19102020 - #EndSARS: Stop Army's planned Op Crocodile Smile

Vanguard, MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2020 — 17
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Solidarity forever!
OLD men do not rebel. It is the
young who have the energy
to revolt. They have nothing to lose.
Until recently, I was almost tempted
to give up on the Nigerian
youths. Have we not dismissed
them as “lazy”? But they have surprised
us. Only a fool would dismiss
what is happening today.
Revolts and revolutions have been
a recurrent feature of the human
condition. It is in the nature of human
beings to rebel if they feel
short-changed or believe their social
conditions are hopelessly beyond
redemption. I have studied
revolutionary theories from Ted
Gurr to John Dunn and Vo Nguyen
Giap. Revolutions are more potent
than nuclear bombs. They can
sweep away an empire in hours.
The French Revolution of 1789
was the mother of modern revolutions.
It was a bourgeois revolution
that overthrew the monarchy and
the old feudal order; the culmination
of the vision of Enlightenmentthinkers
such as Rousseau, Buffon,
Voltaire and Diderot. They
dreamt of a society based on freedom,
equality and government
based on the popular will.
The French Revolution was itself
inspired by the American Revolution
of 1776 which overthrew British
imperialism. The Americans
themselves drew inspiration from
early enlightenment thinkers such
as John Locke who taught that it is
the right of all peoples to rebel
against unjust government. The
French Revolution was unfortunately
a bloody event as was predicted
by political thinkers such as
Edmund Burke. It led to the
Bastille, the Guillotine and the
Great Terror.It is a truism that revolutions
tend to devour their own
children. This is what happened to
Robespierre and Danton.
The French Revolution gave birth
to the first antislavery revolt in
world history, precisely in the
French colony of San Domingo,
which is Haiti today. The Haitian
Revolution of 1791 has been captured
memorably in the epic work
of the Trinidadian historian C. L. R.
James, in his book, The Black Jacobins
(Allison & Busby 1980).
James re-enacts the extraordinary
drama of slave leaders such as Toussaint
L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques
Dessalines who took their own fate
into their own hands. Haiti became
an independent nation on January
1, 1804. Toussaint deployed Haitian
soldiers to support Simon Bolivar
in his anticolonial revolutionary
war in Latin America on condition
that he would emancipate
the Black slaves. Haitian soldiers
were also sent to support Abraham
Lincoln during the American civil
war of 1861-1865 on condition
that Lincoln would emancipate
the benighted slaves of America.
The Emancipation Proclamation
happily came in 1863.
The 20th century opened with
the Mexican Revolution of 1910
which overthrow the 30-year dictatorship
of Porfirio Diaz, while
setting the country on the democracy
and modernisation.
The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
in Russia which led to 70 years of
world communism succeeded less
on account of the ingenuity of Lenin,
Trotsky and Stalin and more
due to bad luck and folly. The international
imperialist war had
begun in 1914. Hunger and starvation
afflicted the peasants. Tsar
Nicholas II was a weak and indecisive
leader whose reforms were
too little and too late. He foolishly
allowed a demonic mystic by
the name of Grigori Rasputin to
infiltrate the monarchy. It was to
prove the undoing of the Romanovs.
The Chinese Revolution led by
Mao Zedong in 1949 was yet another
milestone. Mao was a selftaught
petit bourgeois who spent
many years as a library assistant
It would be a grievous
mistake to unleash the
army and the dogs of
war on them; we will
only be creating martyrs;
the protest might deteriorate
into a revolution
whose outcome nobody
can control
at the University of Beijing. He
spent his free nights reading
Marx and equipping himself with
the intellectual tools of rigorous
social analysis. Mao redeemed
his country from centuries of humiliation
by foreign barbarians.
His “cultural revolution” campaigns
in the sixties, however,
were a ghastly misfortune that resulted
in the death of an estimated
20 million Chinese. But there
is no doubt that Mao was the architect
of China as we know it today.
A decade after the Chinese, Fidel
Castro and his rabble of guerrillas
successfully overthrew the
brutal and corrupt regime of Fulgencio
Batista in January 1959.
One of the commanders of the
Cuban Revolution was the Argentine
doctor and Marxist revolutionary
Che Guevara de la Serna
who became one of the icons of
my generation. The Cuban Revolution
turned the tables against
Yankee hegemonism throughout
Latin America and the Caribbean.
Although Fidel was accused
of dictatorship, Cuban socialism
achieved considerable success in
areas such as public health, education,
employment and social
solidarity. Cuban soldiers also
played a key role in the liberation
of Southern Africa.
The Eastern European Revolution
that began in 1989 brought
down the Berlin Wall and led to
the dissolution of the Soviet
Empire.I was a graduate student
in those heady days. I recall being
invited to the 60th birthday of
the great sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf,
at the time Warden of St.
Antony’s College. Port and Champagne
flowed freely as we marked
that extraordinary moment in history.
In revolutions, nobody is small
or inconsequential. The seeds
were sown as far back as the seventies
in the writings of the Nobel
laureate Alexander Isayevich
Solzhenitsyn. In 1989, an obscure
pastor by the name of Laszlo
Tokes in the Romanian provincial
town of Timisoara, went on hunger
strike when the authorities
clamped down on him. Very soon,
thousands of youths joined him.
Before long, Romania was in upheaval.
The old communist dictator
Nicolae Ceausescu and his
wife Elena were lined up and shot.
Laszlo Tokes later became a
member of the European Parliament
in Brussels. Years ago, I had
the privilege of having lunch with
him at a posh Brussels restaurant.
The Arab Spring began in December
2010, innocuously
enough, with a young unemployed
Tunisian graduate by the name of
Mohammed Bouazizi. Bouazizi
was assaulted by a policewoman
because he could not produce a
permit for the vegetables he was
hawking. After vainly seeking for
justice, he decided to commit suicide
by pouring petrol and setting
himself ablaze. He was badly
burnt but did not die immediately.
President Ben Ali was forced to
visit him in hospital.Alas, he came
too late. Bouazizi died on January
4, 2011. All hell broke loose.
I lived in Tunisia and know the
country well. The youth rose up
peacefully in their millions and
no army could stop them. The dictator
and his family fled to Saudi
Arabia. The Arab Spring spread
to Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco,
Algeria, Lebanon, Egypt, Mauritania,
Kuwait, Oman and Sudan.
Old tyrants came down. The Arab
world has never been the same
ever since.
In August 2019, Sudan was the
latest country to experience the
upsurge of people’s power. The arrow
head of that movement was a
22-year old student of architectural
engineering by the name of
Alaa Saleh. Alaa caught the
world’s imagination by her signature
white gown whilst atop the
roof of a car, with her finger pointed
skyward.
Nigeria’s youth revolt has onlybegun.
The trigger was arrest and
torture of a young man in Ughelli
by the SARS who also commandeered
his Lexus Jeep. But the
roots of their disenchantment run
deeper. The leaders of this revolution
are everywhere and nowhere.
They have used crowd-funding
and electronic bitcointo raiseN25
million. Volunteers have been distributing
food and soft drinks.
They have composed themselves
with nonviolent discipline. But
their grievances cannot easily be
dismissed. They say they are tired
of police brutality, corruption,
poverty, unemployment, violence
and insecurity. They demand
nothing less than a New Nigeria.
Someone has threatened them
with civil war. But what they are
going through is war already.
They will not be cowed down.
Wisdom requires that we engage
with them urgently. It would be a
grievous mistake to unleash the
army and the dogs of war on them.
We will only be creating martyrs.
The protest might deteriorate into
a revolution whose outcome nobody
can control.
Solidarity forever!
DEATH SQUADS MASQUERADING AS LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENTS:
Getting to the roots of the problem
BY OLA BALOGUN
NOW that tongues have loosened, expos
ing the horrendous misdeeds of the dreaded
SARS outfit to public scrutiny, many Nigerians
have discovered with shock that the the widespread
instances of torture and extra-judicial killings
attributed to SARS operatives bear a close
resemblance to the horror tales associated with
the activities of death squads in past situations in
other parts of Africa, such as in Idi Amin’s Uganda
or in apartheid South Africa...
Ethiopia under Mengistu’s iron fist, Dr. Hastings
Banda’s murderous regime in Malawi, and
Sekou Toure’s merciless recourse to a barbaric
reign of terror behind a hypocritical ‘socialist’
facade are all examples that spring readily to
mind in this connection.
The revelations about the sinister goings on in
the SARS police units are also reminiscent of the
manner in which killer units proliferated under
dictators like Mobutu, Eyadema, Siad Barre,
Sergeant Doe and co.
The same ugly phenomenon also reared its
head during the Rawlings era in Ghana, culminating
in the barbaric assassination of three high
court judges who were killed in horrendous circumstances
by goons allegedly unleashed by a
ruling triumvirate consisting of Jerry Rawlings,
his wife and his cousin, Kojo Tshikata...
Looking further outwards, we also find troubling
parallels during the rule of South American
despots like Pinochet in Chile or Battista in
Cuba.
The question that we therefore need to examine
is: Why does the chilling saga of SARS horror
tales bear such a close resemblance to the
terrible examples of the use of instruments of
state terror by rogue regimes in Africa and elsewhere?
Where does the common thread lie?
Interestingly enough, by claiming to have
solved the SARS problem by simply setting up a
new police unit to replace it, the Buhari administration
has been attempting to deflect attention
from the real issues that have been
brought to the fore by the current unrest by seeking
to portray the misdeeds of SARS operatives
as misguided actions by a few rogue elements...
This is of course entirely misleading!
What an unholy exercise in deception!
Fortunately, the young heroes who have taken
to the streets in many Nigerian cities to demand
a thorough overhaul of the fundamental
structures of the Nigerian state are not buying
any of the false narrative that the powers that be
are attempting to propagate.
Most remarkably, our youths have been astute
enough to discern the fact that far from being a
simple aberration, the phenomenon of SARS is
closely linked to the fundamental issue of how
Nigeria is to be governed!
As a result, the logical upshot of the current
demonstrations is that the #EndSARS uprising
needs to set the stage for a revolutionary overthrow
of the present system of governance in
Nigeria.
To understand why this should be so, we need
to beam a spotlight on the reasons for the repeated
failure of the various forms of governance
that have been embarked upon by virtually all
the post-colonial African states, be it in North or
in sub-Saharan African countries, and be it under
the guise of parliamentary rule, presidential
rule, military rule or alleged Marxist systems of
government...
What has really happened is that the transition
to independence has largely been a mirage, due
to the fact that colonial rule by European powers
was replaced by internal colonisation by a power
hungry elite that has stepped into the shoes of
the erstwhile colonial masters.
As a result, the various constitutions and forms
of government that have been enacted in the
SARS has now been exposed as
the extreme tip of a variety of
instruments of coercion that have
been systematically deployed by
the Nigerian ruling elite since
our accession to nominal independence
60 years ago
wake of the emergence of independent African
states have almost invariably only had a single
aim in view, which has been to entrench the dominance
of an entrenched ruling elite...
At the end of the day therefore, our internal
colonial masters have been no different in essence
from the White minority rulers in South
Africa and Rhodesia in terms of their willingness
to deploy all available instruments of repression
to ensure their hold on power...
Viewed from this perspective, it is easy to understand
that SARS did not come about by accident!
In reality, SARS has merely been one among
various repressive instruments that have been
deployed (and still continue to be deployed!) by
the Nigerian ruling elite to maintain a stranglehold
on power, so as to be able to continue to loot
the nation’s resources with shameless impunity.
Thus, SARS has now been exposed as the extreme
tip of a variety of instruments of coercion
that have been systematically deployed by the
Nigerian ruling elite since our accession to nominal
independence 60 years ago...
By extending the debate beyond the SARS phenomenon
in order to call the overall structure of
governance into question, the Nigerian youths
are definitely pointing in the right direction!
They appear to have instinctively understood
that the real issue lies with the confiscation of
state power by a greedy elite class that has political,
civil service, military, academic and business
components, which means that the ugly
phenomenon of SARS cannot be eradicated without
a thorough overhaul of the apparatus of governance
itself...
Manifestly, the current youth uprising in Nigeria
is quite capable of snowballing into a fullfledged
revolution, but the question that needs to
be asked is: Are our young heroes suitably
equipped ideologically, and are they well organised
enough to be able to impose a viable alternative
to the system of government that they are
seeking to replace?
In this connection, the on-going impasse that
has resulted from the initial success of the Arab
Spring in Tunisia and Egypt as well as more
recently in Sudan provides much food for
thought.
Are we going to end up the same way in Nigeria?
How can our youths avert the danger of paving
the way for a group of military opportunists
to emerge and turn the hands of the clock back
to the benefit of the ever-resurgent greedy ruling
elite once the revolutionary uprising would have
swept the present power structure away?
There is obviously a pressing need for more
mature and experienced heads to seek to offer
political and ideological guidance to our youths
at this early stage for the purpose of providing
adequate guidance (not leadership!) to the young
lions and lionesses who have currently embarked
on the glorious path to a long overdue Nigerian
revolution.
To succeed in full, there is obviously a need for
our heroic youth activists to be provided with the
political and ideological tools that they will require
for ultimate success.
Therefore, now is the time for workshops to be
organised by well-meaning intellectual patriots
of all ages for the purpose of proposing economic,
social, ideological and political models that
the youths can build on!
WHO WILL BELL THE CAT?
*Dr. Balogun, a veteran film maker and
political activist, wrote from Lagos
C
M
Y
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