Is Mr Dele Alake an Accomplice to a Coup?

Between 1st and 3rd August, parts of Nigeria were rocked by the so-called #EndBadGovernance protests. Government property worth billions of naira was vandalised, including the Nigerian Communication Commission’s 3MTT digital facility in Kano, Kano State High Court, electric poles, and traffic lights, among others.

As protests in Nigeria sadly tend to now engender, hundreds of petty traders and homes had valuable items looted. The greatest and most irreplaceable losses were Nigerians who fell to police and soldiers’ bullets, including 16-year-old Isma’il Muhammed in Zaria, Kaduna State.

We do not support the #EndBadGovernance protests because they were both aimless and animated by the same ignorant and dangerous economic demands that have deterred investments and created massive opportunities for waste and corruption for our political elites and their cronies. It is exactly generations of such protests that have produced widespread hunger and the shameless spectacle of petrol queues across Nigeria.

Some of the spokespersons for the recent protests demanded a return to a petrol pump price of ₦300. If protesters, manipulated by unprincipled politicians, had not blocked the Goodluck Jonathan administration’s attempt in 2012 to remove the fuel subsidy, Nigeria would today not only have sufficient supplies of petroleum but also would have become a major exporter of the product.

Yet, the government’s position before, during, and after the #EndBadGovernance protest reveals that Nigeria, indeed, has a deep problem of bad and even rotten governance.

In a democracy, the right to protest, even when you lack a rational or constructive agenda, must be sacrosanct. The government and its spokespeople, informal or formal, insult citizens when they say or imply that they are blind not to see the great economic benefits the government has brought to them, or too dumb to avoid being misled by evil politicians.

We firmly believe that an elected government has the absolute right to implement economic or social policies it has campaigned upon or chosen to pursue. However, this right does not extend to clamping down on peaceful opposition to its policies. Rather, such opposition calls for more professional and strategic articulation of the government’s reform agenda.

Awa L’okan: A Clans and Friends’ Democracy

The incompetence and recklessness of the government’s response reached a climax on 13 August 2024, when Mr Dele Alake, a long-time ally of President Bola Tinubu and the Minister of Solid Mineral Development, addressed the media after a Council of State meeting.

Mr Alake’s short address was an absolute communications and political disaster. He spoke with complete certainty that the #EndBadGovernance protests were a plot to illegally topple the Tinubu government rather than being genuine protests against economic hardship. He menacingly promised a security clampdown against such protests in the future. This is a breathtakingly foolish attempt to blackmail critics of the government, which would do the Tinubu administration and Nigeria no good. It rather portrays the government as jittery and desperate.

Mr Dele Alake’s baseless assertion clearly suggests that, lacking an effective strategy to manage criticism and opposition, the government plans to resort to blackmail, threats, and the illegal use of force. Is the intention to take us back to General Sani Abacha’s Gulag?

Nigeria is a delicate multi-ethnic democracy where governments are seen to represent an ethnic section of the country. In making critical appointments, President Tinubu has rather reinforced—just like Buhari before him—the notion that it is the turn of political elites from a part of the country to “enjoy” government, i.e., “Awa l’okan.”

It is very divisive for a politician from the President’s part of the country, who is neither the presidential spokesperson nor the Minister of Information, to claim that protesters planned an illegal change of government and threaten the use of force against them. It is reckless for those in power to pretend not to know that there is a high degree of political tension in Nigeria and that this tension has an ethnic dimension.

Nigerians from a part of the country see the Tinubu government as barely legitimate, having stolen the 2023 elections (it is our position that the opposition had no route to victory in the elections, having balkanised its own votes and given some of it to the ruling All Progressives Congress). Part of the combustive political context is the division of voters in Lagos into indigenes and aliens, with pockets of violent attacks on the “Nigerian aliens” to prevent them from voting during the last elections.

Frankly—and this is not at all a popular opinion—the other side are not saints either and have not acted in the interest of a united Nigeria. Lagos as a society and as an economy is open to all Nigerians, as a centre of commerce and culture should be and aspire to be. The noxious attacks on a section of voters in Lagos, which are restricted to election periods, are grossly exaggerated by often self-appointed spokespeople of the victims to mean that some or all Nigerians do not enjoy equal rights in Lagos.

In reality, the overwhelming majority of Lagosians who are equally victims of the divisive strategies and misgovernance of our politicians do not care who they sell to, buy from, rent from, or even sleep with! Citizens are doing and are perfecting our politicians’ evil work when they suggest otherwise. These “useful idiots” include people who passionately dispute and dissect, thus promote the disgraceful debate about whether Lagos is “no man’s land” or not.

The division of citizens in the nation’s commercial capital into Nigerian Lagosians and “alien Nigerians” took an alarming turn during the #EndBadGovernance protest with calls to expel some Nigerians from Lagos.

How does Mr Dele Alake think raising political tension further by framing protesters as coup plotters and meting out the corresponding legal consequences, for instance, lengthy jail terms, improves popular acceptance of the administration’s economic reforms (a set of reforms which we not only think are absolutely and urgently required but should also be deepened and broadened)?

For his unguarded statement, President Tinubu should have asked Mr Dele Alake to provide details of the people planning to unseat the government to the Inspector General of Police and the Attorney General of the Federation within 24 hours, failing which he should have been fired from the cabinet. His careless and unthinking attempt to sound tough has done President Tinubu, his regime, Nigerians who support the administration’s economic reforms, and the country at large a severe disservice.

A Politically-Savvy Law and Order Approach to Protest

The United Kingdom experienced violent anti-immigrant right-wing riots for over a week, which were largely stoked by politicians at the extreme right of the Conservative Party, such as Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage of the Reform Party. The response of the UK government has not been to blame right-wing politicians for politically cultivating the grounds for the riots, but rather a “swift and forceful response by prosecutors and the courts,” which has seen 1,000 people arrested and half of these charged to court. A young man received a 20-month sentence for merely encouraging the rioters to attack a hotel housing immigrants on Facebook.

It is the government’s duty to prevent protests from turning into orgies of destruction, violence, and looting. A strict law-and-order clampdown on thugs and criminals can achieve this purpose without making the government more unpopular and generating more opposition to its critical economic reform agenda.

The Urgent Need to Improve Government Messaging

Mr Dele Alake’s outburst is careless and arrogant. Looting during protests is extremely condemnable, and the government has a duty to ensure that every looter is arrested, prosecuted, and jailed. Nevertheless, shooting and killing protesters, even looters, should never be an acceptable punishment for even the worst of these miscreants. Could it have been Mr Dele Alake’s intention to threaten more of this “capital punishment” ?  Surprisingly, the Inspector General of Police and many of his top brass adopted a more sensible and politically wise approach to the #EndBadGovernance protests.

Objectively, it is difficult to hold protests in Nigeria without episodes of violence and looting because the economy has generated hundreds of thousands of homeless youths and miscreants for whom protests are a rare economic opportunity to loot bags of rice, electronic goods, and even small packets of garri from not only big shops but also from very poor Nigerians.

Mr Dele Alake, if he needed to speak at all about the protests on behalf of the government—we emphasise again that he is neither the President’s spokesperson nor the Minister of Information—should have acknowledged the rights of Nigerians to protest, condemned violence and looting, and sympathised with Nigerians who lost property and loved ones (these Nigerians have been failed by the government). He should then have pointed out to the organisers of the last and future protests the difficulty of preventing violence during protests and invited them to discuss the police’s proposal to restrict protests to designated areas.

Mr Dele Alake’s gaffe is a reflection of a broader problem within President Tinubu’s administration—lack of coordination within its communications team. We have seen under this administration, which is less than two years, how communications officials within the government issued contradictory statements on the same issues. Or about fallacies about very important issues.  This is an embarrassment to the administration as well as the nation at large. President Tinubu’s communications unit should get its game together.

The first job of communications operatives in government is to understand how things will play politically in the short, medium and long term. Far from being the people to indulge in demonstrations of bravura, they should be the ones who urge caution because they can foresee how government actions or policies could be perceived by the pubic. The appointed and self-appointed spokespeople of the government should never run their mouths widely like bulls in a political china shop. What is not easy and requires careful strategy is a reaction that portrays the government as mature, confident, and democratic, and persuades more Nigerians to support the President’s agenda of economic reforms. We require professionally astute and politically wise tactics to manage government reaction to sensitive national issues.