Baba Aye's

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...

Scores of thousands of young people took over dozens of cities and towns in Nigeria for two weeks. This rebellion, with the slogan and hashtag #EndSARS was sparked by the reported killing of a young man by the special anti-robbery squad (SARS), in Ughelli, a town in the Niger delta region on 3 rd October. With each passing day, the supposedly “leaderless” movement waxed stronger. And while #EndSARS remained the primary and binding demand, calls for more radical measures to #EndInjustice increasingly gained support within the ranks of protesters. The regime’s efforts to break the movement with guile and attacks by its hired hands failed. In desperation, it called in the troops on 20 th October to smash the major demonstrations in Lagos, the commercial capital. According to Amnesty International “at least 12 peaceful protesters” were killed in the two major protests that day alone. The figures are probably much higher. According to protesters, soldiers carted away dozens of bodies....

Angry youths took over the streets in cities and towns across Nigeria in October, calling for disbandment of the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigeria Police Force, whose operatives were trained and supplied equipment by the British government from 2016 to 2020. The largely peaceful protests were drowned in blood on Tuesday 20th October. In the wake of the massacre, there were violent clashes with scores of police stations torched, several jailbreaks and a festival of ‘looting’. The restoration of law and order in the dying days of the month might however not translate into a restoration of the pre-EndSARS normality in the country. SARS was established in 1992. Its plainclothes operatives were meant to infiltrate robbery gangs to nip their operations in the bud. By the turn of the century they started apprehending online scammers as cybercrime became common.  Young men with tattoos or dreadlocks automatically became ‘419’ (online scam) suspects. Having an iPhon...