By Obi Nwakanma
The swell of public anger rose so high in the last three weeks in Egypt, it sustained the push for what many now call the “Egyptian Revolution.” The protests and the popular movement ousted President Hosni Mubarak who had led Egypt under the emergency law since the assassination of Anwar Sadat on October 6, 1981.

It has also drawn global attention to North Africa and the Middle-East as flashpoints of new struggles to change, reform, or oust ossified regimes that no longer serve the contemporary needs of the people. The other important Egyptian revolution of the modern era happened in 1952, when Colonel Abdel Nasser led a group of young officers of the Egyptian Army to overthrow King Farouk 1.

That revolution abolished Egypt’s constitutional monarchy, and established a republic. Before 1952, there was the 1919 rising against the British colonial occupation of Egypt. These movements, as they happened, had important implications in the African and Oriental world, and indeed stimulated the era of the anti-colonial movement. Egypt has always been at the crossroads of these worlds.

What is important about the current rising in Egypt is its nexus with history. Egypt is a barometer of what might happen in the rest of the Oriental and the African world. But it all started with the rising in Tunisia. The “Tunisian Revolution” began with a classic act of seppuku by a Tunisian citizen: on December 17,2010 Mohammed Bouazizi, a street vendor, unable to bear his condition anymore as a citizen, immolated himself publicly. City officials had confiscated his wares, harassed him, and denied him his means of livelihood.

He could no longer tolerate the humiliation of living under this extreme condition that undermined his humanity. He did not throw a stone at a government building. He did not turn his tails beneath his legs either. He simply committed the highest act of civil defiance: he took his own life publicly – simply to prove that there could never be a nation without a citizen.

Mohammed Bouazizi’s story is compelling because it mirrors the story of many Nigerians, only that he was born in 1984, in the small city of Sidi Bouzid in the heart of Tunisia. His father died early from a heart attack, leaving his mother with three other children. His uncle later married his mother. Things were tight. Bouazizi had a rough time of it. He left school early and could not complete high school. His uncle was in poor health and so was family income – in poor health. Mohammed Bouazizi felt the challenge to provide for his brothers and sisters. He tried to work.

He applied many times for jobs, but unemployment is high in Tunisia. He even tried to join the Army, but they’d not recruit him. What next to do? He branched out on his own with courage and determination; he was an ordinary guy with grit; with the will to survive.

He was not lazy; not dependent. He could not depend on anybody – not relations; not government. It is a familiar story. So he took to hawking produce on the street. He would buy vegetables and set it on his wheel barrow on the streets of Sidi Bouzid. From his little trade, he helped his mother and other siblings, and even put his younger sister through the university. He was growing his little street trade, and as his mother said, “all he wanted was to buy a van.”

The little guy just simply wanted a chance in life. But all these came to an end when on December 17, 2010, having bought his goods on credit, and set up his cart again on the street. City police officials came, confiscated his merchandise, beat him around, and overturned his wheel barrow. They said he did not have “vendor’s permit” but as it turned out, it was because Bouazizi did not have money to pay his “roger” to the police.

Bouazizi did what a good citizen ought to do. He went to the City Hall and tried to speak with the governor and lodge a personal complaint. But he was refused audience with the governor. He kept insisting that he would burn himself if the governor refused to see him and hear his petition. But he was a little guy. Very inconsequential and voiceless. Mohammed Bouaziz however wanted to be heard loud and clear, and unmistakably. He left, bought a can of gasoline, drenched himself in it, and set himself on fire in front of the government office.

His story and his act of extreme public defiance ignited the fire of the revolution in Tunisia. Soon, other Tunisians rallied, and began the streets protests which for twenty-eight days rocked Tunisia and finally ended the government of Ben Ali and his party the RCD – a PDP type party in Tunisia. The people rose to protest inflation, unemployment, repression, corruption, and a general failure of public governance. The government of Ben Ali collapsed on January 14, 2011.

The triumph of the street protests in Tunisia inspired the protests in Egypt. The gatherings at Tahrir square overthrew Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian revolution on its own has inspired other defiance movements. The Bahraini are up in defiant protest seeking to overthrow the monarchy of King Hamad  bin Isa Al-Khalifa and in its place establish a constitutional government – a republic.

Last week’s brutal crackdown of protesters at the Pearl Square in Bahrain has not deterred the protests. By Friday in fact mourners bearing their dead had grown emboldened by the dead and by the rituals of mourning. The Yemeni has risen too. There are reported protests in Jordan. The Saudi government is on alert.

It is Peoples power redivivus. These governments are key American allies who have been at the center of America’s Middle-East policy- a policy so Machiavellian in its intent that it is built like a revolving door.

The situation in Egypt and much of the Middle East has been spinned with much difficulty by the US state department who are in the unique situation of the Scylla of mouthing support for democracy and the Charrybdis of loosing the long, corrupt and dictatorial allies whom they’ve propped up against their people in that region. But the lesson for the Nigerian political and business elite ought to be clear: people do rise. The level of corruption, insecurity, unemployment, and growing disaffection in the land makes the Egyptian situation not too long in coming to Nigeria.

But the more general lesson is that the streets are speaking the language of public dissent across the world, in increasing frequency and increasing numbers. Everywhere, a young and dynamic generation, highly educated and massively unemployed and alienated, are armed with the new tools of technology, and are breaking down the barriers, and calling out people to the streets for street protests.

The global economic crisis is the spur. It is the indication of the dead end of capitalism and the so-called free market, and economic policies starting from the 1980s, which has imploded and which had led to a few global elite and a massive urban and robotized poor. The protests are not only in Africa and the Middle East: increasingly European capitals and American cities are hearing the footfalls of a global disenfranchised. Egypt is a mere prelude. New York or London may in fact be next.