Very welcome at the evening highlight panel, which is closing for today, but not for the whole of the conference. As I've already mentioned, the host of tonight's panel, Klaus Leggevi, has written an article by the impressive title, How to Get Rid of Autocrats, which might be of interest for multiple people. This is back in headline on Eurazine. It's a couple months old. It's actually one month old. Please go and read it on Eurazine.com along with other articles, which are all linked from yesterday's and tomorrow's speakers in the live stream article. And now I give the floor to Klaus Leggevi and his invitees, whom he is going to address. Very welcome. Thank you very much for the ad and for having me here, having us here. And I think, I don't know if you know Venice, the Ponte Sospiri, and there is this indicated La Charte Andare Ognie Esperanza, Let All Hope Go. This was my feeling after the last panel. But there is still hope. There is still hope. And I think we have to represent hope in this conference now, because there, something can be done against autocrats. Let me introduce myself and Klaus Leggevi, a political scientist. And I will introduce our great speakers here. Let me read first a quote. Protest is when I say that and that doesn't suit me. Resistance is when I make sure that what does not suit me no longer happens. Resistance is when I say I'm not part of it anymore. Resistance is when I make sure that everyone else does not join. It's a quote and it's a dangerous one. It's a toxic one by Ulrike Meinhof in 1966, when she was still a hero of the rebellion. Her conclusion was imported from a panel or a teach-in, as we said at the time, was a Black Panthers in Berlin. Protest is when I say that and that doesn't suit me. Resistance is when I make sure that what doesn't suit me no longer happens. And it was dangerous because it served as a basis for her building the Red Army fraction. And it was toxic because it was followed by a verdict a couple of months later. Of course we will shoot. But nevertheless, it's an acceptable definition of resistance and seems to be quite topical in these days. We will not continue with Ulrike Meinhof. We will continue with our panel. In our evening session we have, forgive me, to forget 89 for a moment, forget 89 for a moment and develop Geisters Gegenwart, as Karl Schlegel said, a presence of mind. And indeed, as he also said, a thinking without banister, without these prescriptive lessons of older resistance moving through the 60s and 70s and around 89. I think we have to leave the comfort zone. I remind you two days ago, the city council of Dresden has proclaimed an anti-Nazi emergency. An anti-Nazi emergency in Dresden, one of the places of the revolution in 89. We all have not just to interpret the world, we also have to do something and change it. In the US all kind of movements, particularly of young and youngest people desperately tried to prevent another presidential term of the crook in the White House. In my view, three main questions arise, the relation between protest movements and parliamentary forces, to the relationship to representative democracy and coalition building in general, and the European impact and outreach of all this, because we are a European network here. We are privileged tonight to have three representatives of very successful protest and resistance movements in Europe with us, Elena Marshal from Fridays for Future in Germany, Rado Vanku from Sibiu, Romania, and Dora Pap from Hungary, Budapest, who will present themselves in short statements telling us about their activities in their respective countries and cities now. As you see, we have organized an open fish bowl here for older people like me. This is a format where the speakers sit in the center, as we do in the moment, in the center of concentric circles where any member of the audience, that is you, can at any time, at any time occupy this empty chair, the black one, and join us. You can also step in when there is no free chair, meaning that one of us will be given up the center position, and ideally, but this never happened before, we four will all at a certain moment merge into the public, the audience, and we have a lively discussion still moderated by me, I guess, but that's all. So Dora, to start with you, we met a couple of months ago in Budapest, had a conversation about the chances of the opposition, particularly in the municipal elections, which have taken place meanwhile, and they're not just a miracle, but something very good happened. The mayor of Budapest is no longer a fetish member, it's one of the opposition. And you were in your movement, which you would explain a bit to us, aha, you were fighting for this, that this could happen, and this not just happened in Budapest, it also happened in other places in Hungary, whereas still the fetish party and Orban have an overwhelming majority of people behind them, but nevertheless, let's talk about success, let's talk about hope, let's talk about what can be done, so what has been done in this year 2019 to make this success happen? Yes, thank you for the invitation, actually, yes, back then when we met last year, that was a big question, what is going on, what is going to happen, and several weeks after the change in Budapest and the ray of hope that is basically a big success for the opposition right now in Hungary, of course, I see more wide rays of lights, or several rays of lights coming to the country, and not just to the country, but also to the region, but I would like to go back a bit when we are talking about Hungary, I'm in a really lucky position that Philip Ter has already mentioned, most of the disappointing things that can be mentioned about Hungary, when we think about Mr. Orban, whose name was mentioned like 20 times this morning and also 10 times the session before, I have to say that I don't want to give him more coverage this evening, but unfortunately I still live in a country that is ruled by two-thirds of the majority, and Budapest is the first crack on the shell of illiberalism, and the desperate fight of activism is basically come to life, or can come to light from no one, and 2022 is a really big question for not just the opposition, but the whole activism in Hungary, because most of the actual definitions that we use concerning Hungary is illiberal democracy, autocracy, oligarchy, nepotism, corruptions, frinking civic space, I don't know, serious harms suffered by the rule of law and democratic institutions, and according to the 2017 report of the Freedom House, Hungary is only partially free, and I don't even want to think about how many points Hungary is going to lose with the new government-controlled conglomerate funded in 2018, uniting more than several hundred media outlets, which right now shape information sharing and provides 24-7 propaganda in the air and in the printed media in Hungary. I would say partly free is just like getting 44 points of 100 in the Freedom House report, and I didn't even mention, or neither Mr. Ther mentioned criminalization of homelessness, dragging marginalized groups like Roma people, women, refugees, and those island seekers in the center of attention by pointing at them as the sources of threats in the country. I mean the government saying that the country is facing threats by these people and in order to exploit people's hatred and lack of solidarity, and they successfully transformed it into political power and gained economic power while the opposition is captured in a really pitiful identity crisis for a decade now. I'm really not happy about saying this, but this is really connected to the crisis of values that other panels were debating about. Before that, before I would continue painting this black sheep of Europe even deeper and deeper dark, I would like to say that the movement, Ahang, I was working for in the last two years is a digital organizing platform and a platform that stepped out of other organizations and was first in the line that started to promote digital organizing and political organizing as the first step towards change, which happened with the primaries in Budapest. The primaries are not an institution in Hungary. There is no regulation for that. And this platform basically, Ahang means the voice, so people's voice, and this platform undertook the responsibility of organizing this democratic institution, a brand new democratic institution that the primaries, but we were also experiencing with other democratic decision-making procedures. I could mention like the methodology that the platform is using is really, really similar to that. What Kampakt is doing in Germany, or what Aufstein is doing in Austria, or what 38 degrees is doing in the UK or move on in the US. So it's just like knowledge sharing, basically these platforms share the methodology we are working with. And there was a possibility to continue it also in Hungary. But I also have to mention that beyond these definitions, beyond the ray of hope, we have to see that it's just not enough to make a crack on the shell of illiberalism. But we have to change how we think about society. It's not just solidarity. It really takes building a community around the issues that people care about, that would change their lives. So it's just not just when they are affected by certain problems, but how they can show solidarity with each other. And if we turn to the notion of 89, I think it's really important, and I think it's really visible here that there are two of us Hungarians right now in this conference also. But I think concerning the revolutions in Hungary, and what I think about 89 as well is that, and what is the lesson of 89 basically, is that we should stop lying about the so-called vendane in Hungary, because there might have been an economic change in the country. But thinking about the society culturally, how a community is basically should be built up, and how we should think about ourselves as a community, what is our identity as a nation. These did not change. So basically, these are really big problems when we talk about changing or the actual role of the opposition, because there is only right-wing populism in Hungary, which gave a fixed and really successful narrative for building up a nation. And that's where basically Orban's success is, and that's what the center of Orban's success is as well, that he is not just a strong leader, but a leader who really took care of giving really simple message that people can identify with. So I think this is really something that we have to consider, and also the opposition has to consider, that what can they offer beyond fight, and what can they offer beyond demolishing a dictatorship. Thank you very much. Rado Ivanko is a writer and a professor from CBO in Romania, and he can tell us some more about examples of protest and resistance in Romania. The movement he's active in as a co-founder, I guess, is we see you. We see you. What does it stand for? Well, we see you means that the politicians cannot hide behind walls, behind curtains, and do their tricky corruption business as usual, because we see them, they cannot hide from us. CBO, the city where I come from, has this peculiar architectural characteristic. The roofs have this kind of air holes in the shape of elongated eyes, and it's a trademark of the city. So we use the image of the eye in our logo to say, we see you, you cannot hide from us, we know what you are up to. And we started this protest in December 2017, in 11 December, because the whole year has been a year of protests in Romania. In January 2017, the leading party, the governing party, which is a so-called social democrat party, which, by the way, is a three-words lie or a triple lie. It's not social because it's populist, it's not democratic, it's kleptocratic, and it's not a party, it's a gathering of mobsters. But nevertheless, okay, let's call it social. But it was part of the socialist international. It was a very long. Yes, and it has been kicked out exactly because of corruption, which is a good thing that the social branch of the European parliament has done. So the governing party was led by a guy, Livio Dragnea, who has been already condemned for election fraud, luckily for him with a suspended sentence. And he had a second trial ongoing for corruption, for abuse of power, abuse in service. And fake jobs, actually. He hired at an institution which was supposed to work for institutionalized children. He hired two persons who were working for his party, but were paid from public money without working one day, one second in that institution. So it was obvious that he was going to be convicted. He put some of his guys to calculate the money stolen from that institution. It was not an enormous sum. It was not millions of dollars. It was 200,000 euros, which is quite big, nevertheless. And he intended to pass a law by emergency decree which to stipulate that anybody stealing less than 200,000 euros from public money is pardoned. I mean, this crime was taken out of the penal code. And there was a journalist who found out about his intention because he did not speak publicly about it because there were elections in December 2016. And they never said one word about modifying the laws of justice. And on the country, they promised hospitals. They promised eight hospitals. They were elected in 2016 with this promise. Now it's 2019. Not one of them has been built yet. They promised highways, not one meter of highways were built on the country. They stopped all the constructions of highways and so on. But there was no word about justice. In January 2017, this journalist finds out about the intention, makes them public. The president, Klaus Johannes, who is a liberal, goes to the government meeting and words them, do not pass such a law. Because this is obviously anti-European, anti-democratic.  So do not pass this law. They deny. And in nighttime, they passed the law. In nighttime, like thieves. That was what the street was going to shout. Because we were all out in the streets immediately. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Romanians. This was in February 1, 2017. In February 5, we were 600,000 people in the streets in Romania shouting against them and asking for the government to resign. And for this guy to withdraw. They did not resign. We discovered, I mean, there was some judges involved in our rebellion, even though the job description of a judge forbids him to go into the streets. But it was too serious and some of them risked their jobs and came into the streets with us. And one of them observed that there was this 10-day buffer that they forgot. They are also stupid, lucky for us. They forgot this 10-day buffer in the corpus of the emergency decree, which said that the law only enters into force after 10 days. It's a measure usually put into emergency decrees in order to, if there is something misfit or unfit, you have time to correct it, yes. So they forgot this buffer there. So we asked that within these 10 days buffer the emergency decrees withdrawn and they resigned. They did half of the job. They withdraw the decree, but they did not resign. And we kept protesting for one year and we saw that they learned how to cope, how to tackle, how to manage the pressure of marching protests, of traditional protests. And we said we must invent a protest which they cannot manipulate, which they don't know how to deal with.  So we announced that every day at noon we are going to be in CBU in front of the headquarters of the Social Democrat Party and warn them in this silent protest that we see them. We know that they still work in order to annihilate the rule of law in Romania because they did not stop with that. They withdraw the emergency decree, but they tried to pass some other laws via the parliament which to decriminalize whole chapters of the penal code, including sexual harassment, for example. I mean, they made a sort of inventory of all the guilds, all the legal charges, all the legal problems they had and they said, okay, we will decriminalize all these things, okay? So we knew they didn't stop. And we said, okay, we will protest every day at noon in front of your party until you stop, you resign, and we re-become a European country with a rule of law active in it. And we have been protesting for 669 days continually, day by day, until the government fell two weeks ago. And we decided to suspend the protest because now the new government is going hopefully to be installed on Monday. And if they obey, if they do what we have asked them, we will leave them alone. If not, we will be back in the streets because now people have learned how to protest, have learned that protests are effective because if you draw international attention on them, they respond, the politicians respond, even though they, they pretend not to care. It's their usual weapon to pretend that they don't care about protests. But they do because international pressure, European pressure, is very effective. And this is why Europe for us was not something abstract. It was something very concrete, having a headquarters in Brussels and Strasbourg and so on, and putting pressure on our politicians and forcing them to withdraw their outrageous intentions. It was something very concrete with concrete effects. And this is why we stood in the streets hoping to become a European country again. It was not an abstraction. It was not something aspirational. It was something that we knew what it is, and we wanted to be there. Helena Marschel also knows how to organize a huge protest movement in Germany for a long time. She's from Fridays for Future in Germany, and this is not just a German movement. It's elsewhere. What was your recipe for success, and what does Fridays for Future stand for? Well, generally the goal is that effective policy is passed all over the world to combat the climate crisis, because we are in a place right now that we really do not have time to lose, and I feel like everyone in movement kind of always has this ticking clock in their head because we have clear planetary boundaries and tipping points, and if we pass them, which will be at around 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, then we can't really do anything about it anymore, because then it will be like a ball that has crossed the tip of the mountain and is just rolling downwards. And no matter how many missions we reduce after that, we will just continue rolling downwards. And I feel like this sense of urgency has just been amplified, and obviously Gritte Thunberg started striking in August of 2018, and this through press and through her speech at the COP in, I think in Poland last year, she just inspired so, so many people, including me. And I saw this speech, I saw that she was striking in Sweden, and I kind of said, we need to do this in Frankfurt as well. And so in December of 2018, so almost a year ago now, we started the first strikes in Frankfurt, and we were 30 people the first week, and we were striking in, I think, under 20 cities in Germany, so really not that big. But somehow we just kept doing it, and we said, okay, let's just do this again next week, we'll see each other next Friday. And I think, I mean, on today's Saturday, yesterday was the 46th Friday of strikes. We've coordinated internationally, so this movement on the 20th of September was in over 120 countries worldwide. And I mean, we've somehow managed to mobilize so many people with our simple message of, we just want a future, which is honestly not a lot to ask, and should not be something we have to ask for. But because of the circumstances, we've been forced into this situation, and we've been forced to act, and we've mobilized 1.4 million people into the streets of Germany on the 20th of September, and it was no longer just students skipping school, but we campaigned to get as many adults and as many people as possible from all walks of life and from all pieces of society to come and strike with us and protest with us, and tell the government that they are standing behind us and that they support our demands. And sadly, on that day in Germany, the Klima Pekin was announced, and that was kind of just a slap in the face of these 1.4 million people protesting because it was, I mean, it has nothing to do with science, has nothing to do with the 1.5 degrees agreement that we signed in Paris. And I guess that's just a sign that we need to keep going and we need to keep protesting, and that's why already the next international date is set for the 29th of November to try and put some pressure on the COP 25, which is now in Spain, as it was just moved shortly. And yes, I mean, it just keeps getting more urgent every single week. Do you also think about civil resistance in terms of like extinction rebellion is proposing for a while? I mean, is this also an option for you? I mean, skipping school is already civil disobedience. It's a clear break of the rules, which in the first three months was very annoying because a lot of people wanted to talk to us about skipping school and not about the climate crisis, which is what we actually want to talk about. And obviously, after 10 months of doing that, it's not, you won't get the same reaction anymore. It's now kind of, it's very sadly, it's normal now that students are skipping school on Fridays. And I think there will obviously be new options that we look at. How can we continue to stay in the public eye? How can we continue to put pressure on our politicians and obviously civil disobedience is one method to that. Another method would, which is probably what we're going to be doing a lot on the 29th of November is to be as aesthetic as possible. So do very like artful forms of protest that I'll just create images that you kind of stop and think and stare at. And yeah, so I think that obviously that's going to happen. Yeah, thank you very much. I think you also need a hand or my question to you is if environmental concerns are also present in your protest movement. Is this an issue or is it an issue for later? I think it's an issue for us in the everyday life. But in Hungary, most of the environmental campaigning is basically occupied by other organizations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Youth. And this is basically something that's really reached the level of going to the front door of people. So it's not anymore which organization is taking their fair share of the market, but rather that people buy their kitchen table, parents talking to their children, whether they should skip school or not. And even in Hungary, it's also what the voice platform was connected to was a student strike that was actually the students were motivated by Fridays for Future and they were taking steps toward changing the changing of the education system. There was a new law and then they saw what is happening with Fridays for Future. They said that, okay, we do not only have to act for the environment but for changing our school. So we see that there are changes we don't want and we will go back. But I just wanted to also refer back to this notion of we were together for several months and then the climax of campaigning is always, yeah, it's changing. I usually call it the post-concert depression when we don't know how to go on because it was so exciting for several hours or several days or several months. But I think this is somehow when you are forming a movement actually. So when you find in your everyday life the place for that issue and this is what the digital organizing can help with because you can be present in your member's life, in your followers' life. This is something that they have to, this is something that is called active participation when you actually can show people how they change their own life for the sake of the issue. And that's how students are actually helping this issue because it's so much present in their own family's life that not just they themselves but their parents and their nephews and their uncles and their grandparents are with them in this issue. And of course they are making politicians angry as well because yeah, of course as Radu said politicians of course pay attention if there are a lot of people on streets in case of Hungary there were a wave of demonstration that was so small that the maximum number of people who went on streets was 200. And even though that campaign could change a law basically, it was a home care campaign when families providing care for their disabled and terminally ill relatives and they didn't get the minimum wage in Hungary. And only those families went on the street to the parliament continuously several times within half a year. And there was so much tension around the topic that after half a year the parliament had to issue a new regulation for the families. So I think it's not just the amount of people but of course whether that's also a question how essential the topic is that you are with and environmental topic is that essential that you have to take care about it. Is Romania? As a matter of fact environmental activists are part of this protest because the success of the protests in the last two or three years also lies in the fact that there are several layers of protests that overlapped. In 2012 to 2013 the first protest the first major protest in Romania was exactly due to environmental causes. There is this one of the most important gold reserves in Romania is in a mountain called Rociamontana and there is a gold corporation which wanted to exploit it with cyanides and you know to destroy actually the environment there it was a huge protest. Two years afterwards there was a protest for the healthcare system. There was a fire in a club in Bucharest 65 people died because the club was it was not allowed to function but corruption made it possible for it to function. Corruption also made very inefficient the intervention of the emergency paramedics and so on. Corruption in hospitals for example in hospitals we discovered I mean some journalists discovered that they sold pure water as disinfectant you know and people died in hospitals because disinfectant was absent and so on it was it was this kind of corruption in the healthcare systems that took into streets some other protesters and in the protests start in 2017 all these groups of protesters environmental activists healthcare system protesters and so on and some other people who have never been into the streets united their forces and created this huge mass of protesters against the social democrat party. So part of us are environmental activists but we can see that I mean it was only something prior prioritizing you know I mean it was prioritary to stop them first because if they passed these laws which eliminated crime from the penal system Romania was not a governable country anymore it would have been a jungle actually what's a country without a penal code. So we know that after solving this problem we will turn our attention back to environment back to healthcare and so on but it was a matter of priorities not so this is not not either or but let's unite solve problems one by one. Helena you organized the conference I think in in September reaching out to for example trade unions to enlarge the basis of your your protest in terms of parents and scientists for future you also reach out for other organizations and non-governmental organizations trade unions can you talk a bit about this? Yeah so the motto of the September global climate strike in Germany was all of us klima so everyone for climate and that was the point was kind of to touch on this aspect of the climate crisis will affect everyone sooner or later no matter how much money they have or where they live or what they do that the climate crisis will have effects on them and the point was kind of to to get all these people who are all going to be affected eventually or their children will be affected to basically unite and put pressure on governments because maybe in some aspects they seem more dangerous because they can vote I mean I'm 17 I cannot vote yet but all the adults behind us are voting right now and are going to be voting in the next years and I think that causes politicians a lot more distress but I was actually going to comment on two other aspects because you were talking about how politicians basically pretended to ignore the protests but acted and I've kind of had the opposite experience because in the last month so many politicians have told me how great I am and it's so horrible because they they tell us oh what you're doing is so wonderful and you've inspired us and now we're going to enact legislation and we're so we're so changed because of what you're doing and then they don't change anything and that happens not just with politicians but also with bank executives we go to we were at the the the general meeting of Deutsche Bank and we told them you're investing in coal and you're investing in the in in destroying our future and then the next the answer of the of the of the CEO was yes I just wanted to tell you how great it is what you're doing and how you're inspiring a a change in our society and it's just it's kind of um it's a huge problem because what what do you say to that if you if you keep getting poured over with compliments and and everyone telling you how wonderful you are without changing anything and and that's kind of just kind of a a barrier we've come up to again and again and there's the same thing when the when the Bundesliga President presented their their climate plan that they were saying how price of future had affected them so much and how they were going to actually follow through with the Paris climate agreement and that just is not what actually happened just just a quick note there is this climate act in parliament now and there was a phrase in this article nine saying that climate negotiations or deliberative process around the climate act should include organizations like Greenpeace and others but also citizens burger in and burger and exactly this passage has been eliminated and we're fighting now to get it back into the law the Green Party is trying to to put it back into the proposition of the of the government it's interesting that citizens you are citizens eliminated after all these these protests I mean we were talking and somebody brought up the the phrase of permissive tolerance Herbert MacCousis had this and the alternative was a große Weigerung I don't know how to express this in in English große Weigerung means a great denial is rebuttal yeah so this was his answer to this in in in 67 nevertheless I would like to ask you to many people argue this is just a middle class thing what you're doing and I know that for example in Hungary there are there are thoughts how to include trade unions working class people into the alliance does this work well I have to admit it is a middle class thing that's that these platforms are doing so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna say otherwise because how organizing is work of course like a platform like the voice it's a micro funded but for example can impact that we were talking about this earlier when you when when a platform when an organization is member funded then of course there is there is a pressure there's a need to also pick topics that that are reflecting the members the members needs and the members point of view so there's when it comes to the next step when when these platforms when these movements can actually go to a next phase where they educate their members when where they educate society so can they risk educating can they can they be the ones who are going to confront people with the with taboos with the less comforting topics and and of course it's a really big question in in Hungary most of the topics that that I was working with are basically representing marginalized groups in the last couple of years also connecting to cultural work as well and and it's and it's pretty hard to to go against the wall that that society that between society and decision decision makers have been have been built but but in several cases we can see and and and of course Han could see and several movements in Hungary could see and and I think also in Romania and Poland and Austria this is another other case how how can we reach out to to the marginalized groups to to organize themselves but that's another kind of that's that's a new profession that's another kind of profession so because there is not just the barrier of of the need to self sustain an organization but also the tools that these platforms are using are digital tools so you cannot say in Hungary that 10 million people have laptops mobile phones and and actually are are using them or or digitally active so these these are these are taking times these these processes processes take decades in order to invite the whole community within but for example the voice platform is is present in small communities as well this is a combination the method of of the platform is a combination of the digital organizing built on community organizing and one of the first campaigns that I was working on was it was in in segregated settlements in Roma settlements in Hungary and we organized a don't sell your vote campaign which basically was about the first democracy issue that was raised in in those communities the only message around the elections into not just in 2018 but before that in these communities is just one politician or one representative or not even a representative of a party appearing in the village and and and asking people to sell their votes because yeah with 5004 in which equals less than a bit more than 10 euros they can they can easily be bought out in in such in such circumstances is it's totally normal and in this in this campaign we could see that going to the settlements going to the villages going to small cities is just the very first step and and not in in most of the cases and not even successfully mobilizing for the opposition and the first reason why we why we couldn't successfully mobilize for the opposition is that people didn't know the opposition at all so for example and this is this is the media freedom issue in Hungary that most of the people in the countryside couldn't even reach out to information that any other parties than Fidesz actually exist in Hungary so the more we more we enter the the bubble outside the middle class outside environmental issues outside issues concerning better a better school should be built or or should we preserve some some human rights or whatever infrastructural problems are also the problems of the middle class then we enter a territory that is in in most case in campaigning is unknown and then there comes the the relevance and the importance and the importantness of social work and that is something that we also have to learn and I myself also and the platform also had to work and I am going to finish it right now because this is something that in Hungary the housing movement is really strong with and one of the successes in Budapest basically was that a new mayor in the in one of the local districts was was a former the campaign of the new local mayor was run by a former movement leader of the housing of the housing movement housing poverty against housing poverty movement in Hungary and this is a huge success for for all the civil society organizations showing that that civic participation is indeed needed in in politics and we have to be the ones who are not just confronting the politicians with with the issues but who are also taking part in in politics in in an everyday level and and and this glass box feeling that you have with the banks is just basically a tactic that you can tackle if if there are if you can and if you can activate more and and motivate and and mobilize more and more people who will come from them that we are not going to step into the that glass box which is basically surrounded by your empathy and and this kind of a more and more positive messages by the way the empty chair still empty so please take the opportunity to step in yeah I feel engaged in this discussion because I'm here as an a magazine maker but as a civilian I happen to start an anti austerity movement in Belgium five years ago it's called if I translate a heart above heart so it's the heart the human heart against or above that was already a discussion of three hours if we would choose against or above but and heart is like heart economics it's against the neoliberal tendencies and the main idea of the movement was to link different protest movements so it's like trying to link because we are all on our own island let's say it's the cultural sector on its own island it's the the health care at its own island and what we have been trying is to link all that the last five years we had mass demonstrations we had like more creative forms of action and because your first question was like what is the link between protest movements and and political parties that's a big question in in my experience the link between protest movements and the institutions is even a more crucial question I think because the political parties are I don't know if yeah many people don't trust political parties anymore in a way and and these institutions I think they have the key to to make it into a next step what like the people on the streets are doing and that really depends on on these yeah institutions it's it's like it's not if the protest will work it's not depending on the activists of course it is but but it's like depending of the whole circle around also and yeah sometimes you have good days and sometimes you have bad days when it comes to institutions who for them it's a difficult question of course like they are often depending on state subsidies they they want to have a kind of neutrality but they also see that the quality of what they are doing in hospital or in youth work or in anti-poverty is like yeah not that good anymore as it as it was before and but the system is also really clever in reducing the time of all these institutions to to do to help like activists at the same time so it's it's a difficult thing in a way but we had we had good links with trade unions with which are quite strong still in in Belgium and at the same time sometimes you feel that you've become too dependent of the strategic choices that for instance trade unions are making and and I still after five years we changed it a little bit into maybe we need to talk again to to just yeah human individuals like yeah and it's about the future and and yeah so that is my thing I want to put in here it's the relation to institutions I think this is an important point we should still discuss a bit more because I I see or sometimes in in in these protest movements a radical disappointment with parties with parliaments with the with the institutions and I think this is understandable completely understandable if you your reaction to the reaction you experience with parties and and and yeah it goes in this direction but nevertheless what we need is legislation what we need is regulation what we need is a tough institutional intervention because we don't have time because we need really strong measures and not just transforming ourselves into climate into sustainable individuals it's about the society in general and so the it's very important and I think we have to do all we have to engage all kind of compromises to find a basis for common work with the institutions I don't think that the anti-institutionalism of these movements will lead us very far do you agree or is it is there already a cleavage that is no longer to to to trans pass I totally agree we knew from the beginning that we have to transport the message into a partinical system into a party system to be taken from we didn't trust the parties of course we knew that they were untrustable so we had to generate our own parties in Romania I mean now I mean only in Romania but I think it can be exported as in most of the places on the earth human nature is fallible by itself in manual concept so we knew we had to generate our own parties and one of the big successes of the of the protests was that in Romania two new parties were generated from the streets the union save Romania and plus and their alliance now is the second force in Romanian politics and they will probably after the elections in 2020 they will be the first force so we generated our own our own parties which are formed by people we know we have been working with we know we have known them from years they have put pressure in the parliament in on the social democrat party not to pass those laws that would have destroyed justice and thus the street and the new parties together managed to keep the justice system functional until Livio Dragnea the head of the social democrat party has been condemned he's in jail since May because we kept justice functional by generating our own parties with our own message and with our own program there and I think this I mean of course we don't trust political parties but that doesn't mean that we have to annihilate them we have to build our own parties you don't like something to your own thing so Friday's of future do you trust the green party the question was do you trust the greens you don't have to answer if you don't like to please excuse me um I'm not going to answer the question but I'll tell you some other stuff because Friday's of future I think has been so successful because not I mean we didn't all go into the green party I mean I could have done that I could have gone into the green youth party and tried to do some stuff there but the whole point is that we need our whole spectrum we need all the parties to do more climate because um we it won't be enough for for one party to do that it won't be enough for two we need them all to somehow work together to secure our future and we we hear the same thing that we should just go create our own party and go into politics but that's just not going to work because um by the time the next selections are that's going to be too late and um then we would have the problem again of getting the majorities and so that's the the whole kind of idea behind Friday's of future is to to have this protest movement outside of the parliaments to kind of lobby all of the parties into following our demands and working together to do this yeah um somebody else who would like to raise his or her voice here thank you sir somebody else who would like to step in here we courageous this is fishbowl okay here it is so my question to the Friday's for future is your strategy of saying we just demand from the existing politicians that they make these changes doesn't that require a certain minimum trust into them because if you know that your that the politician is absolutely not interested in listening to you and will put you just in jail and nothing else or something then maybe the other tactic makes more sense so doesn't that somehow imply that you have a certain trust in those politicians and if you didn't have that trust would you then not be forced to move to other tactics like they have they are doing in in Romania and the question to you a very tiny question just inform me I have heard that the coalition of opposition forces also includes Jopik and they have always present been presented to us as right-wing extremists almost fascist really ugly people and I'm just wanting to hear your perspective on that because I'm just curious I cannot really make sense of that it feels weird if you're sitting behind me I think we don't I don't think there's necessarily a trust in politicians I think it's more a trust in our political system because up until I mean I think our democracy is a little bit broken and there are definitely some things that need to change but I think there's the general understanding that we can within this political system gather enough pressure behind these politicians to to do what they need to do and what their responsibility is and what they've been elected to do but I think that question is going to get more and more relevant the longer we protest and the less happens and I think if you ask me that question again in a few months I may have a different answer and maybe our tactic will have changed by then but I think for now we don't really have another option because we need to we were to really combat the climate crisis we should have seen effective legislation last year and the year before and a few months ago and that hasn't happened and I think this extreme timely pressure just kind of gives us the the the need to try and solve this with the politicians that are in office right now and that are that are building the coalition right now that makes sense yes I would I would first refer back to trust because I think that's a that's a really loose kind of definition I mean defined trust in in terms of politics because you know and it also refers to your big as well because this is I mean for for Ong and and for for the movements I think this is not a politics should not be about trusts I mean you cannot build the community it's it's political work is not about not about trust it's about strategy and it's of course it's also business so of course leading the country is just like even more complex so I would say that if if a movement has a strategy in order to find partners in order to to make the mission happen and find and can find partners in in decision or among decision makers that's another kind of issue then trusting each other but but building a kind of an alliance towards fulfilling our goal and that's what a and not just young movement but also also other movements from from the boss had to face several times and we will have to face it because and and this is this is I'm really sorry about it I mean it's a sad situation that actually movements are not in a position that their voice can be heard in the level of decision-making processes but they always have to take into consideration which alliances might work for them so I think people's voice should be heard in much higher level than it is heard right now in in Hungary or or in other countries in the region and back to back to the question of Yobik on the platform the voice platform was organizing the primaries without Yobik so it was like the first ever institutional change it was a coalition of the parties that actually established a civic program board for the primaries so this in this case avoiding the fact that Yobik is the far right party in in Hungary so and they didn't have any nominees for for the opposition leader for for Budapest because the whole is the whole notion of the primary come to the table with two nominees going for for the opposition leader in Hungary and the the so-called coalition of the opposition happened in several cases in the countryside but not in Budapest so Yobik didn't nominate a member in didn't nominate Lord Mayor for Budapest so they were in this sense out of the game for for this kind of establishing process somebody else who would like to stick this black we here we are living democracy I would like to have a have a question to Rado. As far as I know Laura Kövesi is now appointed as the first European general prosecutor fighting corruption within the European Union which is Greg Meave I'm wrong a bit irony that the successful export of Romania is maybe the most powerful person now in Europe to fight corruption which is super cool I think adding on this discussion on institutions and and corporations with institutions do you and maybe all of you expect something from her that really helps you because we all know about the discussion that the European Union is sometimes powerless and and has no grip what will she do what can she do and are you have you ever been in contact when she worked as a successful prosecutor in Romania? Luckily I was in contact with her but not as a guy charged with accusations but participating in discussions about the rule of law in Romania and I met her twice so I know her very generally but I could feel that she's the person that she looks on TV I mean she's dedicated to her work she has this ethical strong ethical system and set of values and she was probably the number one public enemy for the Social Democrat Party she was incorruptible she was very good under her mandate two prime ministers were sentenced to jails a few dozens of parliamentaries and hundreds of mayors and so on so they had their reasons to hate her and they made all the efforts possible to corrupt the constitutional court and to make to make the constitutional court ask the Romanian president to remove her from office which the president after using all his constitutional weapons was forced to do even though he appreciated her so now it's an irony as you said it's a it's a strong irony that Europe uses her for this position which is really strong and I know what she can do because you ask about the concrete effects I mean it's very important that some somebody knowing what white colors do especially in Eastern Europe for embezzling funds and probably the tactics and the strategies for doing it are universal knows exactly what to do in order to stop this and it's about constructing hope actually because it's not only about a prosecutor it's about constructing a legal system that punishes the evil guys to put it plainly so it's the hope that there is there will be a Europe of justice and hope is crucial I mean we all talked about hope here constructing hope is it's our business it's what protesters should do it's what activists should do it's what everyone of us should do because Lesha Kolakowski has this famous book the hope of of the hopelessness when you're hopeless but you still feel that there is some kind of small hope there you go for it and you do every concrete actions that you can in order to achieve it when we were in the streets in 31st of January 2017 before discovering that there is that 10-day buffer when we could act in order to keep Romania a rule of law it was bitter it was bitter hopelessness and still we were acting even though we thought that everything is lost but then when we found out that there is a small hope that we can make things work we started doing it and we we managed to do it now Dragne is in jail now his party has lost they had 47 percent they are now at 22 percent so they lost everything Laura Koves has been kicked out but now she's ruling anti-corruption in Europe so you see it's like a fairy tale I'm sorry to say that but uh yeah at least for Romania it happened thus we believed we fought a few hundreds of days continually I mean three years being in the streets continue we have lives we are not hired to do that you know we have lives we have jobs we fought and eventually it's exactly like what all miss universities say if you believe Hardinov something it will become true you know yes that's that's really hard to say anything after that line I wish I was miss university so basically I just wanted to refer back to hope because I think it's really important because in most cases we are talking about sites like the populace the right-wing extremists and they are the bad guys and and the left and and the liberals and oh well the conservatives where is the center and and and that's all ever but I think hope lies within within not taking sides but within within thinking about society as a community and I think that's really important to say in most of the cases where these movement hope these movements are fighting uh because for example in the case of ohong uh we could we could see that uh in a lot of case um the issue matters and not the political identity and that was really important in the case of the for example in the home care campaign but also in the primaries as well because the right wing was was also mobilizing as effectively as as the as the leftist parties and and and anyone else so making the issue as horizontal as possible was effective enough to push back uh politicians to push back uh decision makers and say that change must happen so where where hope lies I think that's I mean community is where hope lies and and restructuring and redefining values and and finding finding a common common identity is where hope lies basically because if we are not taking into consideration the other side then we are the ones who are building the wall more thicker and thicker in in most of the cases which is which is really well funny to talk about 30 years after after we are talking about the fall of the wall but in in many cases we could see in the in the last 30 years that the that the wall became bigger and bigger between people between civil society I mean civil actors and and everyday people so this is something that we as activists have to tackle right now not to build it again but to find ways I don't know several ways around it thanks who else one would like to raise come on hello everyone I'm Ian I'm I'm from Ireland and I'm active in the dm25 movement if that might say something about democracy in Europe 2025 so we're interested in building the demos of Europe and we're here Europeans talking to each other about our experiences in activism and in Europeans what do you think Europeans can do to support your movements and support each other's movements really across borders like things like just helping to wage information wars online or or something something else and also I'd like to also make a point about maybe inviting Friday's future to work because of work for more your solutions to the climate crisis on a European level and yeah so I'm curious to hear what you think about all those things um yeah I think that's really important especially because we have an institution as the European Union and we can obviously also fight for solutions on that higher level which we're actually trying to do a little bit right now um I don't know if you know about the decision of the European investment bank who um wanted to who want to stop investing in fossil fuels and fossil industries and Germany actually with they have the highest percent like um because it's it's weighted by um how much industry you have and um Germany has like the the the biggest part biggest stake of votes exactly and they they were basically going against this decision because they said we need to continue investing in gas which is a fossil fuel and not a renewable energy as the gas industry likes us to think a lot of time and um I think that's where we can really as maybe a national movement also lobby basically these decision makers in Germany who can then maybe change their decision on a European level um yeah I think uh you you put the question of support and I think the biggest way we can just support each other is to talk like we're doing now I think that's really important that we because all these different aspects are all combined somehow I mean um movements for social equality are intertwined in so many places with the movements for for climate justice and for um against corruption I mean it's all basically um connected in so many places and I think so that's what we can most important thing we can do is talk to one another and um the second most important thing I think everyone can do is to vote and to be politically active and to take part in democracy even if maybe it's not perfect and um I think we did that really successfully before the European elections where we did um the uh like basically strikes all over Europe um the day before the European elections which um climate was in the end the biggest and most important issue in the European elections so that was quite successful in that way um I have a question to you because you're coming from Ireland and I think Ireland has something to export to the European Union so to the Europeans this is a citizen assembly I think this is a brilliant model for deliberative and consultative democracy uh changing even laws as it was uh it was shown in in in in Ireland maybe you can talk a little bit about this and I just want to mention that in this regard uh French president has um established 150 climate conventions all over the country to discuss climate change and climate protection measures the law the the act in France and this is a kind of uh by these councils are established by a random vote so it's everybody who participates it's a very representative convention and I think this is interesting uh that uh we always hear that climate change and the problem will diminish democracy or will fight democracy you know the the the opposite is true um climate action and democratization can go together and this is what can be shown with institutions like would you like to explain a bit about citizens assembly in in Ireland? Yes I think it was quite a good idea um the most dramatic the most well known consequence of the citizens assemblies in Ireland have have was the uh referendum to change the constitution to permit abortion which was passed surprisingly last year by a two-thirds majority and that that was the result of this citizens assembly being given the task by the government to decide what to do about abortion because it had been it has been banned in Ireland for yeah forever and uh or since the 1870s and then it was put into back in the days when Ireland was a much more catholic country it was put into the constitution the ban was put into the constitution in 1983 by referendum but it's it's been like a political hot potato ever since then and especially in recent years with the rising feminist movement so I think the government didn't really want to deal with it itself so they gave it to this citizens assembly and they gave gave them four other issues as well and yeah the citizens assembly recommended that they have a referendum about repealing this because it had been more than a generation had passed since then so yeah it's it's quite a good idea and you can read about it in detail and there's a website it's citizensassembly.ie it's in english um or irish if you want so yeah you could I I don't know all of the details but that website has all the details it's it's not it's not active anymore though but yeah I think these such citizen assemblies are a very positive step so we need more of them like for in the case of climate so that people can talk about like get get into more extensive dialogue with each other than just complaining about how trains are more expensive than flights or how we're like putting lots of other random issues into it like too many coffee cups or something who else would like to step in here to sit down on the black chair yeah I would like to ask the question how can we show that all these problems ecological and social institutional problems belong together how can we create a common utopia because I'm afraid that these problems or issues are played against each other I think we saw that in Turing a little bit and I'm afraid that when the movements are disappointed and and the climate packet was a huge disappointment for this movement that they become radicalized and that we could see the point where we ask the question if democracy is not able to save the climate who will and we just discussed this a little bit and yes so to be precise Roger Hallam extinction rebellion is asking this question a little bit right now so we should have an answer to that and we should have maybe an utopia to that that everybody so also the social week I don't know this is the correct term but can see that a green future and ecological future is a good future for everybody Elena we were talking about the green new deal I mean this is maybe the the word yeah I think but answering your question the best thing we can do is to share our visions and to basically just talk about what is possible and the changes that we can make and I feel like if we talk about things like free public transport that's a thing that's going to benefit a lot of people who maybe don't earn as much money and who cannot maybe pay for it and if we talk about the possibilities for creating jobs creating green jobs and investing into renewable energies and that obviously also helping people and I think a green new deal obviously is which has been talked a lot about by ASC in the US but also in England is a huge possibility to basically connect fixing the climate crisis with fixing a lot of the social problems that we have and this always being played out against each other saying we can't put too high of a carbon tax because that will be bad for the people is just I mean that's not the truth because we had multiple studies on carbon taxing showing that it's actually a very social way of fighting the climate crisis and that it can be done in a way that helps basically people but that's not the way it was implemented and that's the problem because the way that the climate packet is now is that it is a burden for the lower class people and people who are earning less and that's exactly what it shouldn't be and that's exactly what our government is denying this they're saying we had to have this low carbon price because we don't want to be too much of a burden on people and that's I mean that's just not the the truth that's not reality because it is a burden on people the way it has been done right now and that's just kind of horrible because it's just an excuse for not acting enough and it's not really yeah I'm just so it annoys me so much that I don't really even know what to say because it seems like it this should not be something we have to talk about yeah actually I think what we have to do depends on our representation on Europe and for me there was this discussion with the nation states before Max Weber famously defined a nation as a community of memory and feeling and I think this is what happens here now talking with each other about our different problems environmental things healthcare protests for corruption and so I mean anti-corruption we are creating this community of memory and feeling where we all participate and which we all share and we behave like a nation like a european nation if you want to even though we belong to different nation states with different problems so talking as Helena said I mean it's it's more than talking it's creating this community of memory and the feeling which is vital if we want to have a Europe and then we have to create alliances like they did in Hungary and it was I mean the the alliance in Budapest is really important and inspirational for what we will have in Bucharest running for mayor we have to create alliances even though and this is also a sort of answer for you even if we don't like some actors in that alliance I have seen something impressive in Turkey this year I have been there 10 days after the first row of elections for for mayors in Istanbul and it was an alliance which was theoretically outrageous for them it was on the one hand socialist aligned with nationalists who hate their guts there is a huge ideological tension between them and they also allied with the Kurdish party there is a tension resulted from blood I mean there have been you know killings from both sides I mean from the all three all three sides so they had to build an alliance which is also tensioned by blood memories in order to stop a dictator so now I think the the radical divide is not anymore between the right and the left as it used to be it's between phyllo totalitarian or anti-totalitarian this is where the radical divides pass we have to accept the anti-totalitarian axiom and to function on this one and build alliances which help us place ourselves in our politics into the phyllo democratic and anti-totalitarian movement even if sometimes we have to use we have sometimes to use immoral solutions for that like Yobik is on is a part of an immoral solution but it's still a solution that helps your country remain a democracy and this is vital today and just to what can we do as as what can we learn from each other just in one sentence my message would be copy paste and translate because there is no harm in trying that's that's the I know that is just like a stereotypical question or or or sentence but for for a movement like like what I was working with several times in in Hungary this is this this is the same there this is a common mistake that we think that we have to start from scratch and that's not true we have a lot of examples there are you know it's just like libraries with books with examples written and and tried out and and you never know which is going to click in the right moment for you so there is not I mean you can predict this is this is my prediction to predict what is going to work but on the other hand using your using other examples that are on the table is really important and and platforms like like on and compact and 38 degrees and move on and so on and so forth and Fridays for a future are doing the same that they have models and they are trying it out there are messages that we are using and sometimes it's working and sometimes it's not so I think if you have 100 message then then two of them is going to work but you don't have to worry about that you are not going to have the right tool in your hand you have it it's just a matter of time until it's going to work for you yeah thanks a lot I think we have to stop here it was a wonderful evening about hope I think this worked well you see three examples wonderful examples of fighting for the right cause and a fourth one and it gives me an opportunity for personal note sometimes people like me are asked to step back as white old men so I do this and I'm quite confident that others are able to continue the fight and let's go on thanks


Former Deputy Senate President Ike Kweramadu has proposed a political solution to ensure the release of the detained leader of the Indigenous people of Biafra, Aipop Namdi Kanu. He believes that this can be achieved if the South East caucus in the National Assembly moves to intervene in the matter. He said it would help the federal government understand the feeling of the people and also reduce tension in the South East. Joining us to discuss this is Ihe Ibeji and Ambrus Ibuki. Thank you very much, Ihe Ibeji, for joining us. Thank you very much. Good evening, viewers. Yes. This sounds very interesting, but the part that gets me is helping the federal government to understand the feelings of the people. The federal government of Nigeria went round this country, and I'm talking about the Bahá'í administration and all of the people that work with him, to canvass for the votes of the people, making promises to make sure that they all are carried along in the administration as he went forward. Now, this is the second tenure under President Mohammed Abu Hari, and I'm trying to understand what the former Deputy Senate President meant by helping the federal government to understand the feelings of the people. Okay, so thank you very much. I accept his speaking with respect to the feelings of the people as are today in terms of the violence and the issues that have arisen over time because of the IPOB and the Nandikandu issue. Well, because in terms of the feelings of the people, in terms of the agitations right from time, in terms of what they've always wanted, respect to marginalisation, getting back to the civil war, of course, the federal government understand that. So I want to believe that what he means is the exorbitant situation that has been brought about since this agitation, that when the Nandikandu came into the picture with the IPOB, it seems that the IPOB has brought the economic shut down in these South East states. I want to believe that that is what he means, understanding the feelings of the people, because they have the system to know the feelings of the people originally in respect to what their demands are. Now, let's go back to some of the things that he said. We know the reason why IPOB came up at the first instance. We know about the civil war and we're not going to go back into all of that. But then how did Nandikandu come into play? Of course, it started from some agitations. Where it is today, we cannot necessarily say that this is what all the evil people stand for. But if the government is yet to understand what the people of the Southeast need in 2021, but all of the things that we've seen happen in the Southeast, and I'm not in any way excusing the burning of government establishments and, you know, INEC officers, you know, killing police officers and all of the things that are happening there. Of course, you know that when there are agitations or tensions, there are also criminal activities that can happen, you know, besides it. But how do you think that the federal government should respond to the issue of, you know, the Southeast and the tensions? Let's even take out Nandikandu, who is one person out of the equation and look at the East's southeastern problem and why we're here, why there is even room for Nandikandu to emerge in the first instance. So, I mean, first and foremost, the federal government would need to look at massive, that first and foremost, the intent of infrastructure development, the slant in lack of infrastructure development in the Southeast is one area that needs to be addressed. Number one, but very, very key. Let me know, let us not move that aside. There's been this psychological, this mental burden right from the time of the civil war that has always been on the mind, on the side of the ordinary, even my people crossing, maybe not us, maybe unspoken, but there's always been there. The federal government needs to find a way to tackle that. I mean, a lot of people speak about other solutions to these things, political solutions without talking about that. I mean, how do you make an average human mind, you know, forget, so to speak, what he terms as injustice, you know, to their race for something that they feel that should never happen in the first place and agitation, they felt that we should have allowed, we should have not allowed to achieve.  That's the mental and psychological burden on them. You need to begin to tackle that, to assuage them. How do you do that? You need to engage them. And that's one of the roles that the leaders and the governors should play, disproportionately. It gets to the point where the leaders and the governors need to understand that. I think we lost our connection, but let's go to Ambrose, can you hear me? Thank you. Yes, Mr. Bokeh, so my question is straightforward. The former deputy senate president is seeking that the certain members of the National Assembly come together to propose a plan of sorts that can help the federal government understand the plight of the people. The situation in the southeast is both political and otherwise. But is this political solution, in his words, the answer to the problems that the southeasterners are facing? Again, I asked our other guests the same question. The issue of Nambi Kanu is one. The issue of the southeast is another. And in addressing all of this, is it just a political solution that will suffice? Can you hear me? Oh my goodness, I think we lost that connection, Bokeh.  Yes, I did hear you. Yes, so I mean, that is what I meant by, what I mean by, it's a holistic, it's a comprehensive solution to the problem. It is not just political. It's not just infrastructural. You need to look at that psychological part. That's one of the most difficult parts of it, to make a common evil man forget that so-called injustice. And if I may say, that's one of the reasons why this IPOV in agitation has come to fall. One of the reasons why muscle, which was the first under Rafa Wazuriki, as far back as 2005 to 2011, was one of the reasons why it came tonight in the first place. Even though that one was not as violent as Bokeh currently experienced today, which, quite frankly, is criminal. I mean, any form of violence to me from any sort of agitation is definitely criminal. So those are the crops of the issue. Crops of the issue. So it's not just about infrastructure. You want to build a second Niger bridge that will solve the problem. No, that's not just going to solve the problem. That's just crushing the sources. You want to build the east-west road. You want to build this road. You want to do the Oka road. You want to do the Oni-Cha-Oi road. And you feel that will solve it. Okay, that's good. It starts it. But what about that area where you get to interface with the people to make them understand that you accept and understand that this agitation and this war that was fought at some point in time, you know, it has ended. And you want them to really be one people. You want them to be one Niger. As long as you're not going to interface with them in that kind of manner, then in this sort of agitations and splinter groups will always come up. And that's the way I see from where I come from. The way I'm standing. Well, I want to thank you very much. Unfortunately, our time is moving pretty fast and we have to wrap things up here. Thank you so much for speaking with us. We appreciate it. All right. Well, thank you all for staying with us because time is not on our side. We have to wrap things up. But we recently got wind of the news of one of our very revered guests, Obadiah Meilafia, a former governor of the CBN. And so in honour of him, we bring you this package of all of his appearances on Plus TV Africa. We want to say our hearts and our prayers are with his family. My name is Mary Annakon. Have a good evening. This tragedy is about the lives of our very precious young, the hope of our future. Before we pontificate, let us, for a moment, place ourselves in the shoes of those young people. This is the rainy season. For several weeks, we are staying in the forest. They have no goal. They are lying outside, calm rain, come shine. Cold heat mosquitoes. Come thunder, come storms. With guns pointed at their heads, would press for their lives to be snuffed off at any moment. As you know, five of their colleagues have already been killed. One was buried on Saturday. I saw the television broadcast of the funeral. The parents and the family are heartbroken. So before we pontificate about other people, who to me are very imaginal, their life is not worth the fraction of the lives of these young people. I don't know how people bring that. What is the definition of a bad man? I hope I don't have to bring a dictionary and open it to you. And then say, look, my friend, this is the definition of a bandit, according to this bandit dictionary. A bandit is a robber or a thief. My worry as well is that going by the history of some of these kinds of funds, you would be surprised that it is the rich and the elites that end up having access instead of ordinary people who really shoot the target of these funds. So, you know, I'm going to make the best of our systems. Nigeria in 2017 overtook India as the world capital of poverty. So we are having very serious problems. There has been a massive fall in foreign reserves from a peak of about $60 billion to today around $33 billion, $34 billion. And not only that, there's been a massive fall in the value of the Naira from about $160 Naira to the dollar in 2014 to now almost $548 Naira to the dollar is an extraordinary fall of almost 200%. I mean, it's terrible. You know, the presidency is the highest majesty of the federal republic of Nigeria. And as they say about the papacy, any cardinal who badly was to become pope should never be appointed to that position because his motives must be very questionable. If he loves it so much, because being pope should be something that should be held in great awe and people should not have an inordinate ambition for it. By going four times glass, you know, wanting to be president, some people say, okay, they get him about the benefit of the doubt. But from the very beginning, people say, no, no, this is very bad news.


and extract all the knowledge, and I'm here with Mark Finnerin, who runs the mentor program at SAP, SAP Labs. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, John. So, now you guys are no stranger to producing media. You have podcasts, you have all kinds of stuff. You guys wear the rugby jersey, you're known as those mentors, those gunslinging tech guys out there. Great personality, great group of guys, been very impressed over the years watching you grow that organization. They're all cool guys, so tell us what's going on. I know you're always busy, so thanks for dropping in. Give us the update on what the latest patches mean, the new buttons, what the mentors are doing, and what's the highlights. Yeah, thanks for having me. The latest, greatest, you're talking about the batches. I mean, for the people that don't know the SAP mentors, they are the top community influencers of SAP. They know SAP inside and out, and all on the ground floor. They're good communicators, and they have proven community spirit. So what they often do is bring the local community together in SAP inside tracks. And the passion comes across like, as you can see here, we have a new batch on my sub-mentor shirt. Yeah. For people that don't know. They put their Twitter handle. Own Twitter handle on the bag. And that is certification five. So certification five is a group of the mentors. It's like the Navy SEALs of SAP.  So they formed their own group and said, hey, certification at SAP should be improved. So they wrote on their own time a 50-page white paper around certification and brought that back to SAP. And one of the outcomes of that is that there was a certification group founded that met this time for the first time here at Sapphire for a meeting where customers, partners, and SAP education came together to talk about how can we bring greater value through certification. And so that is one of the successes of them. And so they themselves created the batch. Yeah, it's a great team where I just tweeted, you guys are amazing. I'm really impressed. But tell us what, I know you're always busy because last year we tried to get some time. We only saw each other at some of the events when we were in the hallway. So tell us what's happening. What have you done this week? What is the coolest thing you've done? I think the coolest thing. Or a couple of cool things. Couple of cool things. Actually, Thurston Franz in Germany who unfortunately can't be here, he used the river application and developed an Android app which is called SAP Mental Outreach. So for people that don't know the mentors and want to find out who they are and who is in the special area. So he created an Android app where you can search for mentors, where you can find them. And the cool thing is that he did it for Android and then others helped him to put it out on the iPhone, at least as a web app, which is running on the iPad now too. And so this is now available on Cutting Edge Technology River is not even, is there and we are using that. And it proves the point of what the mentors are doing is not only giving good feedback, but they roll up their sleeves and create stuff. They develop stuff. Where do people get some information? Obviously the Eco Hub, everyone says go to the Eco Hub. Is there another website or is there a specific link or URL? Just go to your Twitter handle. Sub Mentors is the Twitter handle, Sub Mentors, or search for Sub Mentors or submentors.sap.com. Sub? Sub Mentors. SAP, SAP. SAP Mentors. SAP Mentors, not sub. Okay, sounds like sub, get the accent. Sorry. What else, what are the cool things have you done? Obviously there's a lot of events, social events. Last night the CEOs were at the influencer dinner, that was cool. One thing that we do every evening, one half an hour before the show closes, the show for closes, we do a daily wrap up. We come together at the ASARC lounge today at five and the mentors come together and talk about, hey, what was the learning, what are the things that others should check out and talk about what is going on. And I think that is really where you can experience the expertise of the mentors. The curation, there's some great curation, you guys are out scouring the landscape. Exactly. I like the cube here, but manually out there, collecting all the data. What is the data telling you?  I mean, just off the cuff, what are you feeling? What are the things that are emerging for you that you can share with folks real quick out there? Kind of bumper sticker. I think the vibe is really high. People are really positive about HANA and in memory and all the things that are happening. Also, many of the mentors are in the mobile space and lots of things are happening there. And I really think also that it's another proof of that the sub mentors as a group, to create a group of your top community influencers and bring them together with the executives, they're going to meet with Hassad this afternoon and if the schedule isn't totally off because the keynote went longer. Why did the keynote go long? Was there, I saw a lot of stuff on Twitter, was it because he was just bow guarding the microphone or was there actually a schedule slip in technology? Did it not keep up in time? No, I think that Vishal already got very excited and told lots of stories because of all the great customers' stories. So he was a microphone hog. He was hogging the microphone. Well, and Hassad, of course, is also passionate about everything. It was really cool. I mean, I have no problem with the schedule shift. I'm not saying it affects everybody, but you get the two horses up there talking about the tech and there's some two of the big players up there on the tech side. You had the business keynote yesterday with Vishnabe and McDermott, update, blah, blah, blah. And now you got the big guns. Yeah, and I thought it was really, really powerful to have all these customers that are using it already and saying, look, I'm running SAP and this is how it helps me and so that was cool. All right, so we're here with Mark Vinneran, the mentor. You run the mentor program? Are you charged with the mentor program? Yes, it's my idea actually. I always forget your official, it was your idea. You're the founder of the mentor program. I knew that, I always forget what titles, but it's been a great success. I've watched it grow up from the beginning. I remember when you started it, it is a fantastic group of people. They're mentors, like they say, but they're also out scouting the landscape. They're like a human search engine to me. They're a group, they're well-formed, good guys, like to have a lot of fun and work hard.  They like to share, they like to engage. Yeah, the special forces of SAP.  That's right, mentor magic. All right, well thanks for coming in theCUBE and we'll look forward to seeing you later tonight and next year. Check us out at five o'clock in the ASIC Lounge. ASIC Lounge, if you're here. Thanks for having us. Is there a live stream going to be there? I mean, they do our live streaming over there. Sometimes, let's see whether we can get it going. Okay, great to see you. Thanks for coming inside theCUBE. This is...