My friend Tunde, (name has been changed) is a model Nigerian.
He has never got into trouble one day in his 31-year-old life, and that record does not look like changing anytime soon. Tunde is the kind of guy who probably went through primary and secondary school without ever appearing with a rough shirt or getting his name taken down on a “names of noisemakers” list. Immediately after five trouble-free, clean-cut years at university – which he got into on his first attempt – Tunde then landed an exemplary job at a Big 4 consulting firm and started building his career.
Tunde became so good at what he did that he was offered a postgraduate teaching scholarship in the US – an offer usually not extended to Africans, let alone Nigerians. Not just a model career man and son, Tunde was also a true gentleman who made sure to marry his girlfriend before getting on the plane. I would quite happily bet that Tunde has never even considered cheating on his wife despite being on another continent.
It is important to paint this mental picture of Tunde the stainless, exemplary young Nigerian man who is as close to the optimum human profile as possible, because there is one part of Tunde’s story that I have left out – the only part that doesn’t fit with everything you now know about him.
Tunde is apparently a criminal.
Throughout Tunde’s time in Nigeria as a young adult, despite never hurting a fly, he was consistently profiled, targeted, harassed and extorted by a rogue police unit called SARS. The Special Anti-Robbery Squad, or the State-Assisted Robbery Syndicate as they are now colloquially called, somehow determined that Tunde was a “criminal.” If Tunde hadn’t got the scholarship, he tells me, he would still have emigrated anyway. His number one reason for wanting to get out of Nigeria?
SARS.
“My people are useless…My people are senseless…My people are indiscipline…”
By now of course, most of us are resigned to the reality of being led (ruled?) by someone who clearly believes that he is doing us a favour. President Buhari does not fancy himself an elected public servant so much as a legendary family patriarch deserving of perennial reverence and displays of fealty. Like my octogenarian family head back home in Soweh-Ahovikoh, Mr President expects younger people to prostrate before him and let him have the last say on every matter. Only in his case, such expectations are not enforced by voluntary unspoken family conventions, but by the DSS and other apparatus of state.
To his eyes, the spectacle of young Nigerians uniting to demand an end to their officially sanctioned kidnapping, torture, extortion and murder at the hands of a police unit that reports directly to him via the IG is little more than young people who have no respect anymore. What do we mean by #EndSARS? Do we unruly kids not know that whatever we go through at the hands of uniformed gangsters – including robbery, rape, extortion, kidnapping and extrajudicial execution – is for our own good? Who are we to challenge a system of mindless violence and thuggery born out of the desolate imagination of the Class of ’66?
This desolate imagination only understands that a number of young Nigerian men are involved in cybercriminal activities, which warrants a “crackdown.” It does not account for the fact that the purpose of said crackdown is defeated when left to the discretion of barely literate thugs armed with military grade assault rifles, who go around wearing the kind of outfits that evoke imagery ranging from “Chapo Guzman bodyguard” to “ranking member of violent university confraternity.” To this dreadfully impoverished mindset, “computer” + “young man” = “internet fraud” because, well, what else do you with a computer if not pluck some fruit off the magic Oyinbo internet money tree?
The abject lack of knowledge and nuance within this binary mindset makes it impossible for example, to recognise that the Tech industry, which is probably Nigeria’s only hope for rapid export expansion and increased forex earnings, is directly tied to the productivity of young men with laptops. Sending out a rogue police unit to violently hunt and shake down the people that give Nigeria even the slightest hope of survival in a future it is woefully unprepared for – using the methods and form of an armed robbery gang in an Ugezu J. Ugezu movie – is economic suicide and rank stupidity of the highest degree.
But soldiers don’t do nuance. Even when they’re wearing civilian clothes and clenching their fists before adoring crowds.
And so, we are yet again confronted with the reality that the president and his Inspector General of police are knowingly and unrepentantly determined to keep on unleashing terror on young Nigerian men via a rogue police unit that statistically commits many more crimes than it supposedly solves. Our only option now is to use whatever voices we have in local and international media to drive home the point that we would rather not be assaulted, kidnapped, robbed, extorted, anally raped, tortured and murdered, if it’s all the same with our government.
I will start with a direct message to the carpenter who sees young Nigerian men as nails.
A direct message to the man with the hammer
I understand that you were trained first and foremost as a soldier. A soldier’s primary job is to shoot stuff and break things. It is not an easy job, but it is a relatively simple one. Your world is a binary one – to inflict violence or not to inflict violence is the “0” and “1” underpinning the entire leadership code you have practised all your life. Flogging commuters with horsewhips to make them queue up properly in 1985; flogging traders with horsewhips to make them sell their wares at the prices set by the ESSENCO board in 1984; chucking food vendors in prison for having business relationships with the PDP in 2015 – these are all outcomes of your training that categorises the world into friendlies and hostiles.
Some issues however, are not binary “0” and “1” issues.
By enabling law enforcement to become Nigeria’s largest and most vicious gang of organised criminals, you are laying the conditions for anarchy, and you are directly responsible for creating a feral new generation of Nigerians that increasingly cannot differentiate legitimate pursuits from criminal activities. You may think that people like Tunde – upwardly mobile, internationally relevant young Nigerians with a global voice – are a threat to you and the Lord of The Flies social order becoming institutionalized under you, but you are sorely mistaken.
It is not people like us that you should be afraid of. People like us talk a lot, but generally do little because we have sufficient social and economic capital invested in Nigeria as to give us something to lose. I might write a scathing article for a global media platform about the filthy activities of the rogue police unit that reports to you via your IG. Tunde might write a global bestselling book about his experiences at the hands of the state-sanctioned criminals in black. Neither of these will directly threaten your personal safety or your regime security.
The people you should be terrified of are the seething, silent majority – the ones who cannot express their anger using column inches in BusinessDay, but who know how to do so with a firearm or a machete. Nigeria is per capita, one of the world’s most under-policed countries. It is also fighting at least four simultaneous armed conflicts against Boko Haram, Niger Delta militants, Fulani ethnic militia and ISWAP. The very last thing you want to do is drive your teeming population of young, underemployed, frustrated and angry young men to the wall and give yourself a fifth – and most impossible enemy yet – to fight.
I know you are used to shooting your way out of problems, but as a retired military general, I am sure you also understand the concept of an unwinnable war. Even without the existing armed conflicts, Nigeria’s 300 thousand-odd armed forces personnel cannot realistically pacify the country if just one million young men decide to stop running from SARS and start shooting back. Nobody wants to see that happen – especially those of us with something to lose – because we recently saw a glimpse of what that sort of anarchy means in practise.
Nigeria is already sitting on a demographic time bomb.
Don’t let it detonate on your watch.
