ktravula – a travelogue!

Occupy Nigeria!

“We were sent the wrong people. We asked for statesmen and we were sent executioners.” – Wole Soyinka in A Dance of the Forests

Today all around the country, citizens are taking to the streets to protest the sudden and brazen removal of fuel subsidies by the Federal Government, thus raising the cost of buying fuel in the world’s sixth largest producer of oil. There is more: insecurity of lives and property, and a splintering country along the lines of ethnic and religious allegiance. Very scary.

As much as I want to blog about other interesting things in America today, I’d like to use this post to express solidarity with fellow compatriots now defying the sun, a suspicious police force, and an anti-people government, walking and protesting to express their grievance with a distrusted government. They carry with them a risk of government violent reprisal, and a loss of livelihood if – God forbid – the situation is not quickly reversed.

The soul of the country is once again on trial. We stand at a junction. We have a choice between a big government run by a selfish political class with a struggling, oppressed populace, and an accountable, egalitarian society where the resources of the country is judiciously used to better the life of citizens. We have been here many times. The military dictatorships we went through enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else (and several lives). Now under an elected democratic government, the last thing we want is a system even much worse than previous ones. Alas, that is what we have.

May the will of the people overcome.

Occupy Nigeria! was published on January 9th, 2012, with the tags , , , , under the Observations, Opinion category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

A Changing Country

When, two to three decades from now, I am sitting in my office, study or at a family dinner table looking back to my days in the United States, one of the things I will cherish the most is the opportunity to have been here to witness pivotal moments of notable changes, when a new fresh nation was born out of a tired vestige of the old.

From what I read, the last time something as significant as a popular uprising by citizens to demand change came about was in the 60s during the civil rights movement. From what we see around every day these days, those days – or at least something close to it and equally significant – are back. It showed itself first through the Tea Party movements in 2009, and now through the message of the Occupy ____ protesters that have taken their message to major cities around America.

I was privileged to sit through one of the first sessions of the Occupy Edwardsville meetings today on campus. The movement which started as a reaction to the Oligarchy of Wall Street and unfair income disparity in the country has spread all around the country and is beginning to embody the disenchantment that most people feel about the direction of the country. Today’s event, being campus based, was more educational and brain-storming than anything else, but it was not any less significant.

I do not know a full list of their demands, but one of the major recent successes of the movement so far has been to force the Bank of America to reverse its decision to charge card users $5 monthly for debit card use. Another one is to change the national conversation from shrinking the government size to equitable living opportunities. Today’s meeting was open and democratic, allowing members and spectators ask questions and participate in brainstorming sessions to fashion reasonable and workable manifesto. I saw some professors in the crowd as well as students. At the back of the gathering were two cops standing and paying attention.

American politics, I have found, is one of the most fascinating in the world. This citizen opportunity for social and political change through a democratic means is not only stimulating, it is one of the country’s most admirable characteristics. All of this play out even in spite of obvious regrettable consequences of all mass action: infiltration by anarchists who want everything to fall apart as soon as possible, to no known end.

I see a new country emerging – as it always does season after season, and I again find myself tied to it. The news of my coming here got to me on the same day that the country elected its first black president. Being here at the crossroads of its changing environment provides for me a boon: a vantage point from which to contemplate the past and the present, while interacting with a new dynamic future of which I now find myself an integral part.

A Changing Country was published on November 9th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

Occupy!

Every time I have to think about the “Occupy” protests which, although initially aimed at Wall Street, has now spread to many cities in the world, I inevitably think of the streets of Nigeria and wonder how this kind of protest would play out were it to be tried. And I have no doubt that it would eventually be tried. Having witnessed a number of public insurrections while growing up, I know the tendency of such protests to turn violent before anyone pays any major attention to it. We were socialized under a very repressive, military government, and it has become an unwritten rule of public protests that for it to have any impact – if only to capture public attention and sympathy – it must have an element of tension.

Here is a guide however, culled from one of my favourite texts of all time: Martin Luther King Jnr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. For everyone considering a public reaction to systematic oppression:

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

I’d recommend replacing the racial references in the text to economic/social or whatever the situation is wherever oppressed people live, and the message works just as perfectly. The full text of the letter is here. Protests like the present Occupy are usually a watershed/crossroads of a new era. I can not imagine a better place to stand than on the right side of history.

I write this in response to the high-handedness of NYPD cops arresting peaceful demonstrators who had occupied Citibank premises to close their bank accounts in protest. It would seem that the agents of state have learnt nothing at all from the lessons of history.

Occupy! was published on October 16th, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the Uncategorized category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.