The Allegory of an Empty Pot
The picture below of a woman agonizing over an empty pot was taken on the protest ground at Kudirat Abiola Way, Ikeja, Lagos on the first of August 2024. The picture has been trending on social media because of the way it ingeniously sends an inexpressible message of pain in a short, but lucid, fashion.
What is it about an empty pot? An empty pot tells us there is certainly an empty stomach. The pot and the stomach are empty because the owner has nothing to eat. It’s belaboring the obvious to repeat here that there is excruciating hunger in the land, but this belaboring of the obvious is a useful one.
Beyond telling us that there is an empty stomach occasioned by a life-threating economic hardship, this empty pot reminds us of the consequences of an empty pot and an empty stomach. The reminder is in a quote that came from the realities of a national turmoil similar to ours.
“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”
Jean Jacques Rousseau, whom that quote is attributed to, was a renowned political philosopher and leading figure in the French Revolution. In the context of the political currents of his time, “The Rich” that Rousseau was referring to weren’t everyday people who rose through the social ladder — through uncommon self-discipline, tireless diligence to work, and other universal success hacks — to become self-made, nonpolitical upper class.
“The Rich” that Rousseau was referring to were members of the political upper class. In Rousseau’s time, King Louis XVI and the rest of the aristocracy were “the rich”. To the chagrin of the common man, they basked in obscene luxury and hedonistic comfort with unfeeling brutishness. Through grinding poverty, murderous hardship, and heartless disregard for the plight of the people, about 98 percent of the population in France were confined to the lowest class — Third Estate. The triumph of the the Third Estate is what we still read in history books today as the 1789 Revolution.
It’s not for nothing that those who use history to predict the future prognosticate that the allegory of an empty pot is a notification for a revolution that will make Nigerian masses eat the rich. Some commentators claim that a 1789-Revolution-like revolution would never happen in Nigeria, but two novel gaffes by Tinubu and Buhari are beginning to thwart such unrealistic certainty and denialism.
One of the gaffes is the successive pattern of needlessly inflicting hardship and hunger on the masses of the people, and trying to deceive them that it’s for a greater good they will enjoy in the long run. The administration of Buhari tested the tensile strength of our patience with hardship and hunger for eight years. Now, it seems to me as though President Tinubu isn’t even trying to test that patience; he appears to want to swiftly destroy it with the same weapon, in a shorter period of time.
While hunger and hardship wasn’t the highlight of the #EndSARS protests that roiled Buhari’s administration, the hunger and hardship that Tinubu has now driven to an unbearably painful threshold was initiated by Buhari. Crippling economic hardship and hunger is to this #EndBadGovernance protests, what police brutality was to the #EndSARS protests.
The second is both administrations’ reactionary routine of responding to the legitimate, nation-wide protests with force — because of the irrational confidence that force is the only effective tool. “If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail”, Maslow theorized in his 1966 book. Both administration seem to have the abnormal addiction of proving that the Maslowian hammer theory is true, and, to their downfall, that has made them predictable.
Protesters have now developed immunity against undemocratic responses to protests because the responses are always the same: killing, maiming, and unjust incarceration. J. K Rowling’s quote, that “It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness”, is suitable here.
The two mistakes are just as consistent as their outcomes. And the implicit reality in the outcomes is that both administrations are gradually uniting the masses with hunger and hardship. Sporadic gestures of love, unity and shows of sophisticated civic education seem to be becoming permanent parts of protests in Nigeria. Some examples should suffice.
During the #EndSARS protests, the free food was shared to protesters and anyone who needed it. In Abuja, #EndSARS protesters raised 4.1 million naira to change the life of Jane Obiene, an amputee who joined the protest in Abuja. The current #EndBadGovernance protests united Christians and Muslims in Jos, a state dripping wet with the blood of victims of endless ethno-religious bloodbath. Videos and pictures—from Jos — of Christian protesters who formed a human circle of shield to protect praying Muslim protesters has been trending on social media. Christian clerics, who were fully dressed in cassocks, held hands with Islamic clerics, who also dressed in clothings that announce their religious office, and moved in procession with their large followers, using their influence to promote the #EndBadGovernance protests.
In one of the Facebook videos of the #EndBadGovernance protests, we saw police men and women (who were deployed to control protesters) giving sachet water to the protesters, to reinvigorate them and also assure them that they aren’t at the protest ground to hurt peaceful protesters. And to also somehow disprove the post-EndSARS citizen’s theorization that police-citizen relation has remained permanently fractured by the police’s silent, insidious revenge agenda against young people, and the impatient boldness young people acquired during EndSARS, to quickly resist police authority — even when it’s not illegal.
In another video, we saw a young soldier of the Nigerian Army addressing young protesters politely and thereby subliminally dissipating the combative heat that’s probably brewing in the heads of the young protesters, because of the conventional image of unthinking brutishness that most Nigerians tie to soldiers of the Nigerian Army.
While videos of #EndBadGovernance-protests-orchestrated vandalism and violence in northern Nigeria is trending, another video that doesn’t fit the narrative caught my attention. Some young people pretending to be protesters broke into shops and homes and stole goods and properties. Genuine protesters intercepted the criminals, collected all they stole, and made a video, calling on the owners to come pick up their properties. In the video, they said they wanted to set the record straight that their reason for protesting was to ask elected politicians for a better life, not to steal or destroy.
Nigerian ruling elites at all levels need to note that the didactic point in all this is that: while they have refused to change their style of reaction to the people’s protests against mercilessly torturous leadership, the people are increasingly making positive attitudinal changes among themselves. And those changes have changed the character of the protests.
I agree that the protests aren’t without their dark sides and those dark sides will remain, but I’m convinced that the protests will continue to be refined as the people’s mind are continuously refined. I wager that if this trend of hunger and hardship, the government’s foolish responses to it, and the people’s increasingly refined protests continue, a 1789-Revolution-like revolution that will change the trajectory of Nigeria’s political history forever would happen.
Why hunger protests will always be violent protests
No one needs oracular prowess to know that the #EndBadGovernance protests would certainly be violent, because experientially, protests mostly morph into violence, and, noteworthily , because of the hunger in the mix. Physiologist have since established that when Ghrelin, also know as the “hunger hormones” propels the brain to stimulate appetite and introduce food-seeking behavior, irrational anger isn’t an uncommon response. The apothegm that “an hungry man is an angry man” isn’t only summed up in an English adjective — hangry — , it also has scientific proof to show that it’s incontrovertibly true.
Essentially, it’s not just our bodies that run on food, it’s our brains, and when we don’t have that critical glucose at the needed levels, “mechanisms of self-control over aggression break down,”
So, when you’re hangry, you’re not just more prone to snap at somebody because you’re hungry on a physical level, you’re actually hungry on a cerebral level, and the deprivation is causing your reactive filters to blur if not shut down completely. (Nicole Spector, 2018)
Hardship and hunger are existential threats. The history of our species is replete with stories of what we did, do, and could do to be free from hunger and hardship. The Nigerian government may be ready for the known, predictable parts of hunger protests, but it’s certainly not ready for the unknown part of it.
