In a recent interview, ex-Osun Governor, Chief Bisi Akande, alleged that the #EndSARS movement that roiled Nigeria in 2020 was a conspiracy against his friend, Bola Tinubu. By narrating how a set of circumstances that did not begin with Tinubu became wrapped around him and his ambitions, Akande tried to increase the moral value of his electoral victory. The interesting part for me was that he claimed that those who ambushed Tinubu through EndSARS were “the Obi-dients”, a well-organised army who “came from America (the USA) with a lot of money”. I am willing to bet that Akande has no evidence whatsoever to substantiate his allegations and would demur if asked to name those Obi-dients. But stories like that do not need to be true; they only need to be believed.
But why “America”? Why did the conspiring Obi-dients that Akande conjectured come from the USA and not anywhere else? There is a significant Nigerian diaspora in the UK and Canada, could they also not have funded such a campaign? Given the outsized role regularly ascribed to the USA in our political and economic predicaments, no other country would have sufficed. The imagination that produced that allegation must be substantive to some degree to sound somewhat credible.
Ask a Nigerian or an African why our countries are so poor, and it will not be long before they gravitate towards detecting Western-based institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as why we fail at self-management. Those USA-based organisations are the physical manifestations of the transcendent forces we blame for our woes. Since there are several documented instances of their unpalatable institutional interference in economically challenged countries like Nigeria, there is a mix of truth that justifies how they have come to embody the trope of the evil that keeps Africa from attaining its destiny. That is why one of our Daddys in the Lord could pray that “Either the IMF likes it or not, I decree the naira will rise again.”
The USA is also routinely fingered in the restlessness that bedevils our society. Some people are convinced that terrorism in Nigeria is funded by the USA. I have met a few of those folks before; their attributed reasons for the USA’s supposed malevolence can be internally contradictory, but the conspiracy imagination needs not to be coherent before it rings true to those who believe them. Then there are Nigerians who also believe that the only reason that Muhammadu Buhari won the election in 2015 was because the USA sponsored him. Some of those folks, if they are reading this article, are ready to defend that assertion by pointing to one or two examples they hold as indelible proof. They need not worry. I have read all those arguments; I know where those folks are coming from.
The trouble with such speculation is that we become so invested in tracing the outlines of an alternative reality where “the spiritual determines the physical” that we lose sight of ourselves as human agents who determine our destiny. To the folks who believe that the USA masterminded the 2015 election loss by the PDP, it matters less that it was Nigerians who used their hand to vote for Muhammadu Buhari. They override the agency of fellow Nigerians, some of whom sought genuine reforms and many of whom were also motivated by religious/tribal identities, to blame a supernational force. One would think it was America that created “Febuhari” or “March for Buhari” and helped Yemi Osinbajo distribute the N10,000 pittance they used to bid for votes.
The 2015 election loss was so humiliating for the religious and tribal blocs that Goodluck Jonathan represents, that the only way they can justify the turn of events is to attribute it to a higher power. Even Jonathan himself believes that he lost to the USA, not his countrypeople who got tired of his crass ineptitude. Our society is so invested in the supernatural that if we are not leaving our human responsibility to God, we are blaming the devil for our failings. The same attitude extends to our political and economic behaviours where we always look for otherworldly forces to blame for our self-induced problems.
What gets lost in the narrative is the temporal context. Occupy Nigeria, the anti-subsidies removal protests of 2012 that activated disaffection against Jonathan, and which his supporters (like Akande too) insist was a funded campaign by clandestine agents, also happened in different parts of the world at that time. That of Nigeria occurred in the light of the legislative probe that revealed the huge scam that the subsidy had become. In the era of Arab Spring and the #OccupyUSA movement, was it unthinkable that the young Nigerians embedded within a global media ecosystem would react to oppressive corruption like their counterparts elsewhere? Yes, certain characters like Muhammadu Buhari profited from the anti-Jonathan sentiment that the protest generated, but the emotions that drove it were not baseless.
The funny thing is that I know people who supported Buhari and campaigned for him from door to door. Imagine how amused I was when I saw some of them—against the backdrop of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s campaign against USAID, the cultural arm of the US government—on Twitter (now called X) also crowing about how the USA imposed Buhari on Nigeria in 2015! Buhari was such a huge failure that his once devoted supporters are erasing their own participation in making him president! To distance themselves from the monumental disgrace he became, they delete their complicity.
In the same way that the anti-Buhari people have outsourced their agency in that protest to the USA, Akande too weaponises the EndSARS to blame some shadowy agents for confronting Tinubu. In doing so, he similarly erases the agency of the Nigerians who were genuinely driven to the streets because they were frustrated with the failings of a judicial institution under Buhari’s watch. The EndSARS was about Nigerian youths who had been driven to the wall by the excesses of the police, and just like OccupyNigeria in 2012, they took energies from similar protests abroad. Akande’s historical revisionism had nothing to say about the genuine issues that precipitated those protests.
Notice also that even though Tinubu contested against two opponents, only Peter Obi haunts Akande’s imagination. Yes, Obi profited from the anti-establishment sentiment of EndSARS the same way OccupyNigeria helped Buhari. So immense was his popularity among Nigeria’s Gen Z that he sent the conservative political class into a tailspin. If today, Tinubu struggles with a crisis of legitimacy even as the sitting President, it is also because he lost something irrecoverable to Obi in that election. The Obi who was said to lack “structure” and his supporters who were ridiculed as “people without PVCs” stunned everyone with what they achieved. That is why Akande thinks American money and strategy had to have been involved. If Obi had been declared the winner of that election, Akande’s narrative would have held up to justify how a combination of Yoruba and Northerners, the majority of whom also happen to be Muslims, could lose to a Christian southerner whose supporters were not even taken seriously.
Here is the thing: the fact that Akande’s story is laughable today does not mean it will always be. The APC will not rule forever. Many of their top brass are older men who will eventually lose their vice-like grip over the existing political structure. Nature will do its thing, and they will eventually be defeated in a hostile takeover. Those who will replace them are the current anti-establishment figures who are tweeting while waiting in the wings. From the fringes where they are sensationalising the USA as the God/Satan whose invisible hands move our history to mobilise their army of the disaffected, they will become the dominant ones. The ones in power today will look back at moments like 2020 EndSARS, pick up the narrative of “money, strategy, and America” including the one Akande put out and they too will start running with it.
Punch
