Nigerian Leader Pushes Back Against Calls for National Protests

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu sought to diffuse calls for nationwide protests over the country’s cost-of-living crisis, while slamming the organizers for fomenting “anger.”

“We do not want to turn Nigeria into Sudan,” he said in a statement posted on X on Thursday after meetings with governors and other leaders spurred by calls for daily protests from Aug. 1 over the high cost of food and fuel.

A civil war that has raged in Sudan since April 2023 has left tens of thousands of people dead and forced a quarter of its 40-million-plus population to flee their homes.

Organisers in Nigeria, copying a playbook followed last month in Kenya that led to deadly confrontations with police, urged citizens to demonstrate every day until their demands were met.

Tinubu said there would be loans for students to pay fees and consumer credit for Nigerians to buy cars, before accusing those behind the protest calls of sinister motives.

“The internet has made it possible to hold meetings in artificial settings,” the president said in the statement. “They hold meetings and sponsor anger.”

Inflation in Africa’s most-populous nation, where 40% of its 200 million people live in extreme poverty, was near a three-decade high in June at 34.2%.

To ease the burden, Tinubu has halted tariffs on food imports for six months, distributed grains and doubled the monthly minimum wage to 70,000 naira .

The Nigerian protests include demands for government officials to send their children to public schools and the reinstatement of fuel subsidies that Tinubu partially lifted after taking office in May 2023, contributing to the surging cost of living.

If the demonstrations go ahead as planned, they will join other recent confrontations on the continent, such as in Kenya and Uganda, that were rallied on social media. These so-called leaderless protests have proved difficult for the authorities to smother.

There have been warnings by Nigeria’s security services that they will prevent violence, while stating that peaceful protests are a democratic right of citizens.

The social media campaign echoes the #EndSars demonstrations in Nigeria in 2020 that were initially aimed at the police and morphed into demands to end bad governance. They were halted when the army confronted protesters in the commercial capital, Lagos.

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