#EndSARS: Lessons Buhari should learn

PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari needs to leave the cartoons he is reported by his media aides to love so much to start reading history in order to avoid the fate of many of history’s failed personalities. If his sectarian faith won’t stop him, then he needs to read the history of some of the Shahs (kings) of Shiite Iran, especially those of Nasir al-Din Shah, Muzzaffar al-Din Shah and even the Palavi Shahs that replaced the Qajar dynasty and ruled Iran until monarchy was abolished in that county in 1979 following the Islamic Revolution. What is happening in Nigeria today with the #ENDSARSNOW protests and the resistance to other obnoxious policies of the Buhari administration such as the Water Resources Bill is reminiscent of the Iran of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Stephen Kinzer captures the situation much more succinctly in his brilliant work entitled: “All of the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror”. The book is an account of the CIA’s Coup that overthrew one of the finest Statesmen Iran and the Middle East have ever produced namely Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

In his finely crafted words: “As Iran sank ever deeper into the mire of poverty and dependence, a thirst for change gripped the population. Bazaars in large cities became hotbeds of protest. Religious reformers, Freemasons, and even socialists began spreading new and radical ideas. News about struggles for constitutional rule in Europe and the Ottoman Empire roused the literate classes. Provocative articles, books, and leaflets began to circulate. Nasir al-Din Shah, isolated in the private world of the Qajar court, was oblivious to this rising discontent. In 1891 he sold the Iranian tobacco industry for the sum of £15,000. Under the terms of the concession, every farmer who grew tobacco was required to sell it to the British Imperial Tobacco Company, and every smoker had to buy it at a shop that was part of British Imperial’s retail network.

Iran was then, as it is today, both an agricultural country and a country of smokers. Many thousands of poor farmers across the country grew tobacco on small plots; a whole class of middlemen cut, dried, packaged, and distributed it; and countless Iranians smoked it. That this native product would now be taken from the people who produced it and turned into a tool for the exclusive profit of foreigners proved too great an insult. A coalition of intellectuals, farmers, merchants, and clerics, such as had never before been seen in Iran, resolved to resist. The country’s leading religious figure, Sheik Shirazi, endorsed their protest. In a shattering act of rebellion, he endorsed a fatwa, or religious order, declaring that as long as foreigners controlled the tobacco industry, smoking would constitute defiance of the Twelfth Imam, “may God hasten his appearance.” News of his order flashed across the country through telegraph wires the British had built several decades earlier. Almost all who heard it obeyed. Nasir al-Din Shah was bewildered, frightened, and then overwhelmed by the unanimity of the protest. When his own wives stopped smoking, he realized that he had no choice but to cancel the concession. To add to the indignity, he had to borrow half a million pounds from a British bank to compensate British Imperial for its loss.

History changes course when people realize there is an alternative to blind obedience. Martin Luther’s challenge to established Christianity, the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution, and the Boston Tea Party were such moments. For Iran, the beginning of the end of absolutism came with the Tobacco Revolt. It ushered in a new political age. No longer would Iranians remain passive while the Qajar dynasty oppressed them and sold their nation’s patrimony to foreigners. The spark came in December 1905, when a handful of merchants in Tehran were arrested in a dispute over sugar prices. They were subjected to the bastinado, a favorite Qajar punishment in which victims were hung by their wrists and thrashed on the soles of their feet. The bazaar erupted in protest. At first, the rioters demanded only dismissal of the local governor who had ordered the beatings. Then, sensing their rising power, they began calling for reduced taxes. Finally, at one of their climactic meetings, they added an astonishing new demand: “In order to carry out reforms in all affairs, it is necessary to establish … a national consultative assembly to insure that the law is executed equally in all parts of Iran, so that there can be no difference between high and low, and all may obtain redress of their grievances.”

This demand soon subsumed all others. With his people on the brink of revolt, Muzzaffar al-Din Shah had no choice but to accept the idea that Iran should have a parliament. After agreeing, however, he began to stall and for several months did nothing to bring the idea to fruition. The protest movement swelled anew. Islamic clerics took a leading role. Some invoked the authority of the Shiite martyr Hussein, vowing to defend the poor even if it meant exposing themselves, as he did, to the sword of evil.” The lesson from the above account from Iran is that leaders should endeavor not to push their citizens to the wall to elicit reactions like protests. This is because protests are often intractable; and as citizens achieve their demands they are emboldened to make more and more demands from the system which would lead to system overload.

If history has taught us any lesson, it should be the lesson that almost every time the people rejected and discard their shackles of subservience to demand their rights, they get what they demand for. Thus, a wise government should as much as possible avoid the urge to push its citizens so much to the wall that they feel the need to stage street protests. So far we all can see that the Endsars protests are getting stronger by the day and the citizens are growing in confidence and strength. For instance we are all witnesses to how the Port Harcourt Protestors defied their State government and marched to the Government House despite an illegal government band on protest. The resurrection of SARS as SWAT and the Water Resources Bill in the face of the Zamfara Gold Deal with the Central Bank of Nigeria are issues that are not very different from the injustices that led to the aforementioned Tobacco Revolt in Iran. The Iranian Tobacco Revolt was about resource control. Just as the Iranian people considered the exploitation of their native product, tobacco, for the exclusive profit of foreigners a great insult, the Bigger Delta people have for years felt same way about the management and control of their oil resources. (See the rest on www.tribuneonlineng.com)

The President and his handlers should be sensitive enough to manage the EndSars protests rather than exacerbate it with issues like the appointment of Lauretta Onochie, the Senior Special Assistant on Social Media to President Buhari as a Commissioner in the Independent National Electoral Commission. Her appointment ridicules the word Independent in the name and workings of the electoral commission that is supposed to be a neutral and unbiased electoral umpire.

I align with Festus Ogun who tweeted that: “The appointment of Lauretta Onochie as INEC Commissioner is unconstitutional, undemocratic and ridiculous. Section 14 of Part 1 of Third Schedule of the 1999 Constitution provides that a person to be appointed as INEC commissioner must be a person of “unquestionable integrity”. And like Matthew Page, I am of the measured opinion that Ms Onochie is one of the most partisan people in our national political life. Thus, her appointment is an assault on constitutional democracy in Nigeria and would damage any credibility that INEC has left.

President Buhari should not like Nasir al-Din Shah, isolate himself in the private world of the Aso Villa and remain oblivious and aloof to the rising discontent in Nigeria that have taken expression in the EndSarsNow Protests across Nigeria Now. He should be consider the reported support for the EndSars movement by his daughter and that of his Vice President as an event that parallels Nasir al-Din Shah’s wives joining the 1905 Tobacco Revolt by dropping their smoking.

Nigeria is all we have and we need our President to honour his oath of office to defend and uphold her honour and glory.

• Alfred, a doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island, Bayelsa State, writes in from Yenagoa.

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