For too many, the government encroaches upon their lives but cannot protect them
In his treatise Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes did not suggest that government was benevolent – only necessary. Without it, argued the philosopher, people would live in perpetual fear in “a war of all against all” and life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. His argument’s urgency reflected its context – the English civil war. But it recognised that the state had to be justified by a degree of consent from those it ruled.
The Nigerian government has a democratic mandate. Though President Muhammadu Buhari was once a dictator, his return to power in 2015 was the country’s first transition between democratically elected leaders. Voters chose him to tackle corruption and curb Boko Haram’s violence. But the state’s ability to carry out its most basic function, providing the basic physical security of which Hobbes wrote, is crumbling by the day. For too many Nigerians, the government is a force that encroaches on or plunders their lives without offering protection, let alone support. Unemployment is among the world’s worst, the cost of living is rising, the pandemic’s impact has deepened frustration and an oil price slump hurt the petro-dependent economy; all threaten to worsen widespread violence.