Frustrated Nigerian Climbs 50-Metre Mast To Protest Bad Governance

An undergraduate of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), Nura Iliyasu, has reportedly embarked on a one-man protest by climbing to the top of a 50-meter-mast in Abuja to object to alleged bad leadership of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration.

Iliyasu, 26, will spend the next seven days starting from today, Wednesday, in hunger to remonstrate against what he described as “another season of dashed hope”.

According to reports, the frustrated undergraduate is protesting against “schizophrenic governance, souring foreign-exchange, high commodity prices, dysfunctional refineries and textile industries, elites medical tourism abroad, continued kidnappings,” among others.

Iliyasu, who is from the Northern region of Nigeria, accused the Buhari administration of subjecting the citizens to a “battered and mutilated economy, spearheaded by devalued Nigerian currency comparative to the United States dollar and other foreign currencies; affront, total and disobedience to the rule of law with impunity, thereby rubbishing judicial independence, checks and balances as enshrined in Nigeria’s Constitution; uneven and selective war against corruption as amplified by the political stigmatisation and prosecution of political opposition under the aegis‎ of anti-corruption.

“life today in Nigeria is evidently not dissimilar to the Hobbesian State of nature in which ‘life is too nasty, brutish and short.”

‎He said, “hyperinflation is strangulating our people, starvation is prematurely snuffing life out of our people; deprivation and hopelessness is stagnating our youth progress from achieving the perennial slogan of leaders of tomorrow.

“Political hypocrisy and presence of selfish greed and [un]patriotism fuelled by insatiable and bottomless stomach, had combined to cause perpetual indirection and leadership bewilderment,” claimed Iliyasu.