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Opinions of Tuesday, 1 December 2020

Columnist: saharareporters.com

The current Nigerian crisis: what, really, are the fundamentals? by Omotoye Olorode

They turn the deprived and unemployed youth into their thugs and into parasites. When these same frustrated people are angry, they criminalize them, calling them hoodlums, vandals, miscreants, terrorists, etc.!

Again, Complaints, Complaints, Complaints!

Yet, only three options with their possible combinations are being clearly canvassed: one is to do nothing; another is to organize for splitting the country; the third is to struggle for a class-based social transformation.

Some of us, following the footsteps of our Comrades who are already on the other side of eternity have spent our entire lives struggling in various organized forms to achieve the option of class-based transformation!

We are at the moment of truth. Instead of unending and unproductive social media harangue, our compatriots should just pursue their own preferred options.

If people want public debates, let's have them. These social media pontificating are genuinely exasperating! They are neither based on history nor or empirical contemporary realities.

COVID-19 palliatives are hoarded by the ruling class across the country; they're auctioning public assets to themselves; they are stealing Nigeria blind at federal, state and local levels; governors are asking for state police and autonomy yet they treat local governments as their private estates; they refuse to pay minimum wage; they are all mute on debilitating increases in the cost of food, water, fuel, and power!

In all towns and villages across tribal and religious-confessional lines, there are tiny millionaire enclaves eyeball-to-eyeball with sprawling poor people's slums!

And behind the US, UK and China, the Nigerian ruling class, across tribal and religious-confessional lines, is reported to have the biggest outstanding order of private jets!

They turn the deprived and unemployed youth into their thugs and into parasites. When these same frustrated people are angry, they criminalize them, calling them hoodlums, vandals, miscreants, terrorists, etc.!

Even peaceful protests have become crimes!