Opinion

Farooq Kperogi: Five lessons from the ongoing hunger protests

Published

1 year ago

August 3, 2024

Farooq Kperogi

Farooq Kperogi: Five lessons from the ongoing hunger protests

The nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests that are convulsing the neoliberal fundament of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration are redefining and redrawing the contours of protests in Nigeria in many significant ways. Although I’ve been on the road since Thursday, here are lessons I’ve learned from the protests.

One, there is now a profoundly consequential decentering of the locus of protest culture in Nigeria. In the past, protests against unpopular government policies used to be conceived, constructed, and carried out by a self-selected class of professional protesters based mostly in Lagos who earned activist bona fides from their anti-military, pro-democracy, human rights advocacy in the 1980s and 1990s.

These careerist agitators are now either in government, in bed with the government, or have suffered significant contraction of their symbolic and cultural capital. Most Gen Z Nigerians whose vim and vigor power the ongoing protests either don’t know them or know them but have no use for their guidance.

So, the conception, planning, and execution of the protests have neither a recognizable locale nor any identifiable dramatis personae. A lot of the known names identified with the protests merely joined and amplified it. They didn’t start the revolt and can’t stop it. It’s effectively a leaderless rebellion.

It started life as anguished, discordant murmurs on social media in response to the increasingly unendurable but relentlessly unabating neoliberal, IMF/World Bank-sanctioned economic and social terror of the Tinubu administration. Many of the young people who can’t feed now and whose future is being perpetually deferred have enough education to know that the delayed gratification the government promises them from removing subsidies and from devaluing the naira has never materialized anywhere in the world.

Everywhere in the world—from South America to the Pacific and from Asia to Africa—from the 1980s (when the IMF first forced Structural Adjustment Programs on developing countries) until now, there is not a single example of a country that has escaped irreversible devastation and decline as a result of subsidy removal, currency devaluation, destruction of social safety nets for the poor, abandonment of the welfare of citizens—all IMF policies that countries are forced to implement as conditions to secure World Bank loans.

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The only countries that have developed outside the West are precisely the countries that have repulsed the IMF, that have strategically deployed subsidies to buoy their economies and uplift their people, and that have guarded their national currencies. Many young Nigerians now realize that the idea that the pains they are suffering are mere temporary birth pangs that will deliver a bouncing baby is a damned, soulless, conscienceless, self-centered lie. They’ve had enough.

So, they resolved to band together and fight peacefully. They chose to demand the restoration of petrol subsidies, among other demands, because they see that the people who took away petrol subsidies from them are themselves luxuriating in unimaginably opulent elite subsidies. Their cries quickly gained traction.

For the first time in a long time, northern and southern youth found common ground. Northern agitations for “zanga zanga” and southern push for #EndBadGovernance protests, though gestated independent of each other, somehow converged. It’s a unity forged in diversity and adversity.

The second lesson is a derivative of the first, and that is the unexampled collapse of the cultural, political, and social power of the Northern Nigerian Muslim clerical establishment. Northern Nigerian clerical elites, known as the ulama, had been constituted in the region’s moral imagination as the apotheosis of probity and the unquestioned source of moral and political guidance.

They have used this power, this priceless symbolic capital, to keep the masses perpetually in a state of suspended animation. They have programmed northern Nigerian masses to not resist, protest, rebel, much less revolt, against bad governance. They socialized them into accepting their economic suffering with equanimity. The only thing the clerical elites have conditioned the masses to be implacably roused and animated over is real or perceived slight against religion.

For example, amid the inexorably intensifying breakdown of security in the region during the Muhammadu Buhari administration, the clerical establishment also intensified fraudulent theological rationalizations for the rise of kidnappings and exculpated Buhari of responsibility for this.

However, although there was a ground swell of anti-zanga zanga sermonizing among the region’s notable clerics in the aftermath of their meeting with officials of the Tinubu administration, northern Nigeria is erupting in communal convulsions. It is also instructive that protesters in Daura took their anger to Muhammadu Buhari’s doorsteps. No one is immune now. The genie has been let out of the bottle.

The #OccupyNigeria protests in 2012, which the North also actively participated in largely, some would say precisely, because of the religious and regional identity of Goodluck Jonathan, had the moral imprimatur of the clerical establishment.

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This is the first major example in recent memory I am aware of in the North where the masses of the people not only bucked the impassioned counsel of their ulama but have openly labelled them as unreliable and mercenary charlatans not worthy of respect. This is a culturally seismic shift.

The third lesson is that the federal government is in more trouble than it realizes. It invited civil society leaders, traditional rulers, religious clerics, and certain audible voices in the protest movement in an effort to thwart the protest. It was inspired by the mistaken belief that these hitherto esteemed opinion molders had the capacity to use their conversational, symbolic, political, and cultural currencies to influence people to back out of the protest.

It didn’t work because the habitual order of things has shifted, and the government hasn’t come to terms with this reality. We call it decentering in humanities and social science scholarship. “Decentering” involves challenging and moving away from traditional centers of authority, meaning, or truth. It means a shift of focus from dominant cultures, narratives, or perspectives and the amplification of marginalized, peripheral, or alternative voices.

The government’s cluelessness about this social media-enabled decentering of traditional ways of seeing and knowing manifested in its mutually contradictory claims about who was sponsoring the protest—and in its counter-intuitive displays of persecution complex.

The State Security Service said it knew the “sponsors” of the protest, but the police asked the “sponsors” to identify themselves as a precondition for protection. High-profile government officials fingered foreign mercenaries as the organizers and funders of the protest. They all can’t wrap their heads around the possibility that distraught, depressed, and disgruntled young people, without prodding from anybody, can organize protests to ventilate their frustrations at foreign-inspired policies that kill their present and deny their future.

Unfortunately, the government’s response follows the same miserably familiar template: whine like over-indulged crybabies about fictive “sponsors,” induce or intimidate people thought to be behind the protests, deploy strong-arm tactics against protesters, and do nothing about the conditions that instigated the protest in the first place—until it happens again another time.

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The fourth lesson is that there is a relationship between how security forces respond to protests and how they turn out. In such states as Edo, Osun, Oyo, and Ogun, the police were admirably polite and even-tempered.

I saw a video of the Edo State police commissioner addressing protesters in the kindest, most empathetic way I’ve ever seen any senior law enforcement officer addressing aggrieved people. The protesters reciprocated the police commissioner’s mild-mannered and conciliatory speech with chants of his praises. That warmed my heart. Tinubu can learn from that.

But in places where law enforcement officers treat protesters as enemies of the state and visit unprovoked violence on them, things easily escalate into violence and bloodshed. We saw that in Kaduna, Kano, Abuja, and many parts of the North.

It should be admitted, of course, that there are many criminal elements who cash in on protests to loot the properties of innocent people or destroy government properties. I saw heartrending videos of criminals stealing or destroying private and government properties in Kano and Abuja. Such outlaws deserve no mercy. It’s elements like that who justify the government’s apprehensions about protests always devolving into chaos and destruction.

Finally, although many people from the Southeast supported the protest, the region was the only place, as of the time of writing this column, where almost no protest took place. Was it the culmination of the ethnic baiting of the honchos of the Tinubu administration who said the protests were planned by the people of the region as a payback for their electoral loss in 2023? Whatever it is, it does not give a good account of our efforts at nation-building.

Well, President Tinubu has just one option left for him if he doesn’t want to govern in disabling tumult: address the nation in a solemn national broadcast, acknowledge the unprecedented hurt people are nursing, announce the restoration of petrol and electricity subsidies, and reverse the disastrous “floating” of the naira.

Tinubu’s loyalty should be to Nigeria, not the racist economic hitmen at the IMF and the World Bank.

Farooq Kperogi: Five lessons from the ongoing hunger protests

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism

Opinion

Tinubu’s new tax regime as sovereignty for sale, By Farooq Kperogi

Published

4 days ago

December 13, 2025

Trends Admin

Farooq Kperogi

Tinubu’s new tax regime as sovereignty for sale, By Farooq Kperogi

For weeks, I deliberately avoided commenting on the sweeping new tax regime the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration plans to roll out next year. It’s not because I did not recognize its gravity, but because I am not an economist and did not want to wade into a technically dense debate armed only with moral outrage.

Silence, in this case, felt like intellectual humility. Two developments, however, forced my hand.

The first was the unexpected melodrama that erupted in northern Nigerian social media circles over the federal government’s choice of influencers to “explain” the new tax policies to Nigerians. When a list circulated showing that most of the recruited social media advocates were from the South, northern influencers cried marginalization.

The grievance was loud enough that government handlers scrambled to recruit northern voices to restore regional balance. That this was the most animated public conversation around a punishing tax regime already tells us something disquieting about our political culture.

The second trigger was a widely shared Instagram video posted on October 18, 2025, by The Rohrs Team, a US-based financial education outfit. The video framed Africa’s current wave of tax reforms as a form of “debt colonialism.”

It argues that international institutions and Western governments have perfected a system in which African states are encouraged to accumulate debt and then trained to squeeze their own poor, struggling populations to service that debt. Watching the video, I found myself simultaneously nodding in recognition and wincing at its exaggerations.

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The video’s core claims are straightforward. It alleges that United Nations-linked initiatives such as Tax Inspectors Without Borders embed Western forensic tax experts in African countries to help governments close tax loopholes, audit businesses, and boost revenue.

It then argues that these efforts are not neutral capacity-building exercises, but part of an expansive IMF and World Bank-driven system designed to ensure that African countries generate enough revenue to repay foreign loans.

According to the video, this system relies on carrot-and-stick tactics: cooperate with external tax advisers and access more loans, resist and face isolation or penalties. The end result, it concludes, is a more efficient and less visible form of colonial extraction.

My check from multiple sources shows that some of this is wrong. Some of it is imprecise. Some of it is uncomfortably true.

It is false that UN or OECD officials directly impose tax laws, prosecute businesses, or collect money on behalf of Western creditors. Tax Inspectors Without Borders does not write tax legislation and does not wield enforcement powers. Those functions remain with national governments.

Claims that Tunisia’s tax-to-GDP ratio increased by over 50 percent because of UN tax collectors are also demonstrably overstated.

But dismissing the entire argument as conspiracy would be intellectually lazy.

What is undeniably true is that Nigeria, like many developing countries, is operating under intense fiscal pressure shaped by external actors. The IMF has for years emphasized “domestic resource mobilization” as a central plank of economic reform.

That’s just a fancy term for raising more taxes. Nigeria’s chronically low tax-to-GDP ratio is routinely cited as a pathology that must be cured. Debt sustainability analyses, credit ratings, access to concessional financing, and investor confidence all hinge on this logic.

In that sense, no one needs to issue direct orders. The structure does the coercion. If this sounds abstract, Kenya offers a concrete, sobering example.

In 2024, the Kenyan government introduced a sweeping finance bill that raised taxes across multiple sectors, including fuel, basic goods, and digital services. The bill was explicitly linked to Kenya’s IMF program and the need to so-called plug fiscal gaps.

The result was one of the most dramatic popular uprisings the country has seen in decades. Protesters poured into the streets, security forces responded brutally, and lives were lost. Faced with mounting unrest, the government withdrew the bill.

The story did not end there. The IMF openly acknowledged that the withdrawal created a financing shortfall. The question immediately became how Kenya would replace the lost revenue, whether through spending cuts, alternative taxes, or future legislation.

In other words, the policy instrument changed, but the fiscal imperative remained intact. That is how structural coercion works. The state may retreat tactically, but the economic logic reasserts itself.

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Nigeria’s impending tax regime fits neatly into this global pattern. The government presents it as modernization, efficiency and fairness. But its timing and content are inseparable from the overarching debt-fueled economic restructuring that has already produced fuel subsidy removal, currency devaluation, and a cost-of-living crisis of historic proportions.

The same external logic that declared petrol subsidies fiscally irresponsible now applauds aggressive tax expansion as prudent governance.

This is where the Instagram video, for all its rhetorical excess, gets something fundamentally right: sovereignty, as currently practiced, is largely a scam.

Nigeria may have a flag, an anthem and an elected government, but its macroeconomic choices are tightly circumscribed by external expectations. The petrol price regime that has tripled transportation and food costs did not emerge from a grassroots Nigerian consensus. It was the predictable outcome of long-standing IMF orthodoxy about subsidies.

The new tax regime, coming on the heels of that shock, follows the same script. Nigerians are being asked to pay more, endure more and sacrifice more in the name of fiscal responsibility defined elsewhere.

The economic consequences are not difficult to anticipate. Higher consumption taxes and compliance costs in an economy already hollowed out by inflation will depress demand, push more businesses into informality and further erode purchasing power.

Small traders, transport workers and salaried employees will feel the squeeze long before multinational corporations do. In a country where real wages have collapsed and unemployment remains structurally high, this is punishment.

And yet, there is an irony here worth lingering on. For the first time in decades, a significant number of Nigerians may begin to feel, viscerally, that the state is funded by their money. Oil rents long insulated the Nigerian government from its citizens. Taxes were an afterthought, easily evaded and politically inconsequential.

A regime that aggressively extracts revenue from ordinary people risks provoking resentment, but it also risks awakening accountability.

When people know that their tax naira pays for governance, the psychological contract changes. Suddenly, waste is personal. Corruption is theft from one’s pocket. Incompetence becomes intolerable.

The old revolutionary slogan “taxation without representation” was not just about money. It was about dignity and political agency. It was about the right to demand explanations from those who govern.

Nigeria’s new tax regime, harsh as it is, might inadvertently inaugurate a new era of critical democratic citizenship. Citizens who feel economically assaulted may also feel politically entitled. They may begin to ask harder questions, organize more assertively and reject the culture of elite impunity that oil wealth sustained for so long.

This brings me back to the farce of social media influencers scrambling for government patronage.

There is something profoundly grotesque about watching influencers fight over who gets to propagandize for a policy that will make life harder for most Nigerians. It is even more grotesque when this scramble is framed as a regional inclusion debate rather than a substantive policy argument.

The Tinubu administration recruits influencers not to so much to educate citizens as to anesthetize them. Explanation, in this context, is a euphemism for persuasion, and persuasion shades quickly into rhetorical intimidation.

I fully expect that the newly hired influencer battalions will soon swing into action, defending the indefensible, smearing critics, and blurring the line between advocacy and libel.

If recent experience is any guide, I may well become one of their earliest practice targets for having the audacity to point out that a tax regime can be both externally inspired and domestically harmful. Well, I am already used to that.

Nigeria deserves a conversation that goes beyond technocratic jargon and influencer theatrics. It deserves an honest reckoning with the reality that its economic sovereignty is constrained, its people are bearing disproportionate costs and its leaders are more accountable to international creditors than to the citizens they tax.

If this new tax regime teaches Nigerians anything, I hope it is that when the state reaches deep into your pocket, you earn the moral right to reach just as deeply into its conscience.

Tinubu’s new tax regime as sovereignty for sale, By Farooq Kperogi

Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.

Opinion

Disaster Looms: Otedola Bridge Must Be Demolished and Rebuilt Immediately — Expert

Published

6 days ago

December 11, 2025

Trends Admin

Otedola Bridge

Disaster Looms: Otedola Bridge Must Be Demolished and Rebuilt Immediately — Expert

A project management expert and scholar, Dr. ‘Jubreel Odukoya, has urged the Lagos State Government to take immediate action to demolish and reconstruct the Otedola Bridge, warning that it is “a structural death trap” and “a man-made disaster zone” that continues to claim innocent lives.

Dr. Odukoya, a Nigerian-born construction performance researcher trained in Malaysia, condemned the government’s inaction over the recurring tragedies on the bridge, stressing that no amount of condolence messages can replace urgent technical and ethical intervention.

“The Otedola Bridge is badly designed and poorly constructed. It fails all known standards of performance, safety, and engineering ethics. The time has come for the government to stop patching and start acting. The bridge must be completely demolished and rebuilt to meet global standards of road safety and structural integrity,” he advised.

Located along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway at the boundary between Lagos and Ogun States, the Otedola Bridge has a notorious history of accidents, tanker explosions, and mass fatalities. In June 2018, a fuel tanker explosion destroyed more than fifty vehicles, claiming numerous lives. In March 2024, a newlywed couple — Chiedozie Okoye of Zenith Bank and his America-based nurse wife, Joan Chidalu — died in another crash at the same location.

Dr. Odukoya explained that these recurring disasters are not coincidental but symptomatic of structural negligence, flawed design geometry, and inadequate traffic engineering.

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“The tragedies on Otedola Bridge are predictable outcomes of engineering failure. Sharp slopes, poor drainage, absence of crash barriers, and unclear lane demarcation make it extremely difficult for heavy-duty vehicles to navigate safely. When combined with weak supervision, poor materials, and disregard for ethical project practices, disaster becomes inevitable.”

Drawing on over 33 years of experience in project management, construction oversight, and quality control, including his tenure as Director of Projects Development at Kercon Construction Limited, Lagos, Dr. Odukoya stressed that government responses must go beyond temporary repairs and ceremonial site visits.

“In Malaysia, a bridge with repeated failures would never remain open to the public. It would be closed, reassessed, and reconstructed according to stringent design and soil stability protocols,” he said.

Dr. Odukoya, a member of the Malaysian Institute of Management (MIM) and the Malaysian Institute of Corporate Governance (MICG), called for the urgent establishment of a Technical Audit and Reconstruction Task Force to assess Otedola Bridge and other hazardous road infrastructures across Lagos State.

“Until we subject these critical infrastructures to independent performance audits, the bloodletting will continue. Lagos cannot keep burying citizens because of man-made negligence. The government must act. Otedola Bridge must be demolished and rebuilt now.”

He appealed to Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s administration to demonstrate leadership by adopting international engineering safety standards and engaging certified professionals to redesign the bridge into a model of sustainable urban infrastructure.

“This is not about blame; it is about saving lives. Lagosians deserve roads that are safe, reliable, and built to last,” Dr. Odukoya concluded.

Disaster Looms: Otedola Bridge Must Be Demolished and Rebuilt Immediately — Expert

Opinion

A troubling message from Guinea-Bissau, by Azu Ishiekwene

Published

2 weeks ago

December 5, 2025

Trends Admin

Azubuike Ishiekwene

A troubling message from Guinea-Bissau, by Azu Ishiekwene

None of the three Guineas is thriving, but in Guinea-Bissau, the country that sits on Africa’s map like a tongue of fire, recent events are twisting that nation’s fate into profound misery.

Guinea Conakry is in the grip of a military dictatorship with a messianic complex, while Equatorial Guinea is led by an authoritarian civilian government that has lost its way.

Now, Guinea-Bissau, the country that gave the world Amilcar Cabral, one of Africa’s most foresighted revolutionaries, has added manufactured military coups to its long list of notoriety, which includes being one of the continent’s most deadly drug routes.

Making a coup

On November 26, a military regime led by General Horta Inta-A deposed the elected government of President Umaro Sissoco Embalo. It moved to consolidate its grip on power by appointing Finance Minister Illidio Viera Te as the country’s new prime minister. However, not many who have been following events in the small West African country (with a population of two million) would be impressed by the whitewash.

The deposed government of Embalo was obviously being clever by half by fomenting a palace coup ahead of the announcement of the election results, which might not have favoured him. Embalo has fallen the way he rose. In 2020, he literally defied the electoral commission after the elections and announced himself president from a hotel in the country’s capital, Bissau.

After two successful military coups, over half a dozen failed ones, and intermittent power struggles between the military, politicians, and drug barons who have made Guinea-Bissau a key corridor to Latin America and Europe, citizens in that country, one of the world’s poorest, were ready to give Embalo a try.

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He started well, under the rallying cry of “Embaloism,” which was supposed to rid the country of corruption, poor governance and instil discipline. He also attempted to rebuild confidence with regional allies and powerhouses, including Nigeria, and subsequently reached out to Portugal and the IMF to repair the country’s badly damaged economy.

From Embaloism to Embalomylitis

However, it didn’t take long before Embaloism gave way to Embalomylitis, a condition that has left citizens poorer and poorer, eventually ranking 177th out of 191 on theUN Human Development Index.

Embalo prioritised conspicuous consumption. According to a DW report quoted by opposition figures, the deposed president made over 300 trips abroad in five years, accumulating more than 200 flights on a private jet for non-state visits.

This was a time when schools were failing, and roads and hospitals were in disrepair. Two years ago, his finance minister and treasury secretary were also accused of withdrawing $10 million of state funds, which was paid into 11 private companies linked to a pro-government coalition. Yet, Emabloism was supposed to fight corruption.

To cover his tracks and maintain his hold on power, Embalo went the extra mile to look after the military, often using diverted resources, which primarily came in the form of foreign aid and donor funds, to keep soldiers happy.

The crunch

Matters came to a head last year when Embalo’s government shifted the elections, which were initially scheduled in November, ahead of February 2025, when his constitutional five-year first term limit was due to expire.

One year after the initial election date, and 10 months after his first term expired, Embalo finally organised an election last month, but lacked the courage to wait for the results before he instigated a coup led by two of his key allies – a General and a politician who were both members of his kitchen cabinet.

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In one of the most dramatic military take-overs, the fallen president was speaking to the press as troops were announcing his removal, and hours later, he was safely in Dakar, Senegal, which had been like his second home. The demand of the leader of the opposition, Domingos Simoes Pereira, and the ECOWAS election monitors, led by Nigeria’s former President Goodluck Jonathan, for the full results to be released, has so far been ignored.

Dancing on Cabral’s grave

Cabral would hardly recognise Guinea-Bissau as the Portuguese colony he fought so bravely for, and for which he left a legacy that significantly influenced the independence struggles of liberation groups such as the ANC, FRELIMO, SWAPO and MPLA. In his book, Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories, he extolled the virtues of honesty and accountability. Internal forces that couldn’t stand his courage and independence, instigated from outside, killed him on the eve of that country’s independence.

Yet, five decades later, the more things appear to have changed, the more they look the same. Across the continent today, from Bissau to Conakry and Malabo, and from Niamey to Ouagadougou and Bamako, Africa is experiencing an upsurge in military regimes, all claiming a lack of honesty and accountability for striking. Yet, none of the usurpers is showing any different habits from the politicians they overthrew.

If you add the military coups in Sudan, Gabon, and Chad to the list, and exclude the numerous other failed attempts, the picture begins to resemble a throwback to Africa of the 1980s and early 1990s.

The democratic space, even in once politically stable havens such as Côte d’Ivoire and Tanzania, is shrinking, and successful transitions after elections are becoming the exception rather than the rule. In Cameroon, 92-year-old President Paul Biya, who has been in power since 1982, contested and won reelection, despite being unaware that he was on the ballot, let alone that he had been reelected for the eighth time.

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Another Africa

In another life, some of the continent’s strong leaders, such as Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo, Senegal’s Abdou Douf, Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings or South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, would have weighed in, as Obasanjo did in Sao Tome and Principe in 2003, to call the soldiers to order.

But it’s different today. Not only is the continent buffeted and weakened by severe economic, security, and political challenges, poor governance has also worsened the situation. The West African regional group, ECOWAS, which would have been the first line of defence in Guinea-Bissau, is fractured, sundered by the new alliance of three delinquent Sahelian states – Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso.

Africa cannot help itself, nor can it rely on traditional Western allies, especially in Europe. France, for example, has fallen out of favour in several Francophone countries, while the US, under President Donald Trump, is setting the worst example of chaos-based leadership.

On your own

Guinea-Bissau can only expect messages of condemnation and threats of isolation from ECOWAS, the AU, and the UN. Such messages hold no weight for Embalo and his cohorts. They have heard similar rhetoric many times before without consequence.

The risk in Guinea-Bissau is unlikely to prompt Portugal, the country’s former colonial power, or interest the world’s resource vultures or its warmongers, such as China and Russia. Bissau-Guineans are on their own. The world would hardly notice until the tornado of military coups makes landfall in another African country, which, sadly, may be sooner than later.