Northern Nigeria: The agitator versus political elites

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By, Hashim Muhammad Suleiman, PhD

Hegemonic institutions like religion hardly fail to wip the masses into the lines of elitist thinking in Northern Nigeria. Should such institutions falter, our elites always heck on the coercive state apparatuses. If you want to test the latest police equipment, try organizing a demonstration, not to praise sing, and massage the ego of our political leaders, but to ask them to situp to their constitutional responsibilities of safeguarding the lives of Nigerians.

Our Northern Nigerian political elites always have a working formula against the agitator and collective agitation. The formula is on stages.

Stage one is pauperization of the population in terms of economic and educational attainment. Our elite deliberately and constantly make concerted and wilful efforts to make sure majority of the Northern Nigerian population is kept abysmally poor and uneducated. A poor and uneducated population is easily suspectable to financial inducement and religious manipulation. With some few peanuts and politically induced sermons, our population is kept at the bay of our elite’s whims, awaiting further directives to swim into the tide of idle self destruction.

The second stage of our elite’s formula of controlling the Northern Nigerian population is what I’ll refer to as macho-police action. It normally starts with an invite by the state secret police. I was once invited. They invite you and psycho-engineer you into believing they’re with you, but you have to suspend your agitation because security reports available to them indicate that “hoodlums” would hijack your agitation and cause mayhem. They’ll subtly show to you how dangerous your agitation is to you and your immediate family. They’ll also latently show you how powerful the government is and how the government can easily truncate your thriving life.

Should you refuse and insist on calling out our political elites to live up to their constitutional responsibilities, then they’ll activate the next stage of the formula; sanctioning of state violence. This stage comes on two throngs; licensed and unlicensed violence. Same political elites would send violence from below; through the use of their retinue of political thugs and violence from above; through the use of police action and sanctioning of state violence on you and your agitation.

Then, the last stage of the formula (though always present at each stage) is the narrative control of the violence. At this stage, all things bad about you and your agitation (fabricated) would be unleashed. From loud speakers, from minarets and from altars, from radio stations and from TV talking heads, from daily and weekly microphones, up to maishayi joints and market stalls, our political elites would massify negative narrative about you and about your ideology. They’ll use constructive redundancy to frame you into an alien conception that must be dealt with by their coercive state apparatuses.

In the long run, the agitator for good from Northern Nigeria would be seen by Northern Nigerians as an unnecessary deviant that must be uprooted from the society.

And, then the elites continue having it their way; pauperizing the masses the more. And then, the masses wouldn’t know; even if they’re constantly killed and massacred in places they call home, in places they call sanctuaries of faith and even in places they call roads and markets. And then, the agitator for good would begin doubting if really the agitation is worth it in the first place. And then, the political elites continue laughing in the circle and potency of their formula of dealing with any agitator that calls them out to situp to their constitutional responsibilities.

December, 2021.

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