#EndSARS and the structural basis of police brutality in Nigeria
Scores of thousands of young people took to the streets across Nigeria in October 2020, to protest police brutality. Their primary demand was for government to end the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), an elite and particularly vicious unit of the Nigeria Police Force. This mass movement was thus defined as EndSARS. It was sparked when the video of a young man who was allegedly killed by SARS operatives in Ughelli, a small city in the Niger Delta region went viral on 3 rd October. There were over twenty-eight million tweets and retweets of the video and calls for protest within three days. In Ughelli and neighbouring towns there were immediate spontaneous actions by aggrieved youth. By 8 th October, hundreds of protesters set up camp in front of the Lagos State House of Assembly in Nigeria’s most populous city and its commercial hub as well as in the city centre of Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory. Within a few days, these numbers had increased to thousands and demonstration