an essay on police brutality in nigeria

Police Brutality in Nigeria and the #EndSARS Movement

Daniel Chibuike was a 20-year-old aspiring musician when he was shot dead on October 5, 2020 by police officers serving in the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigerian Police Force. Chibuike’s death was the last straw for Nigeria’s youth, who had already taken to the streets in 2017 to demand the abolishment of SARS. The Nigerian government, in a desperate attempt to calm down the protesters, promised in 2017 that the authority of SARS units would be significantly reduced, but this promise remained unkept, with SARS units continuing their violent and unlawful practices towards young adults in Nigeria. At first glance, the controversy surrounding SARS appears to be an issue of police brutality that many suffer from in countries around the world, and it certainly is. Yet, the brutality of SARS is disproportionately aimed at young males who choose to wear certain types of clothes, drive certain types of cars, and use a particular brand of smartphone. So, the cruel practices of SARS appear to be combined with social profiling that is based on the personal choices of young adults. Using a laptop, owning the newest iPhone, driving a brand-new sports car or wearing ripped jeans are all reasons why a Nigerian young adult can be detained by SARS units. Often, those who “fit the description” are quickly accused of being thieves, with SARS units assuming that young adults must have stolen the cars they drive and the smartphones they use. Despite the absurdity of SARS’ logic, practices like this have led to countless unlawful arrests of young people in Nigeria. Undoubtedly, the central theme of the issue is police brutality, but this brutality seems to be fueled by the major generational and ideological gap that exists in Nigerian society.

SARS and Human Rights

Since its establishment in 1992, SARS has been plagued by a worrisome human rights record. According to witness accounts documented by Amnesty International, SARS routinely tortured its detainees, with many detainees experiencing harsh beatings and serious death threats. Moreover, SARS has been found to have multiple officers who have been engaging in stealing money, property or forcing detainees to pay hefty bribes before freeing them—ironic for a division with the goal of preventing robbery. More importantly, individuals detained by SARS who suffer from these atrocities are often never charged in court, which means that people who are completely innocent are physically tortured and eventually left with psychological injuries. Regardless, whether a detainee is guilty or not should not be a factor in deciding who to torture as all forms of torture are illegal in Nigeria, whether someone is guilty or not guilty of a crime. Despite their atrocities, a total of zero SARS officers have been prosecuted since 2017, which, considering the extensive evidence of torture, is shocking. Clearly, SARS has enjoyed freedom in how they choose to treat detainees and received protection from the government and the courts even though their practices are against Nigerian law.

Chibuike’s death sparked the Nigerian youth to once again take it to the streets in October 2020. This time around, the protests spread to social media, with the #EndSARS hashtag on Twitter becoming the center of expression of displeasure with SARS. Protests took place not only in Nigeria, but also in the United States , the United Kingdom and Canada . Though protests were not met with force abroad, protesters in Nigeria faced resistance from the government, the police force and the army. Nigerian soldiers were seen opening fire during the protests, leaving more than a dozen protesters injured and one dead. Meanwhile, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari remained mostly silent. Buhari’s administration had promised multiple times over the years that appropriate action would be taken against SARS, with no sufficient result ever achieved.

President Buhari's "Lazy Nigerian Youths"

While the main reason behind Buhari’s inertia toward the protests might appear to be the desire to hold his police force together, there are other reasons why the cries of the Nigerian youth have not been heard. Back on April 18, 2018, Buhari referred to Nigerian youth as “lazy” during his address to the Commonwealth Business Forum in the United Kingdom. Back then, Buhari’s description led young people in Nigeria to criticize him on Twitter with the hashtag #LazyNigerianYouths. At the age of 78, Buhari has an extensive military background, a successful coup through which he came to power in 1983, and a military-led nationwide campaign called “War Against Indiscipline” under his belt. Putting Buhari’s description of Nigerian youth and his background together, it becomes clearer why the demands of young people in Nigeria to abolish SARS were not met. The generational and ideological gap between those who are running the country and those who demand change has evidently resulted in an overall lack of empathy in Nigeria. When leaders cannot—or are not willing to—understand the problems faced by a specific group of people in the country, protests and movements like #EndSARS start to occur. While focusing only on Buhari’s approach, or lack thereof, to the issue of SARS’ brutality would be a very voluntarist approach, it is at least apparent that the constant inertia of his administration has only led to further social divide and bloodshed.

The generational and ideological gap in Nigeria also stems from the social structure of the country. Almost half of the nation is Muslim and the other half is Christian. Muslims predominantly live in the Northern regions of the country, adding a geographical aspect to the religious divide. More than 250 ethnic groups are present in Nigeria, many of whose exact population sizes are unknown due to the controversies surrounding the censuses of Nigeria. In the past, most ethnic groups have claimed that the censuses are rigged to misrepresent the actual population sizes so that the political representation granted to each group is altered. The apparent social divide between people from different backgrounds is further enhanced by the divide between people of different ages. As Nigeria experienced a population boom in the late twentieth century, it currently stands as the most populous country in Africa, with the median age in the country being approximately 18. Young adults in Nigeria are frustrated with the disconnect between them and the government, since many of their leaders are “ three or four times their age .” Young Nigerians are also discouraged by rising unemployment and poverty. As it stands, young people in Nigeria have little to no say in how they and their country are governed. When their alienation by the government is combined with unlawful and inhumane policing practices, Nigerian youth struggle to feel welcome in their own country. Initiating movements like #EndSARS is often one of the only effective ways of making their voices heard.

Can Nigerian Youth Rebuild Trust in their Government?

On October 11, 2020, Nigerian Police Force announced that SARS would be dissolved . Because the government had made the same promise multiple times before, many of the protesters were not convinced; therefore, protests continued in most states in Nigeria. In Lagos, counter-protests were staged where the #EndSARS supporters were attacked by armed suspects. About a week later, in Lekki, Lagos, the army opened fire on unarmed #EndSARS protesters, leaving at least a dozen protesters dead and many more wounded. These events show that years of displeasure and oppression cannot simply be erased by one day deciding to meet the demands of those who have been systematically persecuted for years. Young adults like Chibuike have lost their lives, many others have been left wounded or psychologically injured. In any case, #EndSARS seems to have come a long way in achieving their goal, but the government is still under watch by Nigerian youth, and there is pressure on Buhari and his administration to finally keep their promise. Shortly after the news of the dissolution of SARS, the Nigerian Police Force announced that SWAT would now carry out the duties of SARS, and that there would be “extensive reforms” within the police force. This led Nigerians to alter their message slightly and adopt #EndSWAT on Twitter. Whether or not SWAT will treat young adults better or will reforms be made remains to be seen, but the majority of the protesters are staying on alert. After years of persecution and lack of dialogue with the government, it will be a lengthy process for the Nigerian youth to rebuild trust in the law enforcement.

#EndSARS has been and continues to be a movement that demonstrates the stark contrast between different generations and ideologies in Nigeria. On one side, there is Nigerian youth that want to live as they desire and demand change. On the other side, there is Buhari, a powerful military figure with right-wing policies, and his administration trying to run an already divided nation. While it may be hard to predict whether the promises made by the government will be kept, #EndSARS has been a source of inspiration for young adults across the world who want humane policies and administrations that champion peace and equality.

Uluç Kadıoğlu

Uluç has formerly served as Associate Editor, Senior Editor, and Copy Editing Chair at the HIR. At Harvard, he studies Government and Neuroscience with a language citation in Spanish.

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Harvard Human Rights Journal

#EndSARS: The Movement Against Police Brutality in Nigeria

November 12, 2020 By

Allwell Uwazuruike [*]

Since the start of October, demonstrators in the thousands have thronged Nigerian cities, calling for an end to police brutality in the country and demanding justice for victims of police violence and extrajudicial killings. The #EndSARS protests have elicited global sympathy and support, with world leaders such as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeting in support. Other political figures and celebrities have also used the hashtag or referenced the movement to either directly support the protests or demand an end to the government crackdown on protestors. These include former United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. president-elect Joe Biden, boxing heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua, Arsenal footballer Mesut Ozil, and American rapper Kanye West. For several days in October, the hashtag #EndSARS was the number one trending topic on global Twitter with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey launching a special emoji for the movement. [1]

What is #EndSARS?

#EndSARS started as a call for the disbandment of Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit of the Nigerian Police Force that has earned notoriety for its brutality and human rights violations. The hashtag was first used in 2018 to raise awareness of allegations of violence and exploitation by SARS officials. [2] The government announced structural changes to SARS, but the alleged human rights violations and exploitation continued. In October 2020, reports of an unprovoked shooting of a boy in the streets of Delta State by SARS operatives were shared on social media. [3] Although the Nigerian Police denied the shooting in this particular case, it was not enough to quell public anger as more videos of police shootings were shared across social media platforms. Celebrities and activists rallied for support on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and, in a matter of days, protesters lined the streets of Lagos and Abuja demanding an end to SARS. Pressured by the publicity that the protests had generated, the Nigerian government swiftly announced the disbandment of SARS. This move, however, was not enough to appease the protesters in light of similar pronouncements made previously by the government. For instance, in December 2017, the Inspector General of Police (IGP) announced that SARS had been banned from conducting stop and search operations following several reports of harassment. This ban was publicly re-announced by the IGP in 2018 and 2020, reflecting the ineffectiveness of previous orders. Similarly, in 2018, Nigeria’s acting president announced an overhaul of SARS, stating that the National Human Rights Commission would investigate cases of abuse. This statement was followed shortly by the announcement of a centralised FSARS (Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad) which would come under the supervision of the Inspector General of Police as opposed to the previous version which was under state Commissioners of Police. Mere weeks later, the IGP announced the disbandment of FSARS, stating that the unit would go back to being decentralized and under the command of state commissioners. [4] In light of past practices and disappointments, protestors added to their list of demands, calling for compensation of victims of SARS brutality, retraining of police officers, and trials of indicted SARS officials.

Human Rights Violations by SARS

SARS was created in 1992 as a response to violent crime, particularly armed robbery. However, the police unit has come to be known for its high-handed tactics and gross violations of human rights. [5] Transgressions cut across a range of human rights including the right to life, right to freedom from torture, right to a fair trial, right to privacy, and freedom of assembly, all of which are rights protected by the Nigerian constitution.

1. Right to Life

Violations of the right to life have come in various forms such as extrajudicial killings, shooting of protesters, and other random, unprovoked killings. The Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) found in a 2010 report that extrajudicial executions are a routine feature of policing in Nigeria. [6] Human Rights Watch estimates that over 10,000 people were killed by the Nigerian police in the eight years spanning 2000 through 2007. [7] The head of the Enugu State division of SARS allegedly told a researcher of the Network on Police Reform in Nigeria that he ordered the extrajudicial executions of only persons whom he knew to be guilty. [8]

These killings do not always happen secretly, hidden away in police cells and dungeons. In August 2019, videos surfaced showing men of the Nigerian police force executing arrested suspects in the streets of Lagos. [9] The suspects were alleged to belong to a criminal ring that disguised themselves as phone buyers to lure and rob unsuspecting victims. The police arrested two of the suspects, only to have their summary execution recorded shortly after. Amateur clips of the police shooting the victims in the full glare of the public went viral. In reaction, the Nigerian police announced the arrest of the officers involved. [10]

2. Freedom from torture

SARS personnel have also been known to routinely torture suspects for “confessions.” The OSJI report states that the practice is so common that many police stations have a person on staff who oversees the torture of detainees and a room set aside for the practice; police personnel even have their own slang for various methods of torture. [11] Amnesty International has also documented cases of torture, most of which emanate from detainees in SARS custody. [12] The police use various forms of brutality, including sexual violence, against detainees and suspects. [13] Some former detainees report having been bound and suspended mid-air in painful positions, kicked and beaten with machetes, gun butts, boots, fists, electrical wires, animal hides, and other instruments. [14] Others describe being shot in limbs, assaulted by police officers while in custody, suffering multiple fractures, or being forced to perform painful calisthenics. Sex workers in particular report being rounded up by the police to be raped. [15] Acknowledging the routine nature of sexual violence by police, one police officer referred to it simply as a “fringe benefit” of certain patrols. [16]

In February 2020, BBC Africa published a damning documentary on the use of torture techniques by Nigerian security forces. [17] The video focused on the wide and uniform use of a technique known as Tabay. The technique involves binding detainees in a crude and painful fashion: the arms are forced back and tied at the elbows, cutting circulation to the hands and immobilising the victim. The feet are then tied back, arching the spine and contorting the body into a triangle. Victims can be suspended, forcing the full weight of the body unto the arms. A heavy block, usually wood or concrete, is often placed on the victim’s back to intensify the pain. The documentary implicated several arms of the Nigerian security forces including the Nigerian Army, the Nigerian Mobile Police, the Nigerian Air Force, the Nigerian Security and Civil Defense Corps and, of course, the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad. In the documentary, a man identified as a Nigerian police officer gives a harrowing account of the use of Tabay by SARS: “They call it ‘Hawan Keke’ (bicycle ride). I have witnessed it often. The room is dark. Your hands are tied up from behind. If it is not tight enough, the elbows are tied in a way that stops the blood from circulating. Your legs are tied to a chair so you cannot move. Then they torture you in whatever way they want [either by beating or electrocution] … wherever you go in Nigeria, if there’s a SARS office in that state, then they have that kind of room.”

3. Right to Liberty

SARS, as well as other units of the Nigerian Police, routinely lock up suspects, sometimes for years, without trial. The average length of pre-trial detention in Nigeria is three years and ten months. [18] Such prolonged detentions are usually done through the use of a “holding charge,” whereby the police bring a charge against an accused before a lower court lacking jurisdiction to try the offence, pending advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Nigerian Court has held this practice to be unconstitutional, though the practice persists. [19]

4. Right to privacy and family life

SARS personnel, ironically hired to tackle violent crimes, have recently assumed the mandate of fishing out so-called “Yahoo boys” (internet fraudsters). This they do by stopping mainly young men in the streets and demanding to go through their phones. Mere ownership of an iPhone is enough to make one a suspect. Victims have reported being arrested for owning iPhones and laptops or for refusing to grant the police access to their phones. [20]

The Government’s Response

In response to the #EndSARS protests, the government swiftly announced that it was disbanding SARS and replacing it with a new Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team. This announcement further provoked protestors who were concerned that SARS personnel would simply be drafted into the new SWAT team. Rather than ending the protests, the announcement intensified public demonstrations across several states in Nigeria. On October 20, 2020, the Nigerian government cracked down on the protesters. The crackdown was preceded by the declaration of curfews in nine states across the country. One of these states was Lagos, the commercial hub of Nigeria. At nightfall, the Nigerian army opened fire on peaceful protesters at Lekki Toll Gate, Lagos, the symbolic centre of the protest. Videos of soldiers shooting and protesters trying to revive fallen compatriots were broadcast on Instagram Live and viewed in real time by hundreds of thousands. Forty-nine persons were reported to have died in clashes across the country. [21]

Immediate aftermath

The police crackdown was followed by riots in Lagos with government structures razed and shops looted. [22] The violence and looting soon spread to other parts of the country, causing several states to declare curfews. Media outlets reported that “hoodlums” had hijacked the protests and were looting stores and malls. [23] Several warehouses across the country housing COVID-19 relief materials were raided. [24] The looting of stores for food again brought to the forefront the economic plight of many Nigerians—in 2018, Nigeria was reported to have overtaken India as the poverty capital of the world with an estimated 90 million people (about 50% of the population) living in extreme poverty, i.e. on less than $1.90 a day. [25] Critics faulted the government for simply storing relief materials and failing to distribute them to the needy. [26]

A Human Rights Solution

#EndSARS has morphed from a protest against police brutality to a movement for social justice and government reforms. Indeed, the protests have been described as a “vector” for broader dissatisfaction with Nigeria’s political class. [27] Protests and riots have continued unabated for weeks. The important issue moving forward is how to adequately address the issues raised by the protesters as well as those that have unravelled during the protests. The disbandment of SARS and restitution of victims are necessary starting points. The people, as shown through their dissatisfaction with the mere disbandment of SARS, are calling for more. The government needs to develop a human rights policy approach to addressing these issues. Firstly, there is the need to address the systemic abuse of civil and political rights by the police and other government agencies. The government needs to commence intensive human rights training for all law enforcement officers. Officers should also be regularly appraised on their human rights compliance and erring officers prosecuted. In order to effectively protect the rights to life and freedom from torture, the government must ensure that it treats reports of violence, torture, and extrajudicial killings with the gravity they deserve. Such reports must be duly investigated through transparent means such as public inquiries and inquests, and victims should be adequately compensated. On the right to fair trial, the government must also initiate reforms to ensure that suspects are not detained without trial. The right to privacy can also be better protected by the government taking a clear stand on routine stop and search operations which appear to be an avenue for extortion by the police.

This human rights approach may also be extended to address calls for social justice that have trailed the protests, especially in the aftermath of massive lootings across the country. The Nigerian government can respond to these calls by working to protect basic socioeconomic rights. As things stand, the oil-rich Nigerian state is shielded from any form of judicial accountability by the provision in Chapter II of the country’s constitution which states that socioeconomic rights are mere “objectives” and “directive principles.” [28] Indeed the Nigerian Court of Appeal has interpreted this provision as meaning that socioeconomic rights are not legally enforceable and that the “arbiter” for any breach would be the legislature or the electorate. [29] It has been suggested in the aftermath of the protests that the government prioritise “pro-poor policies” such as investments in education and youth empowerment to engage the country’s teeming youths (aged below 30 years) that account for 70% of the total population. [30] #EndSars was birthed by gross human rights violations and sheer disregard for human life. It is only reasonable that future policies make room for effective human rights protection to address the many problems the campaign has highlighted.

[*] Allwell Uwazuruike, Lecturer in Law, University of Central Lancashire.

[1] Magdalene Larnyoh, Twitter Unveils Emoji in Support of #EndSARS Protests, Business Insider Africa (Oct. 16, 2020), https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/lifestyle/twitter-unveils-emoji-in-support-of-endsars-protests/7emvggn .

[2] End Swat: Nigerians Reject Police Unit Replacing Hated Sars , BBC News (Oct. 14, 2020), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-54531449 .

[3] End Sars: How Nigeria’s Anti-police Brutality Protests went Global , BBC News (Oct. 16, 2020), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-54575219 .

[4] See Jacob Olatunji et al., For Fourth Time in Four Years IGPs Ban SARS, Daily Tribune (Oct. 5, 2020), https://tribuneonlineng.com/for-fourth-time-in-4-years-igps-ban-sars ; Nigeria: Authorities Repeatedly Failing to Tackle Impunity Enjoyed by Notorious SARS Police Unit, Amnesty International (Oct. 6, 2020), https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/10/nigeria-authorities-repeatedly-failing-to-tackle-impunity-enjoyed-by-notorious-sars-police-unit/ .

[5] See Criminal Force: Torture, Abuse, and Extrajudicial Killings by the Nigerian Police Force , Open Society Justice Initiative (2010), https://www.justiceinitiative.org/uploads/8063279c-2fe8-48d4-8a17-54be8ee90c9d/criminal-force-20100519.pdf ; ‘You Have Signed Your Death Warrant’: Torture and Other Ill Treatment by Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), Amnesty International (2016), https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR4448682016ENGLISH.PDF .

[6] Open Society Justice Initiative, supra note 5.

[7] Nigeria: Investigate Widespread Killings by Police , Human Rights Watch (Nov. 18, 2007), https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/11/18/nigeria-investigate-widespread-killings-police .

[8] Open Society Justice Initiative, s upra note 5, at 22.

[9] Samson Folarin, Policemen Shoot Dead Suspected Phone Thieves in Lagos, PUNCH (Aug. 20, 2019),

https://punchng.com/sars-operatives-shoot-dead-suspected-phone-thieves-in-lagos/ .

[11] Open Society Justice Initiative, s upra note 5, at 12.

[12] Amnesty International, supra note 5.

[15] Abraham Achirga, Nigerian Police Accused of Abusing Prostitution Suspects , Reuters (May 6, 2019) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nigeria-police-women-idUSKCN1SC1KD .

[16] Open Society Justice Initiative, supra note 5, at 22.

[17] BBC News Africa, The Torture Virus: Tabay ‘Rampant’ Among Nigeria’s Security Forces – BBC Africa Eye Documentary , YouTube (Feb. 9, 2020), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzqP7z62ilU&t=26s&bpctr=1603329234 .

[18] Open Society Justice Initiative, supra note 5, at 7.

[19] See Shagari v. Commissioner of Police [2007] 5 NWLR 275.

[20] Peace Hyde, Nigeria Dissolves SARS But The Youth Demand Justice , Forbes Africa (Oct. 13, 2020) https://www.forbesafrica.com/current-affairs/2020/10/13/nigeria-dissolves-sars-but-the-youth-demand-justice/ .

[21] Enola Akinkuotu et al, Black Tuesday: 49 killed as protests turn bloody , PUNCH (Oct. 21, 2020) https://punchng.com/black-tuesday-49-killed-as-protests-turn-bloody/ .

[22] Timileyin Omilana, ‘I pretended I was dead’: Chaos and violence grip Lagos as End Sars protestors continue to defy curfew , The Independent (Oct. 23, 2020) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/nigeria-protests-end-sars-lagos-riot-looting-b1228242.html .

[23] Taiwo-Hassan Adebayo, Looting Across Nigeria as Arsonists, Hoodlums, Thieves, Take Control , Premium Times (Oct. 25, 2020) https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/422994-looting-across-nigeria-as-arsonists-hoodlums-thieves-take-control.html .

[24] #ENDSARS: Looting Spree in Nine States , Vanguard (Oct. 25, 2020) https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/10/endsars-looting-spree-in-nine-states/ .

[25] Bukola Adebayo, Nigeria Overtakes India in Extreme Poverty Ranking , CNN (June 26, 2018) https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/26/africa/nigeria-overtakes-india-extreme-poverty-intl/index.html .

[26] Olorunwa Lawal, SERAP Asks ICPC to Probe Alleged Hoarding of COVID-19 Palliatives in Nigeria , News Central (Oct. 26, 2020) https://newscentral.africa/serap-asks-icpc-to-probe-alleged-hoarding-of-covid-19-palliatives-in-nigeria/ .

[27] Chris Olaoluwa Ogunmodede, How the #EndSars Movement Upended Politics as Usual in Nigeria , World Politics Review (Oct. 28, 2020) https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/29170/how-the-endsars-movement-upended-nigerian-politics .

[28] Constitution of Nigeria (1999).

[29] Okogie v. Attorney General Lagos State [1981] 2 NCLR 337, 350.

[30] Funke Fayehun and Uche Isiugo-Abanihe, #EndSARS: How Nigeria can Tap into its Youthful Population , The Conversation (Oct. 25, 2020) https://theconversation.com/endsars-how-nigeria-can-tap-into-its-youthful-population-148319 .

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Protestors holding signs "#endSARS Brutality Killings Robbery

Police Brutality and the #EndSARS Movement in Nigeria

Spring/summer 2021.

By Oluwole Ojewale

In Nigeria, our policing institution is rooted in command and control, a model handed over to us by our colonial masters, the Western countries that came to colonize Africa. Rather than having a policing system that renders service to the general public, we have a policing system that was established to serve and carry out the directives of the governing elites. Over the span of 60 years, this policing system has not really reformed itself. It still operates based on the template of the Nigeria Police Act that was put in place in 1943. The establishment of the defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigeria Police Force drew from the command and control template of the 1943 Police Act. This unit was originally put in place to combat armed robbery, but over the years, it has become an instrument of subjugation and harassment and intimidation, particularly against the youth. The federal government has claimed that they will reform the police, and SARS in particular, but little has changed.

In October 2020, Nigerian youth took to the streets to protest against police brutality in what became the #EndSARS movement. This movement resonated across the world, in the United States of America, in Europe, and in Asia, driven by Nigerians in the diaspora. The #EndSARS movement emerged not only in response to police brutality. It arose from a combination of factors. Youths have been largely marginalized and politically excluded. While they can vote, they are rarely appointed to important political positions. These youths see the governance challenges in Nigeria and want to create change.

The protest calling for the ban of SARS extended beyond issues of human rights violations by the police. It was a larger call for improvement in governance in Nigeria. With the wave of protests against the police, people are saying: We have had enough of this maladministration. We have had enough of this poor governance from the state. And they are actually protesting against the state. Whenever citizens can no longer stand issues of police brutality, what they are saying, in effect, is Enough of this bad governance . We’ve seen this in movements across the world that have risen against police brutality—they are actually protesting against the state. The police institution is just a precursor to that. The police force is the symbol of state authority. The primary responsibility of government is maintenance of law and order, and the police is the institution tasked with the enforcement of law and order in countries around the world.

What police brutality means to an average American citizen, though, is different from what it means to an average African. In the United States, police brutality and subjugation goes along racial lines of Black and white. But in Africa, it’s a matter of a Black police officer oppressing a fellow Black African in Africa. If a Black American citizen is protesting against police brutality in the United States, that protest is undergirded by how the right-wing element, white supremacists, are using policing as a tool to subjugate Black Americans.

In Nigeria, we have Black police officers who have been trained in the ethos and philosophy of colonial policing, which was rooted in subjugation and wanton human rights abuses. After 60 years of independence, we have not been able to shed the legacies of the policing institution, the code of conduct, the philosophy that the colonial masters who came to Africa handed to us. We still have the police institutions that our colonizers built on this culture of subjugation, and these institutions have not reflected the required police reforms that we want to see.

In Nigeria, then, we experience police brutality. But this scourge does not go along racial lines, as it does in the United States. Instead, it is a case of politicians who were elected by community people, by citizens who get into power and then employ police officers who go about oppressing the general public. This becomes a cycle of violence: an average Black person in Nigeria sees the act of wearing a police uniform, holding a gun, holding a baton, and all these other instruments that the police use in carrying out their law enforcement duty as a tool of oppression against a fellow Black person.

The militarization of the police has extended across all facets of governance and facets of our human lives to the extent that elections, which are supposed to be civil affairs, have become so militarized that whenever any election is held, the military services are deployed. All of the relevant law enforcement institutions are also deployed. And as elections degenerate into war, ammunition is deployed just for the basic exercise of franchise, which is the right to vote and to be voted for.

This also extends to public life for politicians. Poor communities in Nigeria are poorly policed. All politicians move around with retinues of police officers who are protecting them and their families. Politicians feel that anywhere they go, they must show that they have the police power to subjugate all other members of the community—wherever they go, they must show that they are in charge. The true taste of power, for a politician, is the ability to control and command the police. The institution of policing has itself become the tool of politicians who want to win elections and subvert the electoral process. In order to access and sustain political power, a person must be in charge of the police. The police force thus becomes an instrument for rigging elections, fomenting violence during the election, and perpetrating all sorts of atrocities.

The global militarization of the police is a fear that plagues every nation. But there is a clear difference between what an American citizen is experiencing and what we experience in Africa. In the United States, policing is enmeshed with white supremacy, whereas in Nigeria or in any other African country, it is a matter of fellow Black African police officers using the tool of the policing institution to oppress their fellow Black people. We must be cognizant of the peculiarities of our cultural and historical contexts in addressing police reform if we are to position the police as a service-oriented agency rather than as a military institution.

This is an edited version of a presentation delivered at the Global Militarization of Police panel at the Fifth Annual Black Religion, Spirituality, and Culture Conference on February 12, 2021.

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Oluwole Ojewale is a scholar and program management expert at the Institute for Security Studies. His research and advocacy campaigns span transnational organized crime, election policing, security governance, and violent conflict in West and Central Africa. His most recent book (with Adegbola Ojo) is Urbanisation and Crime in Nigeria (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019).

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Thanks for your scholarly thoughts. Policing shouldn’t be used as tool for oppression as we see in Africa especially Nigeria. Virtually, you can’t see a day without reporting a police brutality. The authoritarian governments given them unnecessary power to dealt with opposition/ or voices criticised the action and inaction of governments. If those in power could see themselves as servant and not ruler, there will be a better police institution to maintain law and order without brutality.

Protests and blood on the streets: repressive state, police brutality and #EndSARS protest in Nigeria

Victor chidubem iwuoha.

1 Department of Political Science, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

Ernest Toochi Aniche

2 Department of Political Science, Federal University Otuoke, Otuoke, Bayelsa State Nigeria

This article investigates how the Nigerian state is implicated in police brutality and clampdown on the #EndSARS protesters and its implications for democracy, development and national security. The article used primary data comprising 38 telephone interviews, 19,609 Facebook posts/reposts and 24,799 Twitter tweets/retweets, complementing it with a wide range of secondary data. From the analyses of data, it shows there is an obvious mutual trust deficit between government and the citizens. This is supported by one-third of the 36 states in Nigeria which witnessed sporadic #EndSARS protests and destruction of government establishments. Use of heavy firearms against unarmed protesters escalated the conflict from civil disobedience to a demand to a change of government. Thus, establishment of institutional mechanisms and disciplinary measures that control the excesses of security agents during civil protests is imperative to protect civil and human rights of protesters.

Introduction

The Nigeria Police Force (NPF) is the principal law enforcement agency in Nigeria (see Section 214 of the 1999 Constitution). The Force has staff deployment across the 36 states of the country and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). The command and control of the NPF is under the Inspector General of Police in accordance with Section 215(2) of the 1999 Constitution, and Section 6 of the Police Act, 1990. It is predicated on the regimental nature of the Force and conducted through the chain of Command along the Force badges of ranks The major duties of the NPF are prevention and detection of crime, apprehension of offenders, preservation of law and order and protection of lives and property (Nigerian Police Force, 2021 ).

The Force is divided into 12 operational Zonal Commands (usually comprising between two and four State Commands) and 37 State Commands including the FCT (usually comprising Area Commands which further comprises Divisions). While the zone is headed by an Assistant Inspector General of Police, the State Command is headed by a Commissioner of Police, the Area Command by an Assistant Commissioner of Police and the Division by a any officer in the Superintendent cadre (Nigerian Police Force, 2021 ). The Department of Training plans for and coordinates the training, retraining of officers and manpower development of the Force personnel through its 28 training schools and centers across Nigeria.

However, international human rights organisations such as Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have documented numerous cases of police brutality in Nigeria, such as extrajudicial execution, organ harvesting, torture, rape, physical assault, harassment, extortion, excessive use of force, abduction, unlawful arrest, illegal detention, and all forms of human rights abuses (Campbell, 2019 ; Amnesty International, 2020 ; Human Rights Watch, 2000 ). Nigerians have, on many occasions, narrated their brutal experiences in the hands of police officers and other security agents, including the Special Anti-Robery Squad (SARS).

The Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) was a specialized unit of the NPF set up in 1992 to fight all forms of violent crimes, such as armed robbery, kidnapping, banditry, etc. (Nnadozie, 2017 ). It was estbaished as a result of the growing number of robberies and theft which constituted the largest category of crimes in the early 1990s. For instance, crime data increased from 244,354 in 1991 to 289,156 in 1993. The formation of the SARS in 1992 contributed to significant crime reduction in the period from 289,156 in 1993 to 241,091 in 1994, and 167,492 in 1999 (Cleen, 2019 ; Cleen, 2003 , cited in UK Essays 2018 ).

However, over time, SARS began to overstep the bounds of its duties by arresting those who are alleged to be involved in non-violent crimes such as financial and economic fraud, which is under the purvey of the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC). It has also been reported that SARS officers mount illegal roadblocks, conduct unauthorised checks and searches, arrest and detain people without warrant or trial, rape women, and extort young Nigerians for driving exotic cars (Kazeem, 2020 ). In a special report published in June 2020, Amnesty International noted that people in SARS custody were ‘subjected to a variety of methods of torture including hanging, mock execution, beating, punching and kicking, burning with cigarettes, waterboarding, near-asphyxiation with plastic bags, forcing detainees to assume stressful bodily positions and sexual violence’ (Amnesty International, 2020 , n.p.).

The 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria began on October 4, 2020, after a SARS police officer reportedly shot a young Nigerian man in front of the Wetland Hotel in Ughelli, Delta State. The video of the incident trended on social media, leading to nationwide protests within a few days (Abati, 2020 ). Even though #EndSARS began to trend on social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) on October 4, 2020 (as a form of virtual protest), it was not until October 8, 2020 that nationwide street protests began across Nigerian cities, eventually assuming a global dimension as the protest rapidly spread to other cities across the world, including London and New York (Abati, 2020 ; Adeshokan, 2020 ; George, 2020a , b ). Although these protests were taking place simultaneously across all major cities in Nigeria, the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos was considered a major national anchor point and epicentre of the #EndSARS protest.

It is instructive to note that both the Nigerian state and its police force are implicated in police brutality in Nigeria. The Nigeria state established the security forces to primarily protect the interests of the ruling elites (Watts, 2007 ). The state thus became ‘an instrument of private and sectional interests’ (Williams 1976 :43), and could not maintain appropriate conditions for civil rights protection. Essentially, the colonial regime bequeathed the Nigerian state its authoritarian and repressive character (Mkhize and Madumi, 2016 ; Plaut, 2016 ; Kalu, 2018 ). The colonial state in Nigeria lacked legitimacy and set up colonial police because it needed brutal force to enforce rules and orders that would maintain firm control of the local natives. However, the colianl rules have not changed in post-colinal state in Nigeria. The Nigerian state through its coercive authorities such as the military and police force enforce rules and orders that serve the interests of the ruling elites rather than the people. Section 45 (1)(d) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended), for example, required law enforcement officers to subjectively arrest without warrant, confiscate and demolish properties, and obtain information from any person or organisation without any restraint.

The aim of this article is to examine how the Nigerian state is implicated in police brutality and clampdown on the #EndSARS protesters in Nigeria and its implications for democracy, development and national security. It interrogates the mutual trust deficit between the government and citizens in escalating the #EndSARS protests from civil disobedience to a demand to a change of government. Theoretically, our major contribution is to explain why civil protests such as the #EndSARS protests provide an exploitable opportunity for yet increased state brutality and repression rather than broaden the civic space by achieving expected greater civic freedom, political reforms, and good governance.

Literature review

Conceptualising the repressive state in africa.

There has been a long history of police brutality in Nigeria and other African states (Tamuno, 1970 ; Alemika and Chukwuma, 2000 ; Abati, 2020 ). However, Abati ( 2020 ) argues that the prevalence of police brutality in Africa is a function of political leadership failure rather than colonial legacy.

Ihonvbere ( 2003 ) maintains that the post-independent states in Africa serve more as weapons of police brutality, intimidation, murder, crime against humanity, repression and excessive abuse than agents for the protection of the citizens and the facilitation of development. Ake ( 1981 ) sees the state as a specific modality of class domination. The essential feature of the state form of domination is that the system of institutional mechanisms of domination is autonomized and becomes largely independent of the social classes including the hegemonic class. Generally, the salient features of African state are namely; intense ethnic conflict, the single-party system, the high incidence of efficiency norms in political competition, the recurrence of military coups, political repression, and the poor performance at economic development (Ake, 1981 ).

Similarly, Buyse ( 2018 ) observes that the state increasingly shrinks the civic spaces in order to protect the interests of the dominant and ruling class. This is achieved by emboldening and strengthening the powers of the state’s repressive apparatuses, such as the police and the military, to crassly violate human rights and commit crimes against humanity (Buyse, 2018 ; Margulies, 2018 ; Iwuoha, 2020 ). The effect of this is that public distrust of the state and its law enforcement institutions tends to be commonplace (Cole, 1999 ; Malena, 2015 ; Clark, 2016 ).

Theorising the repressive state, shrinking civic spaces, and police brutality in Nigeria The repressive state victimises its citizens by the use of intimidation and open violence. It adopts routine surveillance and the exercise of force to subjugate the masses and abolish the machinery of citizens’ collective organisation in order to instil intense fear among the people (Heywood, 2007 ). Such states impose arbitrary regulations and encourage police brutality and the criminalisation of public gatherings to shrink the civic spaces (Van Kesteren, 2019 ; Ezeibe et al., 2020 ). Although repression is often associated with the authoritarian, repressive dispositions can manifest in both authoritarian and democratic states, especially in low and middle-income countries (Centre for Global Challenges, 2018 ). The repressive state asserts both coercive and ideological modalities to deepen its repressiveness. While the coercive modality includes the military, police and prisons, the ideological apparatus includes the courts and the legislature. The coercive and ideological apparatuses of the state largely employ, respectively, violent and non-violent social orders in order to protect the ruling class and ensure their domination over the masses (Ake, 1981 ; Althusser, 1970 ; Margulies, 2018 ; Aniche, 2018a ; Iwuoha, 2020 ).

After Nigeria’s political independence, the postcolonial institutions of justice, especially the police, retained their colonial character as agents of the state against unionists, students and political opponents (Ake, 1981 ; Cole, 1999 ). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other related charters mean very little to the desperate power elite, who rely on corruption and repression to maintain their hold on political power (Ihonvbere, 2001 ). The state increasingly shrinks the civil spaces in order to protect the interests of the dominant class while simultaneously emboldening and deepening the powers of its repressive apparatuses, such as the police and the military, to crassly violate human rights (Buyse, 2018 ). The thinning and shrinking of the civic spaces involve the restriction of freedom of speech, access to information, association and organisation (Malena, 2015 ).

Although civil and political rights improved in May 1999 (after the long years of military rule), gross human rights infringements remain a major security threat in Nigeria (Bappah, 2016 ). This is because the Nigerian police were not originally set up to protect or serve the people. It was rather set up to protect and serve the state for the purpose of exploitation and expropriation of resources (Kalu, 2017 ). In light of this, there is an ever-increasing distrust between the state and the police on the one hand and the people on the other hand. Owing to this increasing distrust as well as the corrupt and state-backed authoritarian character of the Nigerian police, they often consider and treat Nigerian youths as criminals until proven innocent rather than the other way round as provided by Nigerian laws. In addition, given that all the institutions and agencies of the Nigerian state, including the police, have not become autonomous of the regime, regime security or survival is often mistaken for national security (Afeno, 2014 ). Therefore, the primary purpose of the police is essentially to protect the regime rather than the people. In an attempt to protect the regime and its interests, the police and military forces often deploy excessive and brutal force to repress the people.

In Nigeria, the state also uses its legal and regulatory tools to legitimise repression, formal violation and the restriction of human rights. Section 45 (1) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) provides, inter alia, that Nothing in Sects. 37, 38, 39, 40 and 41 of this Constitution shall invalidate any law that is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society (a) in the interest of defence, public safety, public order, public morality or public health; or (b) for the purpose of protecting the rights and freedom or other persons. These regulatory instruments justified excessive restrictions on human rights, as it: (d) required law enforcement officers to subjectively arrest without warrant, confiscate and demolish properties, and obtain information from any person or organisation without any restraint. The newly introduced 16 Covid-19 ad hoc laws further emboldened the state and its actors with authoritarian bents to continue their onslaught with minimal, if any, pushback. This is akin to the approach of the Chinese police, which has relatively little oversight, giving them tremendous power to do whatever they want. This unchecked power has led to several reports of human rights abuses (Wang and Madson, 2013 ; Wang, 2020 ).

Methodology

The primary data for the study were collected between October 11 and December 5, 2020. Purposive sampling was adopted, because of the need to capture states that had massive protests, to select four states and the Federal Capial Territory–Lagos, Edo, Rivers and Oyo states and Abuja. These states recorded over three million daily turnout of protesters for the period under study. The states include Lagos, Edo, Rivers, Oyo, and Abuja (the capital of Nigeria). The respondents were drawn from the Nigerian Police Force, Nigerian Army, state government executive members, human rights groups and ENDSARS protesters. These category of persons are considered to be directly involved in either handling or participating in the EndSARS protest. Convenience/pre-designed availability research design were used to capture respondents who were conveniently or accidentally available to participate in the study. The criteria for the selection of respondents were an affirmative response to preliminary Short Message Services (SMS), cognate experience with the subject and willingness to participate in the study. A total of 38 telephone interviews were conducted across the sampled states, involving five deputy superintendents of police, three majors and two captains in the Nigerian Army, three commissioners and five special assistants to governors, five leaders of rights-based NGOs, and fifteen active participants in the EndSARS protests. Seven telephone interviews were conducted in each of the sampled states to generate data on the implications of state repression of and clampdown on the EndSARS protests on democracy, development and national security. It was not possible to conduct face-to-face interviews due to the Covid-19 restrictions and the need to maintain safety measures.

Fifteen active participants of EndSARS protests granted the researchers permission to follow them on their social media platforms (i.e. Facebook and Twitter) to assess the trend and other dimensions of the protests. A preliminary reading of a sample from Facebook posts/tweets in the 15 accounts revealed that each contained one of the following terms with hashtags: #EndSARS, #EndCorruption, #EndBadGovernance and #EndInsecurity, or related hashtags.

These terms were then used to programmatically filter the sample down to about 19,609 Facebook posts/reposts and 24,799 tweets/retweets made within the 17-day #EndSARS protest period, October 4–October 20, 2020 (see Table Table1). 1 ). The posts/tweets were then read and filtered manually, with a coder eliminating duplicates. This means that the authors sorted/counted the posts/tweets to observe the frequency of each of the four major hashtags (i.e. #EndSARS, #EndCorruption, #EndBadGovernance and #EndInsecurity).

Social media posts/tweets of #EndSARS protesters by categories, October 4, 2020 and October 20, 2020

Source: Fieldwork, 2020

Manual coding was done using a codebook to guide the coding process (Guest et al., 2011 ). A single independent coder coded the posts/tweets for each of the variables/key themes and categories (Smedley and Coulson, 2021 ) in the codebook. In some cases, the coding was a matter of numbering each post/tweet, tallying, recording the frequencies and taking simple percentages. Meanwhile, as expected, a large number of posts/tweets to be tallied or sorted posed some difficulty to the coder. However, the coder overcame this challenge using the Find Function in Microsoft Word, which automatically captured the frequencies (i.e. the number of appearances) of each of the search items (i.e. variables/key themes) shown on the Facebook/Twitter pages. Once the primary coder had finished coding, the secondary coder reviewed the codes to assess the connection between the raw text and codes (Guest et al., 2011 ; Solymosi et al., 2020 ). Then a feedback discussion between the two coders was used to revise definitions and recode where necessary (Guest et al. 2011 ; Solymosi et al. 2020 ). We focused on social media (Facebook and Twitter) partly because of the relative ease of accessing publicly available data and partly because Facebook and Twitter are particularly useful platforms for widely circulating and sharing information (Kim et al., 2016 ). There may be not too much of a difference in sharing behaviour between those who use Facebook and those on Twitter (Juncu and Glorney, 2019 ). More importantly, #EndSARS protests were mainly organised and coordinated via social media (Husted, 2020 ).

The study also used secondary sources of data on state repression and use of brutal force on EndSARS protesters, which were sourced from Amnesty International reports, CNN documentary on Lekki shooting, CSO Police Reform Observatory report, other publications and websites that reported on the EndSARS protests. This study adopted the qualitative descriptive method to analyse and validate qualitative data. The final manuscript was subjected to member check by the authors to enhance the accuracy of interpretations of responses (Koelsch, 2013 ; Ezeibe et al., 2019 ; Iwuoha et al., 2020 ).

Escalation of #EndSARS protests from civil disobedience to a demand for change of government: the government–protesters’ mutual trust deficit

The 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria began on October 4, 2020. Many Nigerian youths dared the government-mandated COVID-19 containment measures and public health consequences of the breach of COVID-19 protocols (Iwuoha et al. 2020 ) to organise peaceful # EndSARS protests against police brutality and impunity. About 28 million tweets bearing the hashtag #EndSARS accumulated on Twitter alone in the first week of the protest (Kazeem, 2020 ).

The #EndSARS protests ultimately grew beyond police brutality as protesters began to agitate for far-reaching political and constitutional reforms to ensure good governance, fiscal federalism, and political restructuring (Abati, 2020 ). The protesting youths demanded a presidential address from their ‘absentee’ president (Adeshokan, 2020 ). But the Presidency waited and delayed until it became a belated presidential address that did very little to assuage the anger of the people. A video emerged online showing President Buhari chuckle as the Lagos State Governor Sanwo-Olu talked about his state’s compensation fund for victims. The President’s actions met a lot of negative criticism from Nigerians (Odesola, 2020 ).

Meanwhile, as conditions for ending the protest, the protesters on 11 October 2020 released a list of five main demands to the Nigerian government:

The immediate release of all arrested protesters;
Justice for all those who died through police brutality and appropriate compensation to their families;
An independent body to investigate and prosecute all reports or complaints of police brutality within ten days;
Independent psychological evaluation and retraining of disbanded SARS officers before they can be redeployed;
Adequate increase in the salaries of officers of the NPF as appropriate incentives for carrying out their constitutional duties of protecting lives and properties (George, 2020a , b ).

The immediate response by the Inspector General of Police (IGP) was to ban SARS and other special police units from patrolling and mounting roadblocks, and directed that SARS officials should henceforth wear their uniforms. The Nigerian government eventually responded by setting up the Presidential Panel on Police Reforms which approved the five demands by announcing the following measures:

Disbandment of SARS, redeploying and issuing directives to operatives to report to Force Headquarters for debriefing, psychological and medical examination just as the government has through the Police Service Commission (PSC) reportedly recommended 37 former members of the disbanded the Squad for dismissal from service;
Setting up of a new Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team to replace SARS;
Encouraging state governments and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) authority to set up judicial panels of inquiry to adopt public hearings in looking into allegations of police brutality with the aim of prosecuting erring police officers and compensating victims and families of victims;
Expediting the passing into law the bill to reform the police currently under the floor of the National Assembly (NASS);
Efforts at improving the general welfare and funding of NPF (Nairametrics, 2020 ).

In spite of government responses to the demands of the protesters in the form of police reforms, the protest increased in terms of intensity, demands, and spread. This suggests, first, that there is a trust deficit between the government and protesters; and, second, that the protest was beyond police brutality (Abati, 2020 ). The fact that there were remote, underlying or antecedent causes of the October 2020 #EndSARS protest was implicated by the refusal of the Nigerian youths to end the protests even after the Nigerian government claimed to have met all their demands. For example, the protesters wanted immediate actions on the implementation of the demands citing the previous three cases where the government failed to implement and enforce its proclamations disbanding SARS. This is an indication of the trust deficit between the government and the governed. A major uniqueness of the #EndSARS protest is the decentralised structure of the movement, making it very difficult for the government to infiltrate, compromise, and negotiate with the protesters because it has no single leader (Abati, 2020 ).

Evidence showed that the major hashtags that trended in the social media, traditional media, and placards at protest venues were rather focused on ending bad governance, corruption, and insecurity in Nigeria. Table Table1 1 shows the new dimensions of the #EndSARS protests as contained on the social media platforms.

Table Table1 1 shows 19,609 Facebook posts/reposts and 24,799 tweets/retweets made within the period. Facebook posts/reposts on #EndBadGovernance had 35.1 per cent, showing that it attracted the highest social media traffic than other categories, including the #EndSARS, which had only 30.7 per cent. Other Facebook categories such as #EndCorruption, #EndBadGovernance and #EndInsecurity altogether recorded about 69.7 percent. Tweets/retweets on #EndSARS scored highest with 38.2 per cent, while other tweets/retweets altogether accounted for the remaining 61.8 per cent. This implies that the protesters generally had major demands on democratic governance and good leadership than on police reforms. In other words, protesters believed that #EndSARS is a gateway to achieving democratic governance and good leadership in the country. This also explains why the protesters refused to discontinue protests despite the government’s promise of reforming the Nigerian police, including the disbandment of SARS on 11 October 2020.

Rather than soothe, placate and disperse the protesters, the disbandment of SARS and police reforms led to new dimensions and demands for good governance expressed with other trendy hashtags such as #EndBadGovernance, #EndCorruption, and #EndInsecurity. In fact, the #EndSARS hashtag only trended predominantly on social media within the first 10 days of the protests. It was observed that the posts/tweets possess the following major attributes, which made them highly significant in promoting greater appeals among the protesters and their supporters:

i. Viral: Posts/tweets that go viral are used by protesters to make and achieve key demands on the state.
ii. Timely: Posts/tweets sent on the day of a key event (e.g. protest, music festival, riot) have stronger effects and results (Stefanone et al. 2015 ; Xu and Zhang, 2018 ).
iii. Use of Hashtag: Posts/tweets with the use of hashtags increase reposts/retweets (Suh et al. 2010 ; Jenders et al. 2013 ; Stefanone et al. 2015 , Van de Velde et al. 2015 ).
iv. Sentiment: Posts/tweets with strong sentiments increase reposts/retweetability (Fernandez et al. 2014 ; Stefanone et al. 2015 ; Kim et al. 2016 )
v. Sharing: Posts/tweets that explicitly asked to be shared attract more attention and reposts/retweets (Lopez, 2014 ).

That the protesters eventually demanded wider political and constitutional reforms is perhaps an admittance of the fact that the police cannot be isolated from the entire polity because it is only a microcosm of the entire society. Police brutality is, therefore, a reflection of the systemic problems and challenges of the entire Nigerian state.

How the Nigerian state is implicated in police brutality and clampdown on the #EndSARS protesters

In accordance with Section 215(2) of the 1999 Constitution, Section 6 of the Police Act, 1990 laws provide that ‘the Force shall be commanded by the Inspector-General of Police.’ This simply means that orders, directives and instructions to clampdown on #EndSARS protesters emanated from the Inspector-General of Police, through the chain of Command, to all officers deployed during the protests. Disobedience or failure to carry out such instruction, directive or order, attracts punitive sanctions. The police essentially enforced brutal force to hold down the protesters in a bid to protect the interests of the state and maintain the rule of the regime in power.

Hence, the #EndSARS Protesters’ demands for wider political reforms generally attracted state repression and clampdown instead of leading to positive change. It was reported that during the protests, acts of police brutality, stifling of voices of dissent, clampdowns on civic freedoms, and military shootouts at peaceful, innocent and unarmed #EndSARS protesters with live bullets were perpetrated by agents of the Nigerian state without any pushback (CNN, 2020 ; CSO Police Reform Observatory, 2020 ). Hoodlums and thugs said to be sponsored by state actors infiltrated the protests to disrupt and disperse protesters in many states, including Lagos, Edo, Abuja, Oyo, Abia, etc. (Abati, 2020 ). Table Table2 2 highlights the reported state repression, clampdowns and abusive brutality on peaceful #EndSARS protesters through its actors–Nigerian Police Force, Nigerian Army and sponsored hoodlums.

State Clampdown on Unarmed Protesters, October 9–October 22, 2020

Source: Authors’ compilation, 2020

Table Table2 2 shows that between 10th and 21st October 2020, some 29 protesters were reportedly killed by the Nigerian Army and the Nigerian Police Force while containing the rapidly growing #EndSARS protests. Many protesters were also seriously injured across the states. Moreover, hoodlums and thugs were hired by politicians to infiltrate the protests, and this further escalated the crisis, leading to arson, destruction of people’s property, as well as perpetration of acts of assault and harassment of peaceful protesters.

Hence, amidst the raging #EndSARS protests, the Nigerian government, through security agencies, further consolidated its repressive character in the following ways:

The reported use of tear gas, water cannons, live bullets, and other forms of brutal force by the police (George, 2020a , b ; CSO Police Reform Observatory, 2020 ).
The reported sponsorship and recruitment of political thugs and hoodlums to infiltrate and discredit the peaceful protests to make it appear violent so as to fulfil the rules of engagement as a causus belli or justification to use force (Abati, 2020 ; George, 2020a , b ).
The imposition of twenty-four-hour curfews by various state governments.
The fining of Channels Television, AIT, and Arise TV 3 million Naira (nearly $8,000) each by the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) over their ‘unprofessional’ coverage of the protests. The government even considered closing down the internet and social media.
The 20.10.20 Lekki Shooting by the Nigerian Army was estimated to have claimed between fifteen and twenty lives, which received its own equally widely used hashtag #LekkiMassacre. The disconnection of the CCTV and streetlights few hours before the shooting was regarded as an indication that it was well planned, rehearsed and meditated (Adeshokan, 2020 ; CSO Police Reform Observatory, 2020 ; Husted, 2020 ).

This suggests that the repressive Nigerian state murdered its unarmed flag-waving citizens. As a backlash, many Nigerians at home and abroad replaced their social media status and profile pictures with slogans and symbols such as ‘Black Tuesday’, ‘we will never forget 20.10.20’, ‘image of the blood-stained national flag’, etc. (George, 2020a , b ). Following the Lekki ‘Massacre’ the protest turned violent when it was finally hijacked by hoodlums who unleashed mayhem on the protesters and the general public. There were massive looting, arson, and wanton destructions of public and private properties. Several police stations were burnt down, and many security agents (especially the police) were killed. The discovery or looting of palliative warehouses where palliative and relief materials were hoarded was perhaps a further indication of the people’s distrust of the governments at all levels in Nigeria.

Implications of state repression and clampdown on #EndSARS protesters for democracy, development and national security

The state repression and clampdown on peaceful, unarmed protesters has serious implications for democracy, development and national security in Nigeria. Table Table3 3 shows the subjective views of the respondents on the implications of Nigerian state repression and clampdown of EndSARS protests for democracy, development and national security.

Summary of the subjective views of respondents to implications of state repression and clampdown of EndSARS protests on democracy, development and national security

Source: Fieldwork (2020)

Table Table3 3 indicates that the majority of respondents affirmed that state repression and clampdown of EndSARS protests impacted negatively on Nigeria’s democracy. Some 36 respondents representing 94.7 per cent of all respondents confirmed that the state clampdown on EndSARS protesters eroded public trust in state institutions; 28 respondents representing 73.6 per cent believed that it violated human rights and threatened democracy; 36 respondents representing 94.7 per cent agreed that it shrunk the civic space; 31 respondents representing 81.5 per cent noted that it undermined constitutionalism, the rule of law and due process; while 23 respondents representing 60.5 per cent observed that it eroded democratic consolidation and good governance.

Furthermore, the majority of the respondents concurred that state repression and clampdown of EndSARS protests undermined Nigeria’s development. A total of 19 respondents representing 50 per cent revealed that state repression/clampdown on EndSARS protesters scared away foreign investors; 34 respondents representing 89.4 per cent stated that it shrunk economic opportunities; 25 respondents representing 65.7 per cent viewed that it led to wanton destruction of public properties and livelihoods; 31 respondents representing 81.5 per cent believed that it shrunk economic activities; while 19 respondents representing 50 per cent stated that it increased hardship and poverty.

On the other hand, 36 respondents representing 94.7 per cent agreed that state repression/clampdown on EndSARS protesters facilitated the breakdown of law and order or a state of anarchy; 23 respondents representing 60.5 per cent insisted that it created opportunities for the emergence of armed groups; 36 respondents representing 94.7 per cent thought that it provided opportunities for the looting of citizens’ properties and criminality; 35 respondents representing 92.1 per cent noted that it increased public distrust of law enforcement agencies; while 17 respondents representing 44.7 per cent revealed that it contributed to the proliferation of SALW in the country.

The result shows that the protesters had other more critical and broader demands transcending the concerns of #ENDSARS and police reforms. This is why the disbandment of SARS and police reforms did not soothe, placate or disperse the protesters but instead spiralled a new dimension and demand for good governance expressed with other trendy hashtags such as #EndBadGovernance, #EndCorruption, and #EndInsecurity. The #EndSARS hashtag only trended predominantly on social media within the first 10 days of the protests, but demands to end bad governance, corruption and insecurity were strongly canvassed and more popularly endorsed than #ENDSARS among many Nigerians on social media throughout the protest period and even beyond. The protesters essentially used the protests for #EndSARS and police reforms only as a necessary means to demanding improved democratic governance and good leadership in the country. Hence, while the massive street or physical protests were going on, there were also vehement and heavy-traffic protests conducted on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, through which many Nigerians vented out their grievances against the state and its poor democratic governance. Feminist Coalition, Kokun Foundation, Assata Collective, the Reach Nigeria, Connected Development, Flutterwave Inc., FinTech, Mentally Aware NG, EndSARS Legal Aid, the Food Coven, Anonymous, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), National Association of Seadogs (NAS), AI, and HRW were some of the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or non-state actors (NSAs) that actively mobilised all-round support for the protesters as well as demanding wider constitutional and political reforms (Adeshokan, 2020 ).

It is therefore not surprising that Nigeria lamentably competes at the bottom of global Democracy Index rankings. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2020 Democracy Index, 1 for example, shows that Nigeria is classified as a ‘hybrid regime’ 2 and globally ranked 110 out of 166 countries in the 2020 Democracy Index. For each 10-point democracy indicator, Nigeria scores so poorly, as follows: electoral process and pluralism (5.17 points), functioning of government (3.57 points), political participation (3.89 points), political culture (3.75 points), and civil liberties (4.12 points). 3 This poor democratic atmosphere generally creates a difficult habitat for good governance and full democracy, thus lowering public trust and confidence in the state and its leadership as well as increasing popular dissatisfaction and negative perceptions of democracy.

Again, the protesters’ demand for wider political reforms did not lead to positive change but attracted state repression and clampdown on protesters through its actors—Nigerian Police Force, Nigerian Army and sponsored hoodlums who infiltrated the protests. Deleterious instruments of warfare such as tear gas, water cannons, live bullets, and other forms of brutal force were reportedly used on unarmed protesters (George, 2020a , b ; CSO Police Reform Observatory, 2020 ). The frontal confrontation on #EndSARS protesters by state forces attracted retaliatory attacks from the civilians. The Inspector General of Police in Nigeria notes that civilians attacked over 20 police stations and 50 police personnel during the #EndSARS protests in the country. Altogether, these further escalated the crisis, reportedly leading to dangerous acts of assaults, extortion, excessive torture, severe injuries, state-inspired extrajudicial killings and ‘fatal’ shootings, causing numerous deaths, arson, and the destruction of property and livelihoods. Even agencies of state such as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) tried to use various forms of intimidation, including freezing the accounts of alleged EndSARS financial sponsors, including Feminist Coalition, Kokun Foundation, Assata Collective, the Reach Nigeria, Connected Development, Flutterwave Inc., FinTech, and a number of individuals (CSO Police Reform Observatory, 2020 ).

Notably, state repression and clampdown on #EndSARS protesters induced gross violation of human rights and remains a major threat to democratic ethos in Nigeria. The people’s right to life, liberty, freedom of movement, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of self-dignity, freedom to good wellbeing, etc. were all cut short by the Nigerian state’s repressive actions during the protests (Abati, 2020 ).

In the past, there have been state-backed extrajudicial killings in Odi in Bayelsa State and Zaki Biam in Benue State in 1999 and 2001. The security agencies, while executing the instructions of the regime in power, have also been involved in the crackdown, arbitrary arrests, detentions and extrajudicial killings of members of separatist organisations such as Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in Southeast Nigeria and members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) led by Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky between 2017 and 2018 (Amnesty International, 2018 ). More recently, the police murdered 18 people in mid-April 2020 within the first two weeks of implementing lockdown policies when only 12 people had actually died of COVID-19 (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2020 ; Iwuoha and Aniche, 2020 ; Aniche et al. 2021 ; Iwuoha et al. 2021 ). The major implication of the involvement of security agencies in human rights violations in Nigeria is low public trust. Significantly, corruption and human rights violations are the major reasons for citizens’ distrust of the government (Clark, 2016 ; Iwuoha, 2019 ; Ezeibe et al., 2020 ).

Nigeria ranks among the top seven countries with the highest level of citizen distrust of government institutions (World Economic Forum, 2018 ). Hence, the repressive character of the Nigerian state expressed in the form of police brutality, with the accompanying poor human development indices (HDIs), combine to create the conditions for the incessant civil rights movements and youth restiveness, including the #EndSARS protest.

Hence, a vehement people’s movement against the state as a result of eroding and low public trust of the state institutions in Nigeria underlies the protests to end SARS and police brutality. The social contract between the people and the state collapsed as a result of the latter’s proven track record of bad leadership, poor governance, corruption and lack of accountability, as well as its consistent use of public resources to encourage police brutality and repression. This indicates the extreme level of state intolerance against freedom of expression, gathering, movement and right to life. Police brutality against the citizens has apparently taken over as the key driver of shrinking civic space in Nigeria (Human Rights Watch, 2000 ). Thus, state actors are rapidly exploiting the #EndSARS protest to further stifle dissent, clamp down on civic freedoms, and push through restrictive measures under the pretext of maintaining public safety and enforcing COVID-19 lockdown measures.

Beyond Nigeria, the records of police brutality against the media and peaceful protesters over bad governance across Africa are replete and dotted with evidence of gross human rights abuses, thus showing that the powers of law enforcement institutions in Africa had been radically overstretched beyond context and enforced in ways that hurt civic freedoms. In the #ENDSARS protests, for instance, security forces sometimes brazenly used horsewhips and weapons to enforce discipline and compliance with lockdown directives (Ibezim-Ohaeri, 2020 ).

State repression and clampdown on civil liberties have far-reaching implications for democracy, development and national security in Nigeria. It depicts a high degree of human rights breaches. It contracts the civic spaces, endangers democracy and the rule of law, erodes constitutionalism, jeopardises national security, disrupts peace and people’s wellbeing. It also flightens foreign investors, dwindles economic opportunities, worsens hardship and poverty among citizens. Consequently, it triggers the emergence of armed groups and proliferation of SALW, breakdown of law and order, state of anarchy, looting and criminality, etc. Generally, the brutal and coercive use of force to crack down on unarmed protesters results in public distrust of the state and its institutions. This finding reflects Ake’s ( 1981 ) and Althusser’s ( 1970 ) argument that African states are dominantly repressive states regardless of their democratic status.

Fundamentally, the repressive character of the Nigerian state can be associated with its colonial history (Mkhize and Madumi, 2016 ). During colonial rule, the colonial state exhibited a predatory character, with the natives as its preys. The state widens the powers of its repressive architecture, which reduces the civic space so as to protect the interests of the ruling elite (Buyse, 2018 ). The state thus serves more as a weapon of intimidation and maltreatment than as an agent of the protection of the citizenry and facilitation of development (Ihonvbere, 2003 ).

The result of repressive responses from security forces in Nigeria against #EndSARS protesters is the erosion of the confidence of the Nigerian people, including those in the Diaspora. The #EndSARS protest was internationalised with massive turnouts recorded in Ontario on 12 October 2020; Germany, 23 October 2020; Dublin, 11 October 2020; London, 11 October 2020; New York, 11 October 2020; Michigan, 18 October 2020; Hungary, 22 October 2020; Ohio, 25 October 2020, etc. (New York Times, 2020 ). As indicated in Table Table3, 3 , these developments seriously undermine Nigeria’s democracy, development and national security.

Thus civil rights protests in low democratic states in Africa do not generally achieve their goals. The consistent development of the repressive character of the state in emerging democracies in Africa (which is essentially useful for the control of political power amidst intolerable bad leadership, governance crisis, and corruption that characterise African democratic rule) is consequent upon two factors: First, the state’s ability to rapidly promote or enforce a crackdown on civil rights movements, stifle dissent, and perpetrate extrajudicial killings against its innocent citizens. Second, its ability to promote or institutionalise impunity and reckless disregard for human life and rights, and the rule of law as well as low level of professionality and noncompliance to rules of engagement among its security officials and institutions.

This article assesses the role of the Nigerian state in the #EndSARS protest and police brutality in Nigeria. It observed that instead of achieving greater civic freedom, political reforms and good governance, civil rights movements such as the #EndSARS protest tend to provide an exploitable opportunity for yet increased state brutality and repression. The mutual trust deficit between the government and #EndSARS protesters escalated the protest and further deepened the repressive character of the Nigerian state. The protesters' distrust of the state and its security institutions led to their outright rejection of the government’s proposed police reforms and the consequent new demands for wider political and constitutional reforms. This negatively constructed government’s perception of the #EndSARS protest as a confrontational and revolutionary movement for regime change. It facilitated the government’s distrust of the people too and led to state repression, clampdown and excessive use of military force against peaceful protesters, thus further escalating the conflict.

The state military and police force enforced clampdown on civic freedoms and are believed to be responsible for the fatal shootings at unarmed peaceful #EndSARS protesters, especially that of Lekki Toll Gate on 20/10/2020. These acts can be interpreted as excessive torture, assaults, extortion, severe injuries, state-inspired extrajudicial killings and ‘fatal’ shootings, causing numerous deaths and the destruction of property and livelihoods. The CBN also barred the accounts of alleged EndSARS financiers.

These have negative consequences for democracy, development and national security in Nigeria. This results in the deficiency of citizens’ trust in the state and its security institutions, and sometimes citizen’s open confrontation and attacks on security operatives. The consistent development of the repressive character of the Nigerian state is consequent and implicated upon two factors: First, its ability to rapidly exploit every opportunity, such as civil rights movement, to stifle dissent and clampdown on innocent citizens. Second, its ability to promote impunity and reckless disregard for human life as well as a low level of professional and noncompliance to rules of engagement among its security officials and the security institutions.

This study suggests that mainstreaming the oversight of the law enforcement agencies and establishing institutional mechanisms that control their excesses during the civil rights movement might help to control the excesses of the repressive state by keeping the security agents in check, thus preserving the civic spaces, promoting peace, democracy, development and effectively managing state-civil relations without violating human rights in Nigeria. To transform the current distrustful state-citizen relations (informed by the repressive character of the state) and the overall dysfunctional socioeconomic conditions in Nigeria, holistic, far-reaching and fundamental political reforms that transcend police reform are required.

Declarations

On behalf of all authors, I, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

1 The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of democracy worldwide in 165 independent states and two territories. The Democracy Index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. Based on its scores on a range of indicators within these categories, each country is then itself classified as one of four types of regime: ‘full democracy’, ‘flawed democracy’, ‘hybrid regime’, or ‘authoritarian regime’.

2 In hybrid regimes (largely non-democratic), serious weaknesses are prevalent—functioning of government, civil liberty and security. Corruption tends to be widespread, and the rule of law is weak. Civil society is weak. Typically, there is the harassment of and pressure on journalists to act according to the will of the government, while the judiciary is often not independent.

3 See The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, 2020.

Publisher's Note

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Contributor Information

Victor Chidubem Iwuoha, Email: [email protected] .

Ernest Toochi Aniche, Email: gn.ude.ekoutouf@teehcina .

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The Nigerian Government Has Pledged to #EndSARS and Reform the Police. This Isn’t the First Time They’ve Made That Promise

E arlier this month, in the face of swelling protests in Lagos and worldwide, the Nigerian police announced the dissolution of the police unit known as SARS, which has been linked to torture, unlawful imprisonment, extortion and murder. Protests have dwindled in Lagos after the army allegedly shot dead at least a dozen peaceful protesters on Oct. 20, but have continued worldwide.

I n a press conference , Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari pledged that the end of SARS was only the beginning: “The disbandment of SARS is only the first step in our commitment to extensive police reform,” he said.

Many protesters have heard similar promises before and remain skeptical. Over the past three decades, the Nigerian government has repeatedly vowed to reform the habits of a police force that observers say is mired in corruption and brutality, only for the problems to persist or exacerbate. Now, even with a global spotlight on the country, many are still doubtful that real change will be brought about. Here’s a brief timeline of the history of SARS and the many times it was supposed to improve—and what experts think will happen now.

Troubled Beginnings

By 1992, when SARS was founded, the precedent of controlling Nigerian people through excessive force had long been the norm: British colonizers had arrived in the 19th century and treated the land and its people as resources to be controlled and plundered. Their colonial enterprise had left behind a culture of violence and corruption so that even after Nigeria won independence in 1960, military coups became the norm. The army held power in Nigeria for much of three decades until 1999, including when SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, was created.

At the time, armed robbery was rampant in cities like Lagos. In 1992, the Superintendent of Police, Simeon Danladi Midenda, was tasked with forming a unit that would operate independently and surreptitiously in order to ambush robbers. (A separate but similar anti-robbery force had been created in 1984.) “The secret behind the successes of the original SARS was its facelessness and its mode of operation,” Midenda told the Vanguard , a Lagos-based newspaper, in 2017. “We operated in plain clothes and used plain vehicles that could not be associated with security or any government agency.”

Read More: ‘We Are Able to Get Things Done.’ Women Are at the Forefront of Nigeria’s Police Brutality Protests

Midenda says that SARS did have some early successes in capturing armed bandits. But reports of success were soon accompanied by reports of abuse of power. In 1993, Ayotunde Adesola, a graduate in computer science from the University of Lagos, was picked off the street by SARS and accused of being in a local gang. In an attempt to make him confess, officers poured irritant powder on his face while beating him, the Lagos-based Civil Liberties Organization reported. During this era, General Sani Abacha ruled the country with an iron first, crushing protests and opposition activists; he was accused of many violations and abuses by global human rights organizations .

A pattern soon emerged of SARS extorting civilians or detaining and torturing them into giving confessions. In 1995, two university students, Bola Afilaka and Ayodele Adejuyibe, were shot and killed after Afilaka refused to stop his car at a checkpoint. In 1999, a man died in SARS custody after days of interrogation and abuse from officers who accused him of stealing a car, according to the Civil Liberties Organization . Journalists were frequently targeted, with their homes raided and families harassed in the middle of the night .

Escalation Against Cyber Crime

While Abacha died in 1998, SARS only grew in aggression and power. In the early 2000s, as cybercrime became more common in Nigeria, SARS devoted its energy to finding the perpetrators—but, rather than investigating crimes digitally, SARS officers began profiling people on the street, openly harassing and extorting those they deemed suspicious, says Seun Bakare, program manager at Amnesty International Nigeria.

“There was the belief that everyone who is carrying a laptop may be using it for internet fraud,” Bakare says. Young people—particularly men with nice clothes, watches or dreadlocks—were accused of being “Yahoo boys” (a local term for internet scammers), shaken down, detained and tortured.

These actions caught the attention of concerned parties both inside and outside Nigeria. In 2007, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment wrote that “torture is an intrinsic part of how the police operate within the country,” and that a significant portion of the violations were carried out at the SARS detention center in Abuja. The following year, a presidential committee was formed to propose reforms for the Nigeria Police Force, but the proposals were not implemented in any significant way. The year after that, the government formed the National Committee Against Torture, but that organization received no funding or ability to carry out its work. “Maybe people do not even know about its existence,” Amnesty International wrote in 2014 .

In 2010—the same year that the Open Society Juice Initiative alleged the Nigerian police operated with “pervasive corruption,” “destruction of evidence” and “routine extortion”—President Goodluck Jonathan pledged his commitment to police reform by earmarking 71 billion naira ($186 million) to the cause.

But little changed, and two years later, the newly appointed Inspector General of Police Mohammed Dikko Abubakar savaged SARS in an interview , describing the operation as “killer teams engaging in deals for land speculators and debt collection.” He promised to “purge the system of corruption, which cripples and frustrates every honest effort at reforming the police.”

Jide Babalola, a journalist who currently works as a legislative aide for the office of the Deputy Senate President, says there’s a reason why every promise of reform has ended in disappointment: officials have lacked the funding and organizational structure to see the changes through, and rampant corruption often leaves local precincts and individual officers severely underfunded and underpaid. “Only a tiny fraction of what is budgeted for the Nigerian police force ever gets to them,” he says. “How are they going to do anything serious?”

Until that underlying situation changes, Babalola says, there’s little hope of stopping the SARS problem.

TOPSHOT-SAFRICA-NIGERIA-DEMO-CRIME-POLICE

Another Attempt to #EndSARS

In 2016, the World Internal Security and Police Index ranked Nigeria’s police as the world’s worst in a global survey of 127 countries, with an overwhelming 81% of respondents saying they had paid a bribe to a cop in the past year. Many of these bribes happened at makeshift roadblocks set up by SARS officers in order to extort drivers and passengers. The same year, Amnesty International found that SARS “perpetrate[s] acts of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment against detainees in their custody on a regular basis.”

As organizations continued to speak out, so did Nigeria’s citizens, who began mobilizing on social media. In 2017, #EndSARS began trending, with hundreds of people sharing stories of abuse, and assault. That December, the inspector general of the Nigeria Police Force bowed to the pressure, announcing plans to reorganize the team, prosecute cases of human rights abuses and spearhead a better training program for recruits.

The same month, President Buhari signed into law the Anti-Torture Act, which criminalized torture. But Bakare, of Amnesty International, says that not a single police officer has been charged under that act. “Absolutely it has not had any impact,” he says.

In 2018, Nigerian vice president Yemi Osinbajo demanded that Inspector General of Police Ibrahim Idris restructure SARS once again, ban stop-and-search raids, and require officers to wear uniforms with full identification. A federal human-rights desk was also created to address violations. Following the announcement, police spokesperson Moshood Jimoh told The Nation that the police had “fully complied with the directives for the overhaul and reformation of SARS.”

But between January 2017 and May 2020, at least 82 cases of torture, ill-treatment and extrajudicial executions by SARS officers have been documented by Amnesty International .

In October, a video that appeared to show an unprovoked killing by a SARS officer went viral, kicking off a new wave of social media protests and live demonstrations. On Oct. 20, soldiers fired on crowds of protesters at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos, killing at least 12 people, according to Amnesty International . The organization says that at least 56 people have died since the protests began, many at the hands of police and other security forces using excessive force. The army has denied responsibility for the Lekki shooting; President Buhari has blamed the violence on “ hooliganism .” The physical protests in Lagos have quieted recently as protest leaders have asked people to stay home—but marches have continued in other Nigerian states as well as abroad, including in Helsinki .

Read More : The Nigerian Army Shot Dead at Least 12 Peaceful Protesters in Lagos, Rights Group Says. Here’s What to Know

Among the protesters’ five core demands is to “increase police salary so that they are adequately compensated for protecting lives and property of citizens. But during this period of economic stagnancy, many Nigerians worry that their government will again be unwilling to actually change the fabric of the police force. “Unfortunately, I do not have hope,” Bakare says. “If past promises to reform yielded nothing, there’s nothing concrete that shows this time around the government will do what it should do.”

Tajudeen Yusuf, a member of Nigeria’s House of Representatives and of the Peoples Democratic Party, fears the looting and vandalism that have grabbed headlines in recent days are threatening the effectiveness of the movement. But despite the many forces working against the protesters, Yusuf says it is vital for activists not to become discouraged. “It takes youth being consistent in their agitation to create norms that make civil rule unique and for a people,” he says. “Struggle is what produces freedom: Nothing comes without a fight.”

Meanwhile, a new police unit, SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), has been created. Some Nigerians, including David Aworawo, a history professor at the University of Lagos, are cautiously optimistic about the enterprise: “Given the recent consciousness regarding police brutality, I think it will be difficult for [SWAT] to operate with the viciousness and impunity that characterized the operations of SARS,” he says. “Police brutality will not end with the current efforts, but it will likely reduce drastically.”

But many others think that SWAT is no different from SARS, and just the continuation of a long history of obfuscation and inaction. “It’s nothing more than a change of name and acronym,” Gimba Kakanda, a writer and political analyst, wrote for TIME . “It’s just like an old wine in a new bottle.”

—With reporting by Suyin Haynes/London

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Protests Test Nigeria’s Democracy and its Leadership in Africa

How the government responds will frame the struggle against extremism across the region.

Thursday, October 22, 2020

/ READ TIME: 7 minutes

By: Oge Onubogu

Nigeria’s protests against police brutality already were the largest in the country’s history before security forces opened fire on a crowd in Lagos on October 20. The protest and bloodshed have only heightened the need for the government in Africa’s most populous country to end the pattern of violence by security forces against civilians. Leaders must finally acknowledge that this brutality has fueled violent extremism. How the Nigerian government will respond to citizens’ insistent demand for accountable governance will influence similar struggles—for democracy, accountability, nonviolence and stability—across much of Africa.

Nigerian youth kneel for the national anthem during one of many protests against police brutality this month. (TobiJamesCandids/CC License 4.0)

Hundreds of thousands of protesters have been demonstrating across Nigeria under the slogan #EndSARS —a demand for the disbanding of a police unit known as the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). Nigerians and international human rights organizations have presented evidence for years that the unit’s officers have repeatedly committed heinous violations, including extrajudicial executions, torture, and rape. Amnesty International documented 82 cases of abuse by SARS between January 2017 and May 2020.

Such abuses have been committed with impunity. Nigerians mounted #EndSARS protests in 2017 that prompted the first of many still-unfulfilled promises by officials for reforms. The latest protests began after a video went viral last month that showed the aftermath of a killing, allegedly by SARS officers, of a young man. It is no coincidence that the protesters and the victims of police brutality are from Nigeria’s large population of youth. Most victims have been aged between 18 and 35, Amnesty International reports.

But the Nigerian government response to these legitimate expressions of outrage has been dispiriting . A few days after the protests started, authorities announced they would disband SARS, reassign its officers to other police units and create a new unit with properly vetted and trained officers. But the government’s credibility is undermined by its failure to fulfill earlier promises—of investigations, prosecutions and reforms. So protests have continued.

The power of Nigeria’s example

Nigeria is facing a fundamental crisis of governance that reflects a rising set of demands among its young generation—demands shared by youth elsewhere in Africa. And the government’s response is certain to resonate across the continent. With 200 million people, a growing population expected to exceed that of the United States by 2050, Nigeria is the undisputed regional hegemon and has been the decisive force behind the regional bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). That group last year adopted an action plan to counter terrorism and extremism—an effort that will depend on the region’s governments’ effectiveness, notably Nigeria’s, at tackling their domestic security and governance challenges.

Nigeria’s strengths—demographic, economic and military—confer upon it the chance, and a responsibility, to lead in West Africa. And its influence is often positive, for example in its early, relatively transparent response to the COVID pandemic. Yet the persistence of police brutality and the government’s inadequate, even violent , response shows that Nigeria continues to struggle with the moral consistency needed to inspire others.

An effective response to this crisis should start with political leaders and security officials acknowledging that an important cause for the surge of violent extremism in Nigeria, including Boko Haram, is the very brutality by police and the military that authorities have failed to stamp out. Ordinary Nigerians understand what their leaders refuse to admit: that extortion, torture and extrajudicial killings by those who are supposed to protect citizens continues to drive a cycle of violence. The first leader of Boko Haram, Mohammed Yusuf, was executed without trial by security forces. The brutal military crackdown that followed only escalated the violence and helped fuel more than a decade of insurgency .

Nigeria’s leaders should now see the popular demands for accountable and responsible governance—and a real, rather than superficial, overhaul of the security sector—as an opportunity to make meaningful reforms.

An Approach to Reform

Vital steps for an effective response to this crisis include these:

Get serious about police reform. In 2016, the nonprofit International Police Science Association published a global index that rated policing in Nigeria as the worst in the world. The government must stop offering the equivalent of window dressing, such as the unfulfilled promises to overhaul the SARS unit and the failure of at least three police reform committees under different administrations (in 2006, 2009, and 2012) to produce results. The government last month announced a new initiative , to hire constables to improve police relations with local communities. The likelihood of tangible results is unclear, but it would be a positive step if it can lead toward the building of an inclusive policing structure that considers perspectives of Nigeria’s different ethnic and religious groups, and that begins to restore citizens’ trust.

While officials discuss steps for “reform,” what will be required will be a thorough overhaul. It may require returning to an old debate in Nigeria on the relative policing powers of the federal and state authorities. It would include investigating and prosecuting abusive members of the police and military, and uprooting ingrained patterns of corruption. A fundamental step will be for authorities to redirect the large numbers of police who currently provide personal security services to wealthy elites, assigning those officers to instead address serious crimes.

Tackle broader, systemic challenges of corruption and dysfunction. The violence of Nigerian policing does not exist in a vacuum, but rather is an integral part of wider failings of governance. The determined protests in the streets are testimony to ordinary Nigerians’ outrage over their long experience with a system of corrupt governance that undermines them at every turn with authorities’ self-dealing, graft and dysfunction. Even the security forces are victimized by this pattern of political, economic and social abuse, and fall easily into the wider culture of corruption . The biggest reason is that Nigeria’s political elite has not shown the collective will to take concrete steps that would cost its members their impunity and subject them to accountability.

Stated in another way, these protests are a critical, generational test for Nigeria’s democracy. They are an expression of civic engagement by citizens—a warning to the state about the risks of continuing to use the forms and the promise of democracy while withholding the accountability that true democracy requires. Nigerian writer Chukwudi Ukonne may have captured the significance of the turmoil in writing this week , “These protests might prove to be the political epiphany for a generation of young Nigerians who have never been seen nor heard but have now made it clear that the government will no longer ignore them.”

Turn local reforms into regional leadership. Nigeria understandably expects to lead regional coordination efforts in West Africa. It has sought to do so in the fight against transnational extremist groups such as Boko Haram. Yet regional security initiatives, such as the five-nation Multinational Joint Task Force , have thus far failed to reverse extremism’s spread. A reform program at home that accepts public accountability in governance, including policing, will strengthen Nigeria’s ability to perform—and also its moral authority in offering leadership to its neighbors. Given its size, regional prominence and diversity, Nigeria is a prize target for terrorism in Africa . Those same characteristics can make it a powerful leader in building peace and security on the continent.

The protests broke out just days after Nigeria’s Independence Day on October 1. Sixty years ago, Nigerians frustrated with colonialism demanded change, fought and won their freedom from the British. Today, Nigerians of the young generation are equally frustrated and demanding change , this time from their own government. Given its decision-making power within ECOWAS, Nigeria’s leadership—or the lack of it—in responding to the protests, and tackling its governance and security challenges at home, will set the pace not only for the future of the country, but for other countries of the region.

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s).

PUBLICATION TYPE: Analysis

Gone: The lost victims of Nigeria’s ‘most brutal’ police station

For more than a decade, young men have disappeared or lost their lives at the hands of Awkuzu SARS, a notorious police station in southeastern Nigeria. For victims and their families, it is an arduous road to justice.

Awkuzu, Nigeria – Behind a metal gate on the southern flank of the Enugu-Onitsha Expressway, stands a boxy hay-coloured building set in the dense clay earth of Awkuzu town.

For more than 10 years, it has been at the centre of incredulous tales of torture and extrajudicial killings in this part of southeastern Nigeria’s Anambra State – tales that have spread beyond the region and across the country. Throughout the building’s dark history, blood stained its floors and guttural screams from those detained there rang out deep into the night.

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Today, a gloomy aura hovers over the building as cars and pedestrians pass by.

The building originally belonged to the local chapter of a national political party set up during one of Nigeria’s military regimes in the early 1990s, but was later converted to the local headquarters of the police force’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad ( SARS ). Although SARS was disbanded on October 11, 2020, after nationwide protests against it, the building is still used by the Nigerian Police Force.

Popularly known as “Awkuzu SARS”, people in the area say it was not a normal police station. Some describe it as the most brutal in Nigeria. There is a saying about Awkuzu SARS that captures the station’s chilling reputation: if you’re taken there, you may never come out.

Protesting for her brother

In early October 2020, thousands of young Nigerians began pouring onto streets across the nation to demand the Nigerian government dismantle SARS. Twenty-five-year-old Obianuju Iloanya felt compelled to join them. The NGO worker wanted to speak out for her older brother, Chijioke Iloanya, who was 20 years old when police officers arrested him in November 2012. He was handed over to Awkuzu SARS and has not been seen or heard from since.

Many detained at SARS Awkuzu Anambra state have disappeared. Iloanya Chijioke is one of them. He was last seen in November 2012. #InternationalDayoftheDisappeared #Nigeria #SARS #DSS pic.twitter.com/BhfD181men — Amnesty International Nigeria (@AmnestyNigeria) August 30, 2020

SARS was a tactical police unit created in 1992 following a spate of crimes in Lagos. Before the head of the Nigerian Police Force announced the unit would be dissolved in response to the #EndSARS protests, it had operated in all 36 of Nigeria’s states and in the federal capital, Abuja. Rights groups had long accused it of carrying out unlawful arrests, extortion, rape, torture and murder.

“The police are the true criminals of Nigeria,” Obianuju says, sitting in the corridor of her family’s quaint bungalow set on the edge of a sandy, unpaved road in Anambra State.

Obianuju continues, determined to speak through her frustration. “What is this? What is the worth of human life in Nigeria? What do you have to do to not be killed?”

She marched alongside #EndSARS campaigners in Abuja, where she has lived since 2018 after graduating from university. She stood in front of the crowds shouting “End SARS” into a megaphone. Armed young men later ambushed protesters with clubs and knives.

In horror, Obianuju watched the mob running towards them, clenching their weapons. She also saw government security agents.

“They used water cannons on us while throwing tear gas on us,” she says with a sigh of exasperation. “I was in the eye of the storm and I was really scared. I know the Nigerian government; they don’t play nice.”

But she had already resolved to be there – for Chijioke. At one point, she even laid her body flat in the middle of a street in Abuja’s Asokoro district, directly in front of the headquarters of the Nigerian Police Force.

What happened to Chijioke?

Meanwhile, about 450km (280 miles) south of Abuja, more protesters gathered in Obianuju’s home state of Anambra to condemn the local Awkuzu SARS.

Obianuju grew up in a community less than 25km (15 miles) from the post. Throughout her childhood, she shared a bedroom with her two sisters. But she had a special bond with her older brother Chijioke. The two were so close they told people they were twins. She never imagined her brother would end up inside Awkuzu SARS.

Over the course of three days in November, Al Jazeera met with the Iloanya family – father, Emmanuel; mother, Hope; son, Ebuka; and daughters, Kosisochukwu and Obianuju – in their hometown, where they recounted what had happened to Chijioke.

On the evening of November 29, 2012, Chijioke Iloanya went out to a small party in the courtyard of his friend’s flat to celebrate the birth of the friend’s first child.

He was popular in the community. People knew him by his nickname – 50 Cents, an ironic nod to the American rapper because he was not a huge fan of his music. He was more interested in fashion, with a particular fondness for stylish shoes.

“Chijioke was a shoe guy,” says his older brother, 30-year-old Ebuka, smiling. “He was into Converse, sneakers, sportswear, all-purpose shoes. He even taught me about shoe fashion. He can even dress up on a non-eventful day and just be shining with his shoes.”

That day, he was wearing a sleek pair of dark brown sneakers, a white polo shirt beneath a long-sleeved shirt and jeans.

The party was in the town of Ajali, 40km (25 miles) southeast. At the time, stories about police officers, particularly from SARS, busting into beer parlours, hotels and outdoor gatherings to arrest people were rife.

But Chijioke went out anyway and at about six in the evening, his mother called him on his mobile phone to ask why he was out past the family’s curfew. Hope is a conservative woman who does not like her children out after sunset, and she had good reason to be worried. The streets were not safe. Armed groups were kidnapping people in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Violence between gangsters and cultists led to dead bodies being left on roadsides and fields across the region. Police officers were busting fraudsters for duping people on the internet. Hope, like many parents, was on edge.

Chijioke assured her that he was on his way back home. He was going to hop on a bus, he said. But he never made it to the bus stop.

“That was the last we heard from him,” says Obianuju, shrugging her shoulders. She speaks in a matter-of-fact tone, trying not to cry. “The next thing, we got a call from some guy telling us that the child dedication [party] was raided and that the boys were arrested by the police.”

Officers from the Ajali police station had crashed the event that night, arresting a few people including the landlady of the apartment building and the mother of the newborn child.

The following day, Hope went to the Ajali police station and tried to bail her son out but the officers said she could not because she is a woman. She called her husband. The police prepared to transfer Chijioke to Awkuzu SARS.

“When my dad heard, he got worried because Awkuzu SARS is a terrible place, it’s a very scary place to be,” says Obianuju. “Awkuzu SARS is known for killing young people. It’s very rare for a young person to be arrested by Awkuzu SARS and they’ll be out alive or still complete. You can lose a limb or something before you’re out,” she explains.

Emmanuel, a stout man with a husky voice and a relaxed gait, says he and his wife went to Awkuzu SARS looking for their son that same day, but the authorities told them Chijioke was not there. When Emmanuel and Hope went back the next day, they saw their son being led to a cell. They yelled his name and Chijioke looked at them.

Emmanuel pleaded for the police officers to tell them what their son had done to warrant being arrested.

“But the SARS people chased us out of that place,” he says, adding that the then-commander of Awkuzu SARS, James Nwafor, the chief superintendent of police, pushed his wife.

Emmanuel and Hope went back to the Awkuzu SARS several times that week to speak to Nwafor, Obianuju explains. Nwafor told them that he had already killed their son and there was nothing they could do about it, she says. Hope fainted and Emmanuel took her to the hospital.

“That was what prompted my parents to go to the commissioner of police,” Obianuju says.

The then-commissioner of police of Anambra State, Bala Nasarawa, supervised police activities across the state. Emmanuel says that he and his wife went to see him and told him about what had happened to Chijioke, but nothing came of it.

Emmanuel and Hope tried to believe that Nwafor was bluffing about killing their son and that he was still alive.

“When he disappeared, we went everywhere. We spent everything looking for him,” Hope says. Her face stiff with grief, she speaks at a slow, measured pace, with long pauses. They spent the next few years going to other SARS police posts and seeking help in different states across Nigeria.

They went looking for lawyers who could help them and asked activists to speak out about their case. But they could not get any leads. There was no court hearing. The police never presented an official charge to the Iloanyas and never went to their home to investigate – not even informally.

They heard of former detainees being freed after their families allegedly paid the police.

Ebuka, who says he first started hearing about Awkuzu SARS in around 2007 and for a while was hesitant to even go near the building, is sitting on the edge of an armchair in the living room. His eyes grow wider and his voice gets louder as he says, “When someone you know is being arrested by Awkuzu SARS, if that person comes back it’s a miracle, total miracle.”

So, the Iloanya family started praying for a miracle. But they had to pay for it first.

Emmanuel and Hope struggled to raise money. A part-time real estate agent, Emmanuel sold properties worth at least $90,000, receiving 5 percent commissions on them. He used the funds to pay legal advisers and pastors who promised to pray to God on their behalf for a miracle. They also paid police officers loitering outside the Awkuzu SARS post to go in and find out if Chijioke was there. That never yielded any solid information.

“After paying all these things you realise how much you have spent,” Emmanuel says.

With the financial demands growing ever greater, Emmanuel and Hope could barely cope. Emmanuel began to consider the unthinkable – selling the plot of land where his daughter Peace was buried after she died mysteriously in 2010.

Double tragedy

Emmanuel and Hope have been married for 31 years. Attracted to “her beauty and character”, Emmanuel fell in love with his wife the first time he saw her, he says. He built a modest three-bedroom bungalow in Hope’s hometown in Anambra State. There, they raised their children: Ebuka, Chijioke, Obianuju, Peace and the last born, Kosisochukwu.

They lived a middle-class lifestyle. Hope ran a small canteen on a busy road not too far from the house. She cooked rice dishes and hearty soups for a steady stream of customers. Emmanuel, an electrician, went out to look for work installing and repairing house wiring. They earned just enough money to keep everything going and made sure all their children went to school.

Obianuju and Peace had just returned home from school together one day in March 2010 when Peace started complaining that she was hot. She went outside to splash cool water on her body. But then she started gasping for breath and, all of a sudden, slumped over. She was 13 years old and had no known health problems. Her parents rushed her to a hospital but the medical professionals told them Peace was dead. They did not believe it so they carried her body to another hospital. The health workers there told them the same thing. Emmanuel and Hope took their daughter to a third hospital hoping to hear something different.

But Peace was gone.

They brought her body back home and laid her on the floor. Chijioke was beside her holding her hand. Hope sat praying beside her little girl all night. Emmanuel looked at Peace’s still figure as it grew colder.

“I think that’s the only time I’ve seen him cry,” Obianuju says.

Emmanuel chuckles sadly.

“That was the first time he had lost control as a dad,” she remarks.

“My favourite,” Emmanuel says, remembering how Peace’s face and stature resembled his mother’s. “When she was born, I thought she was a reincarnation of my mother.”

They buried Peace on a plot of land that Emmanuel had inherited from his father.

Hope started seeing a therapist to help her cope with the excruciating pain of losing her daughter.

“I was just recovering from the shock of losing Peace when Chijioke’s case happened,” she says, the corners of her lips turned downwards in a deep frown.

Chijioke’s arrest, two years and eight months after Peace died, threw the family into shock, again, and forced Emmanuel to make a tough choice: sell Peace’s burial ground to pay for Chijioke’s release or find another way to get enough money. Emmanuel brewed over the dilemma and finally decided to sell it for 5 million naira ($31,847) and offered 3 million naira ($19,108) to the police. He says they told him it was not enough.

Emmanuel does not want to say anything more about it. It is a painful topic for him.

“It was a double tragedy,” Obianuju says as tears slip down her cheeks. “Cause it was like we sold Peace to get Chijioke and we didn’t get either.”

Many Nigerians perceive the police force to be the most corrupt institution in the country, according to 2019 reports from a local legal rights advocacy group and Transparency International .

Obianuju says that in Nigeria, justice is bought by the highest bidder.

“Rich people in Nigeria do not have these kinds of tragedies,” she says. Her father grunts in agreement, his thoughts turning to Aliko Dangote, the Nigerian billionaire tycoon and the wealthiest man in Africa.

“If I’m rich like Dangote, nothing will happen to my son,” he says.

A river of bodies

In January 2013, Emmanuel heard about something that stirred his hope – dead bodies in a river.

That month, local communities were abuzz with disturbing news that more than a dozen bodies had been found floating in the Ezu River, a tributary of West Africa’s longest, the Niger.

At the time, police cited at least 18 corpses , but local human rights activists put the number at between 25 and 50. They claimed that Awkuzu SARS was responsible for the deaths, alleging that the victims were suspected to be members of a controversial ethno-nationalist secessionist organisation, known as the Movement For the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), which was calling for the southeastern region to break away from Nigeria and form a new country called Biafra.

MASSOB members, accusing the federal government of historically marginalising southeastern Nigeria and discriminating against people from the region, were being arrested and executed after repeated clashes with police and allegedly attacking officials. The founder had been charged with treason.

Reporters and townspeople flocked to the river to get a glimpse of the decomposing bodies. Emmanuel could think of only one thing: Chijioke.

Emmanuel jumped into his green 1996 Mercedes-Benz 230, started the engine and drove the 10 minutes to the river.

When he got to the muddy bank, other people were there, too, trying to see if they could recognise any of the bodies. Emmanuel took off his shoes and waded into the water. He began flipping over bloated corpses. He did not pay much attention to the faces – they were already rotting. He was looking for a dull scar that Chijioke had on his chest, something like a birthmark.

He wanted his son’s body. He desperately needed a body to put into the ground. He needed the body for closure. The body was essential. His Igbo culture demands a body. He wanted his son’s spirit to rest in peace. He wanted the ancestors to know that he had carried out the proper burial rites. He was looking for his son’s body in a river of decaying bodies, turning over the corpses one by one until there were no more to turn.

Emmanuel left without his son’s body.

A family mourns in silence

With Chijioke gone, the Iloanyas decided to keep his story to themselves. They did not bring it up with people outside the family. Still, some people heard gossip about Chijioke being an armed robber and stopped visiting the family. In Nigeria, families whose loved ones are taken by law enforcement officials often experience a deep shame, even when the person is innocent. There is a stigma associated with having your relative arrested and the Iloanya family felt it.

So they kept quiet, year after year, as Chijioke never came back.

“So you start asking me, ‘How is your brother’? ‘He’s fine.’ ‘Where is he?’ ‘He’s no longer in the country,’” Ebuka says. “That’s what I normally tell people. It’s just a way to tell them to leave me alone.”

They have tried to move on with their lives: go to work, keep the house clean, watch television. But there is sadness and they have each had to find a way to live with it.

For Emmanuel, going out to socialise with people in the neighbourhood helps him.

“Whenever, I’m alone. I’m not comfortable,” he says.

The day the police rejected the money he had offered after selling his daughter’s burial ground, Emmanuel went home with thoughts of regret, hopelessness and frustration tormenting his mind.

Ebuka shared a bedroom with Chijioke for almost 20 years. They went to the same schools. Like millions of Nigerians, they followed the British Premier Football League and Chijioke, a Tottenham fan, used to tease Ebuka whenever Manchester United, his favourite team, lost a game.

“You have a brother and all of a sudden, you don’t have a brother.”

Obianuju says she and Chijioke were always together. They shared secrets. He covered for her whenever she did not do her household chores. Whenever she eats something salty these days, she thinks of Chijioke. He used to sprinkle extra salt on his food. It is these sorts of memories that Obianuju battles with.

She got angry at God, disappointed by Peace’s death and again, for what happened to Chijioke.

“It’s difficult for me to reconcile that with my faith. The Bible says whatever you ask of God, he will do for you … why should I be praying for justice when it should be a basic thing?” she asks. She admits that she turned away from God.

A mother’s despair

Obianuju and Ebuka say that of all the people in the family, it is their mother, Hope, who is having the hardest time.

Hope had finally crawled her way out of misery after Peace died. But what happened to Chijioke pushed her back in. She stopped going to social events and even avoided going to the market because she said people would point or look at her sympathetically.

“I just went inside and locked myself up,” the exhausted 53-year-old explains.

A devout Christian, she searched for God. She continued to go to church, but even there, she would think of Chijioke, who played drums for the church’s band.

Hope went deeper into her spirituality and fell into a frantic ritual of looking for prophets to help bring Chijioke back, taking photographs of Chijioke to altars, paying offerings, fasting and praying for hours at a time. She hopped from one evangelical ministry to another, across states. She went as far as Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub more than 500km (310 miles) away, to visit Synagogue Church of All Nations, known across Africa for its charismatic televangelist TB Joshua. Obianuju clenches her jaw and furrows her eyebrows when she remembers this. She believes pastors exploited her mother.

“I took them as frauds. Because there’s no reason why you should be lying to a woman who is looking for her child and you say that you would pray today and in 30 days a miracle would happen,” Obianuju says. “You just take money from her.”

Hope paid less attention to her canteen. At times, she could not muster the strength to go to work, so the business suffered. She is hardly making any profit now and has lost customers. Some days, she shuts down, staying in the house and barely speaking. She is running on auto-pilot: wake up, pray, bathe, make breakfast, maybe go to the shop, maybe not, cook, come back home, sleep. Her face is patched in shadows and fine lines cut into her skin below eyes that weep with sorrow.

Her husband and children are trying to help her. But they do not quite know how.

“Most nights, you wake up and you see her crying,” Ebuka says.

Inside Awkuzu SARS

“Welcome to Hell Fire” was what Justin Nwankwo saw etched on a wall in black paint when he entered Awkuzu SARS.

In August 2013, Nwankwo was arrested from a popular hotel where he worked as a manager, along with the hotel’s owner and some of the staff. Nwafor and his officers had found a gun and two human skulls inside one of the guest rooms. Founded on fears over a 1996 case of an adolescent boy being beheaded in a hotel in a neighbouring state, the police discovery sparked rumours around town that the staff in the hotel were engaged in sacrificial killings.

Nwankwo spent 81 days in Awkuzu SARS, a “human abattoir” he calls it. He says towards the back of the station across the open courtyard, there is a torture hall with odd-looking metallic rings and bars hanging from the walls.

“I was hanged. I was beaten. Guns were sporadically shot around me … they used their boots to hit my scrotum,” he tells Al Jazeera. He saw people shot dead in his cell and heard inmates screaming for their mothers and fathers.

Nwankwo, who is now a university lecturer, said he passed out several times in the torture hall before he was taken to Cell 5, which is behind the counter near the entrance. It is known to be the worst cell.

Nwankwo drew a sketch of what the inside of the station looks like, noting that there are five cells in total. He says Cells 5 and 4 are pitch-black. Cell 3 is adjoined to 4 by a wall. Cell 2 is for women. Detainees in Cell 1 are usually asked to clean up the blood in the torture hall.

When he was released after receiving bail from a high court, he went for a medical checkup which revealed that he had internal bleeding, a ruptured scrotum and infections.

Human rights organisations have documented accounts of torture in Awkuzu SARS that corroborate Nwankwo’s.

The sister of a 27-year-old university student told Amnesty International that when she saw her brother two days after he was taken to Awkuzu SARS, he was limping, looked sick and had injuries on his shoulder, legs and torso. She said he told her that he was beaten, hung from a rope and forced to say that he was an armed robber.

“They took me to the back of the building and tied my hands to the back. They also connected the rope to my legs, leaving me hanging on a suspended iron rod,” a 33-year-old fuel attendant told Amnesty after he was imprisoned for two weeks in Awkuzu SARS in January 2015.

A trader narrated his account to Human Rights Watch: “They brought me out around seven [in the morning] and started tying a tube around my arms from my hand to my shoulder. After six hours they loosened it. They then tied my hands behind my back and put a cane through my arms, put two blocks on my back, and hung me for around two and a half hours.”

Civil rights campaigner Emeka Umeagbalasi of the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law has studied police brutality in Nigeria for years and attributes it to several factors.

“Crude and unprofessional policing,” he says. “The Nigerian police has continually adopted the policing of the yore, the policing of the Stone Age.” He also blames corruption, describing the Nigerian Police Force as a commercialised institution.

Nkiruka Ugochukwu agrees that police officers in Nigeria are after money. She believes that was why her 32-year-old son, Chimezie, a successful Angola-based businessman, was arrested in 2016 and taken to Awkuzu SARS. He had travelled from Angola back home to Anambra to see her and pay her hospital bill when she was unwell. But, days after he had arrived home, Ugochukwu found out that her son was missing. The police said he was driving a stolen Toyota Sienna minivan, even though an investigation proved that he had legitimately bought the car, Nweke Nweke, a local crime reporter who closely followed the story, tells Al Jazeera.

Ugochukwu, like many parents whose children were taken to Awkuzu SARS, never saw her son again. People have told her that he is dead, but she is not convinced.

“My spirit has not told me that my son is dead,” she says with a firm nod of her head.

Ukamaka Obasi, another mother, knows that all three of her sons are dead. They were allegedly killed in Awkuzu SARS between 2012 and 2014. The oldest, Ebuka, was 20 years old, when he was arrested in June 2012 and accused of being a MASSOB member; Obiora was arrested in August 2013 and accused of being pro-MASSOB. Chibuike, the last one, was accused of armed robbery.

Obasi had called Nweke to help her find out what was going on with her sons. Nweke, who knows his way around the Awkuzu SARS station, went there and saw Chibuike hanging from a rope.

“Somebody [an officer] was upstairs. The boy was down. They [police officers] were drawing him, as if they were drawing water from a well,” Nweke says. He has been on the crime beat for 38 years and has investigated countless cases of police brutality. He says that Obasi’s case is one of the saddest he has ever heard.

When the first of her sons was arrested and confined in Awkuzu SARS’s dreaded Cell 5, Obasi says she went regularly to buy food for him to eat. After about two weeks of going to pay to make sure he got food, one of the officials told her to stop bringing money because he “has travelled”.

“They use the word, ‘travel’. That they have ‘travelled’ him. That’s the language they use. Immediately, once they say they’ve ‘travelled him’, we know [the person is dead]. That’s SARS,” Nweke explains and confirms that officers had also told him, as someone who was following the case, each time one of her sons had died.

Obasi says the same happened with Obiora and again with Chibuike. Each time after she brought money for their food for a few days, an official told her that there was no need to keep coming because the son she was feeding was already dead.

Obasi has no living children now. At night, she says she hears them calling out to her in her dreams. Her husband could not handle the blow of losing all his children and went to his ancestral village to get away from it all, leaving her alone in the city to sell fruit and nuts on the street.

Breaking the silence

The Iloanyas had not spoken in public about Chijioke’s case for years, but in 2019, Obianuju broke the silence.

“I told myself I will no longer be held back by this culture of shame. If it will lose friends for me, then that’s fine. But now, I’m going to talk,” Obianuju explains.

She had just watched When They See Us, the award-winning American crime drama mini-series based on the true story of five innocent teenage boys charged with attacking a woman in New York City. She said the programme triggered her. It premiered in May 2019, and a month later, she went on Twitter to post her very first tweet about Chijioke. It was a six-part thread that would be the first of many.

“November 29th 2012, I got a call that #Sars arrested all the people that went for the child dedication at Ajali that day. Mum told you not to go but you insisted he was your friend’s first child. Where are you brother? We miss you? #WhenTheySeeUs #ENDSARS”

“It’s closure that we want. We simply want to know if Chijioke is alive or dead. If dead, why? We want answers. 7 years is a long while but we won’t stop asking for answers. We won’t lose hope. #WhenTheySeeUs #EndSARS”

In July 2020, James Nwafor, who headed Awkuzu SARS when Chijioke was arrested, posted a tweet about the case. It was the first public statement.

“The name of the deceased suspects are Chijioke Iloanya and Ebuka Okeke. The filling station they robbed is Cabard filling station…”

The Iloanya family said they had never been told that Chijioke had been charged with robbing a petrol station. After years of waiting for some kind of information, Obianuju says she had to accept that her brother could really be dead. But she says Nwafor’s tweet also revealed that her brother may have been a victim of extrajudicial killing, due to Nwafor’s reference to “deceased suspects”.

“It means they were arrested, so what happened after the arrests that they became deceased?” she asks. “My brother was murdered in cold blood without access to justice. He was not given an opportunity to defend himself.”

Nwafor’s message raised more questions. The Iloanya family wants answers. Obianuju has taken charge of leading her family’s quest for justice for Chijioke.

She is not the only one. Across Nigeria, other families are breaking the code of silence. In response to the #EndSARS protests, 29 of Nigeria’s 36 states reportedly announced the creation of judicial panels, inviting the public to submit petitions on police brutality and extrajudicial killings. In Anambra State, to date, more than 310 petitions, including the Iloanyas’, have been submitted to the panel since it opened in mid-October. Nwafor’s name appears multiple times in the majority of them, Chijioke Ifediora, a member of the panel, confirmed to Al Jazeera.

Nwankwo also testified at the panel. He is demanding 50 million naira ($131,578) in compensation as well as a public apology from the Nigerian Police Force and for the state government to officially clear his name.

Nweke, the veteran local crime reporter, hired a lawyer to submit petitions on behalf of Ugochukwu, the mother whose Angola-based son was charged with driving a stolen vehicle, and Obasi, the mother of three sons who died after being taken to Awkuzu SARS.

On November 19, Emmanuel Iloanya appeared before the panel to testify. He told the story of what happened to Chijioke. He is demanding 150 million naira ($395,778) in compensation, but says nothing can ever bring back what he has lost.

“I have spent what this panel can give me, I want justice. Let the government bring these policemen here to tell me what my son did,” he said at the hearing.

The panel summoned Nwafor and the current inspector general of the Nigerian Police Force. Neither of them showed up.

Instead, the police submitted to the panel a document about Chijioke’s case. It stated that after interrogation, Chijioke confessed that he was an armed robber and had escorted police officers to his hideout in January 2013. There, criminals opened fire on the police and Chijioke was struck by a bullet and died in hospital.

The Iloanyas were shocked to hear this new information. “I’m just tired,” Obianuju says.

Nwafor is facing intense public scrutiny. The years of allegations against him are coming to bear.

This Akwuzu SARS unit and their commander should be charged at The Hague with crimes against humanity for the systematic torture and murder of so many innocent people. @amnesty @hrw #EndSarsNow — Gesare Chife (@gechife) October 16, 2020

James Nwafor, we have not forgotten about you. You’re a murderer & you brought sorrow to countless families. You must pay for your crimes. You might be free cos you’re being protected but you’ll never be really free. Arrest & charge him with all other indicted officers #EndSARS pic.twitter.com/uAU6vkz06k — Odogwu (@BigChiefDamian) December 22, 2020

Anambra State residents say he was behind the most heinous abuses carried out at the Awkuzu SARS station when he led it from 2012 to 2018.

When he retired in 2018, the Anambra State government hired him as a security assistant to the governor. At the height of the #EndSARS protests in Anambra, campaigners stood in front of the governor’s office until the incumbent came out and told them that Nwafor’s appointment had been terminated.

Since then, Nwafor has been laying low, away from the public eye. But, people are looking for him. There was a WhatsApp group created to announce a reward for anyone who sights Nwafor. Al Jazeera made numerous attempts to communicate with Nwafor. He responded to say that he could not speak to the press.

Nwankwo describes Nwafor as a “pathological killer”. “He’s nearly insane,” he says, explaining that if Nwafor even touches his gun, it is because he intends to fire it at someone. “He cannot bring out his pistol and [have] it return back without sounding,” he says.

Nweke accuses Nwafor of sending assassins to try to kill him on account of his numerous reports on police brutality.

“A lot of people are afraid of Nwafor,” Ebuka says. “The killing is too much. If it’s just arrests and bailing, people may not actually be talking about it. But it’s the killing and the brutality.”

With Nwafor out of sight, #EndSARS campaigners made their way, en masse, to Awkuzu SARS on October 16. Ebuka was there, surrounded by hundreds of other young people. They came from various parts of Nigeria’s southeastern region, gathering in the Anambra State capital of Awka to commute in convoys for the 35-minute drive to Awkuzu.

Live in Awka, Anambra State. We are not here to joke. Currently on our way to Awkuzu SARS. #EndSARS pic.twitter.com/qPxhCywpCi — Chima Ihueze (@IhuezeMD) October 16, 2020

When they arrived at the station, townspeople went out to join the protesters and their numbers swelled. Music celebrities were also in the crowd along with private security agents to protect the gatherers. For many people, it was the closest they had gotten to the station that they had heard so much about. The campaigners shouted and demanded that someone come out and address them. Their chants of “No More SARS” grew louder and louder until shots rang out.

Right at Awkuzu Sars station. Shots fired but don’t think anyone was hit. Tear gas everywhere. #EndSARS #EndSWAT pic.twitter.com/Pz5guuCqKy — Love of her life (@ChibuikePeters) October 16, 2020

No one was killed, but Awkuzu SARS police officers had come out and started firing . The youngsters ran for their lives. Ebuka went around helping people who had fallen before finally leaving the scene. His mother never wanted him there in the first place.

Steps towards reform?

The #EndSARS protests are considered to be the largest youth-led campaign against the Nigerian Police Force in the country’s history. Young Nigerians galvanised to confront an institution perceived as one of the worst in the world. Nigeria’s police force had the lowest score of 127 countries in a 2016 index that looked at how the police enforce the law, follows due process, deters corruption and is viewed by the public and other factors.

“I think we’ve really witnessed over the last years, deep-seated inaction from the authorities. There’s been no political will to look into this institution,” Anietie Ewang, the Nigeria researcher for Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera’s Inside Story .

The government called for psychological evaluations for officers from the now-defunct SARS and created a SWAT police unit.

But the police insist that they, too, are victims, overworked, underpaid and then targeted when armed men took over the streets in the aftermath of October’s #EndSARS protests.

“We came under sordid attacks by some hoodlums and criminal elements. Our stations were attacked and burned. Some were vandalised,” John Abang, the commissioner of police for Anambra State, tells Al Jazeera.

“Some officers paid the supreme price,” he says. “Of course, we’re human. We have parents, too. We have wives, we have cousins, we have nephews.”

The Anambra State police command’s public relations officer, Haruna Mohammed, showed Al Jazeera a gory video on his mobile phone of a man on a motorbike holding the decapitated head of a police officer, who was later identified as Inspector John Okoh, as people rush around him to look at it and snap photos.

Abang, who took over as the state police commissioner in 2019, says he has heard stories about Nwafor but cannot comment on them and trusts that the judicial panel will handle the allegations. However, he credits Awkuzu SARS for tackling violent crime in Anambra State.

“There was a time in this state when kidnapping was a regular occurrence. Every other day, individuals were kidnapped for ransom, some were gruesomely murdered in the bushes even after collecting ransom,” he says, adding that commercial banks used to operate between eight in the morning to one in the afternoon for fear of being robbed.

“But SARS rose to the occasion and today, I can say that for several years now, the issue of kidnapping in Anambra State, like other states in the southeast, has been brought to a very bare minimum.”

Awkuzu SARS is now defunct and the building is in the service of the Anambra State Criminal Investigation Department of the Nigerian Police Force.

Praying for closure

It is about 6.30am on a Sunday morning in November and the Iloanya family is waking up. Emmanuel, Hope, Ebuka, Obianuju and Kosisochukwu shuffle into the living room. They come together to pray. It is a daily family ritual.

Outside, a gentle Harmattan breeze blows around the frame of the small house. The sun has not come up yet and the room is dim. The leather couch cushions sag under sleepy bodies. The family starts with a rhythm, clapping their hands in unison. Then, they sing a spiritual song in the Igbo language:

N’ụtụtụ, eji m ekele ya. N’ihu onyenwe m n’abalị, ka m kwere y ana nkwa. (In the morning, I greet Him. Before my Lord in the night, I promise him.)

Obianuju sits on a couch below the window, keeping her voice low. She has found her way back to God, in her own way. She is now able to spend more time with her family because she no longer has a job back in Abuja. She says she felt that her boss was pressuring her to quit, uncomfortable with Obianuju’s prominence in the #EndSARS movement. Obianuju says she is happy that she left and that on grounds of principle, she refuses to work with someone who opposes her advocacy for her brother. Losing her job is not the only price she is paying for her activism. Like other #EndSARS protesters, she believes the Nigerian federal government is following her.

“They’re now tracking us to kill us,” she says.

One protester told Al Jazeera that government agents ransacked his home and office. Some snuck out of the country. Others found their bank accounts blocked. The Central Bank of Nigeria claims that accounts were being used to “finance terrorism”. Obianuju uses a VPN to browse the internet, travels in secret and when she is back in Abuja, stays with friends. But she says she will be fine. A political science graduate, she is looking for a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree and wants to work in human rights or civic engagement.

After years of never speaking in public about Chijioke, Ebuka finally did. He went to a nighttime candlelight service during the #EndSARS protest where gatherers spoke the names of people who had died.

When the announcer on the stage said “Chijioke Iloanya” hundreds of people responded: “We remember!” Ebuka’s voice wailed above the others, trailing just a little longer. He stood up in front of everyone and told them his brother’s story.

“I don’t know what happened to me that night,” Ebuka says, still overwhelmed with emotions. “I was just saying anything without holding anything back.” He says that night freed him.

Nonetheless, he is still angry and wants to leave Nigeria. After Nigerian soldiers fired shots during an #EndSARS protest in Lagos on October 20, now known as Bloody Tuesday, young Nigerians went on social media to vent their frustration with the government; many said they want to move abroad. Ebuka, a psychology graduate who works as a part-time driver and a DJ, wants to leave as early as possible to “any place that is not Nigeria”.

Emmanuel will stay. His family needs him and he needs them. He says they are “the back of his bone”. He is immensely proud of Obianuju for taking initiative in the family’s journey for justice.

In the morning prayer session, Kosisochukwu sings in a dainty soprano voice, closing her eyes, sitting next to Ebuka. At 20 years old, she is the youngest in the family and has been helping her mother, Hope, in the canteen when not attending university classes. Hope still needs all the support she can get from her family. She says she wants to be strong and healthy, for whenever Chijioke comes back, but at the same time, she is beginning to think that he may really be dead. She just wants closure; they all do.

She is going out more these days. Her children hope it is a sign that she is getting better. The previous day, she went out for a social event, dressed up in a scarlet blouse with gold embroidery and a matching skirt of George fabric. She put on a pair of drop earrings and even cracked a smile when Obianuju stood behind her, plaiting a braid down her back. Mother and daughter looked at the mirror together, sharing a tender moment.

Hope leads the family to recite Psalms 23. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want …” And when it is over, Hope, her eyes bloodshot and puffy from crying earlier, does what she does every morning: she says his name.

Chijioke’s face looks down from fading photos leaning on the far wall of the living room above the television set.

Behind the parlour, the sunlight begins to stream into the corridor, pouring light into the dark rooms. One of them is where Chijioke used to sleep. After his arrest, Hope locked up the room and kept everything in its place for when he returned. No one was allowed to go in, except to clean it. She did not want people messing with his stuff, so his bedroom stayed put throughout 2013, 2014.

Then in 2015, Obianuju, Kosisochukwu and Ebuka decided among themselves that it was time to give the room to Kosisochukwu because no one was using it and she needed her own space. But Hope was not ready. So the room remained still from 2016, 2017, 2018. Hope was finally ready to give up the room in 2019. The family started the difficult process of giving away Chijioke’s belongings. They gave them to neighbours, cousins, people in need. His clothes, hats, textbooks – they gave practically everything away. There is hardly anything left of Chijioke’s now, although last month, Obianuju found a plaid shirt and a belt.

His beloved shoes are gone.

Nigeria can defeat banditry by reconstructing the police system – criminologist

Regional Coordinator, Institute for Security Studies

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Men in helmets, bulletproof vests camouflage uniform, carrying weapons.

Security in Nigeria has degenerated in the last 10 years. Various non-state armed groups have emerged countrywide.

These actors include criminal gangs, separatist groups, Islamic fundamentalists and kidnappers. They all have different motivations and ways of operating.

One of the country’s most pressing security challenges is described as “banditry”. It includes armed robbery, kidnapping, murder, rape and illegal possession of firearms.

Attacks by bandits increased from 124 to 1,031 incidents between 2018 and 2022. There were around 13,485 banditry-related deaths between 2010 and May 2023.

The activities of bandits are fast spreading from north-western Nigeria to states in the north-central region. This is aided in part by the limited state presence in the rural areas of these regions.

The primary authority to amplify state presence is the police. But poor policing in these areas has enabled banditry to continue. A different policing approach is needed.

In a recent paper I propose a new approach to policing the problem. I set out a framework which encompasses mainstream policing, hybrid policing and a new layer of security architecture – a joint task force with the state police.

The proposed model places the local community at the centre of policing, rooting policing in society.

Federal and state police

At the moment, policing in Nigeria is under the central control of the federal government. Section 214 of the 1999 Nigerian constitution says that aside from the Nigeria Police Force, “no other Police Force shall be established for the Federation or any part thereof”.

I argue that multilevel policing would be well suited to combating armed banditry and other criminality in the country.

The proposed framework reconstructs the police system to cut across the federal and sub-national governments.

The federating units ought to take greater charge of security within their own jurisdiction. The federal government should also maintain a critical lever of management, and support the devolution of police power to the states.

The state level would complement, not replace, the federal police.

Research aims and methods

To arrive at this suggested framework, I reviewed literature and interviewed key informants from religious communities, women’s groups, youths, academia and police. I focused on four states – Kaduna, Katsina, Niger and Zamfara – that have emerged as banditry hotspots in Nigeria.

The study also drew on information on terror attacks extracted from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project .

This project provides data about the date, location and perpetrators of bandit attacks. Coordinates show their spatial distribution and pattern.

Through qualitative and quantitative research, my study attempts to come up with a policing model that can counter armed banditry in north-west Nigeria.

Responses to banditry

There are four distinct but complementary models in the existing – though disjointed – security mix and law enforcement responses to banditry. They are the mainstream policing, vigilante, hybrid policing and joint task force models.

Nigerian Police Force: The job of the Nigerian Police Force is mainstream policing: gathering intelligence, identifying and protecting vulnerable targets, and responding to attacks.

The police force has foiled banditry attacks, neutralised bandits, recovered AK-47 rifles and motorcycles used in attacks, arrested suspects and rescued victims.

Vigilante model: Communities adopt this approach to compensate for a lack of police presence. Vigilante organisations are sustained associations of private citizens voluntarily seeking to provide quasi security functions. Their methods of preventing crime may involve force or the threat of force. They may rescue victims, arrest criminals, and participate in joint security operations with the police and army.

Vigilante groups in the north-west hold training sessions but have only crude weapons. This puts them at a disadvantage against bandits.

Hybrid policing model: This is about community-focused engagement. Zamfara state hired 7,500 youths . The trainees were deployed locally to help the conventional security agents. Katsina state has also used community policing for simple routine duties such as crowd control, traffic and patrol duties, and gathering intelligence.

Joint task force model: This is the idea of inter-agency collaboration to achieve fast results through the combination of military and policing capabilities. It is a crisis response strategy.

Countries where military and law enforcement agencies have been fused for peace operations include Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo . The experiment has yielded useful results in operations against organised and serious war crimes.

Policing to combat armed banditry

My study proposes a police system that cuts across levels of government.

Constitutionally, Nigeria operates a unitary policing system. The Nigeria Police Force is the sole policing actor with a constitutional mandate.

However, other policing actors (such as the vigilante and hybrid policing models) operate in the space with different levels of legitimacy, highlighting the chaotic policing framework in Nigeria.

Therefore, my core argument is that the Nigerian government must consider decentralising policing from the federal to state and community levels. This is the idea of multilevel policing and it requires constitutional amendment.

This will create a scenario where the present vigilante structure can be constituted as a local community level policing organ for the purpose of intelligence gathering and other community level policing activities.

Nigeria kidnapping
rural banditry
separatists

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Nigeria’s harsh police culture grew from colonial abuses

Akali omeni’s new book ‘policing and politics in nigeria: a comprehensive history’ explains why this culture persists.

While I’m teaching my politics of policing class in Philadelphia, I often suggest that the United States can learn lessons about policing by studying other countries through a comparative lens. Students can be skeptical. But it’s not hard to show that many issues we might think are unique to policing in the United States — disproportional violence against minoritized communities, militarization of police, patterns of state repression by police, political elites weaponizing crime for political gain — come up again and again around the world.

Consider one foundational challenge of policing: the expectation that the government should have a monopoly on violence and that police are charged with using it to protect citizens’ security. Police officers are supposed to exercise that monopoly in a country, deciding how and when to use that violence in the communities they patrol. But their right to do so is highly contested. In many societies, police have dual roles. Yes, they are responsible for providing law and order, ostensibly keeping communities safe from crime. But they are also used by people in power to coerce their political opponents. That leaves citizens with two questions: Whose interests do the police protect and how do politics shape policing?

In “Policing and Politics in Nigeria: A Comprehensive History,” Akali Omeni skillfully examines these issues as he traces the history of policing in Nigeria from the colonial era to now. While Omeni situates the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) as a foundational institution of the Nigerian state, he also argues that the NPF is a broken institution that does not place the “average Nigerian’s interest and well-being at the core of its culture.”

Just over two years ago, the #EndSARS social movement in Nigeria drew worldwide attention to the ongoing culture of police abuse and impunity within the NPF’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). The NPF tasked SARS with handling violent crimes like armed robbery, motor vehicle theft, kidnapping and murders. But rather than effectively protecting communities and curbing violent crimes in Nigeria, SARS became infamous for its police brutality against civilians .

This is not a new phenomenon in Nigeria , or the region. Drawing on historical evidence and interviews he conducted, Omeni documents an ongoing culture of NPF police abuse from the colonial era until now, including extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, enforced disappearances and corruption.

Omeni begins the book in the colonial era before the unification of Nigeria. The book’s early chapters show how the culture of the United Kingdom’s colonial police force was shaped by both suppressing local rebellions and independence movements and by fighting in World Wars I and II. As an institution, the police were on the front line protecting British colonial interests. Omeni shows how even the individual colonial administrators’ opinions uniquely shaped policing. He links this British colonial policing culture to that of several imperial police forces including the Lagos Police, the Royal Niger Company, the West African Frontier Force and the Armed Hausa Police, which were eventually united into the NPF.

Next, Omeni examines several critical junctures in Nigeria’s state development, when its government had the opportunity to change policing for the better. These include Nigeria’s independence in 1960; decades of military dictatorship; and Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999. Instead of reforming the police to focus on protecting Nigerian citizens, Omeni shows that successive governments allowed the colonial era’s policing culture of us-vs.-them to persist. Even as the NPF became centralized, Omeni argues, the politics of control and partisanship within the police shaped political events like the Biafra war , decades of military rule and the eventual transition to the democratic Fourth Republic.

Omeni argues that British colonial rule continues to shape policing in Nigeria. But he also makes a strong case that Nigeria’s leaders have repeatedly broken promises and failed to reform the police to meet the needs of Nigerian citizens. Omeni shows that while policing practices, trainings and pathologies developed under the colonial era persist today, the culture of police abuse — most infamously known through the SARS unit’s flagrant abuses — continues because of such larger issues as institutional neglect, political tensions and authoritarian dynamics. In other words, rather than protecting everyday Nigerians, politicians and police officers in Nigeria used the institution’s pathologies for their own ends.

Omeni could have connected how the history of policing in Nigeria connects and relates to policing more generally. As I read this book, I kept thinking that while the history of policing in Nigeria is a Nigerian story, it is also a larger story about how the institution of policing is designed to use violence to control societies. Yes, police are also supposed to keep communities safe and deter crime — but fundamentally their role is to ensure political control of local communities.

For individuals trying to understand the #ENDSARS movement, militarization and the police, the lingering effects of settler colonial dynamics, and the durability of authoritarian institutions and repressive behaviors by police, even in ostensibly democratic societies, this is a must read.

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Travis Curtice ( @travisbcurtice ) is an assistant professor in the department of politics at Drexel University. His research examines the politics of policing and political violence.

As Lawlessness Roils Nigeria, Police Chief Vows to Take Back Streets

As protests against police brutality have subsided after a violent crackdown, they have been followed by a wave of looting and vandalism that the police have vowed to end.

By Shola Lawal

LAGOS — Nigeria ’s police chief on Saturday ordered the mobilization of all police resources to reclaim public space after more than two weeks of peaceful protests over police brutality gave way to widespread vandalism and looting.

The order came four days after the police and soldiers fired on demonstrators , killing 12 and injuring hundreds in an upscale Lagos neighborhood. The protesters are demanding that the government dismantle and discipline a police unit known as SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, which for years has been known for detaining, brutalizing and stealing from citizens, particularly young people.

Tuesday’s violent crackdown on protesters, combined with a nighttime curfew imposed in its wake and protest leaders urging people to stay home, have largely cleared peaceful demonstrators from the streets of Lagos.

But following the shootings, which outraged Nigerians, at least 17 police stations were destroyed in Lagos, according to a police spokesman.

Widespread looting has also taken place, including at government warehouses stocked with food. Malls, TV stations and banks have been targeted as well as retail stores in popular shopping districts in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial and cultural hub.

“Enough is enough to all acts of lawlessness, disruption of public peace and order and wanton violence which have resulted in indiscriminate looting of shops, malls and warehouses, damage to property and loss of lives in some parts of the country,” said the police chief, M.A. Adamu, in a statement on Saturday evening.

Additional police units are being deployed to all 36 states, Mr. Adamu said. He added that the police would “use all legitimate means to halt the further slide into lawlessness and brigandage.”

Violence and looting were also reported in other states.

On Saturday, the governor of the southwestern state of Osun, Adegboyega Oyetola, imposed a 24-hour curfew “to forestall the breakdown of law and order and protect the lives and property of citizens and residents.”

Dozens have died in the protests against police brutality that started Oct. 8, with 38 killed across the country on Tuesday alone, Amnesty International said. The turmoil has been the worst street violence since Nigeria’s return to civilian rule in 1999.

Many of the demonstrators have been middle-class, well-educated young people in the southern and central cities, and are too young to remember the military rule that ended two decades ago.

The government has promised to reform the police force in the wake of the protests, but President Muhammadu Buhari has been criticized for not mentioning Tuesday’s shooting and for warning Nigerians against “undermining national security.”

He further inflamed the protesters Friday by saying security forces have exercised “extreme restraint” in handling the situation.

Mr. Buhari has said 51 civilians have been killed, along with 11 police officers and seven soldiers since the protests began.

Protesters said the surge in violence this week could damage their peaceful efforts at reform and allow the government to cast the movement as having been hijacked by criminal elements.

“The lootings don’t put us in a good light,” said Chiamaka Ebochue, 27, a protester in Lagos. “We have to take this loss and restrategize. We need to be aware of our voting rights — that’s the only ammunition we have.”

Tony Iyare contributed reporting from Lagos.

Shola Lawal was the 2019 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow at the International Women’s Media Foundation. More about Shola Lawal

IMAGES

Police Brutality in Nigeria Receives Global Attention
What To Know About End SARS Police Brutality In Nigeria
Nigerian Protesters Against Police Brutality Demand Justice a Year Later
Protesters attacked in Nigerian demos against police abuse
Police brutality in Nigeria is a global phenomenon
UN chief calls for end to reported police brutality in Nigeria

COMMENTS

Police Brutality in Nigeria and the #EndSARS Movement
Daniel Chibuike was a 20-year-old aspiring musician when he was shot dead on October 5, 2020 by police officers serving in the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigerian Police Force. Chibuike's death was the last straw for Nigeria's youth, who had already taken to the streets in 2017 to demand the abolishment of SARS. The Nigerian government, in a desperate attempt to calm down the ...
#EndSARS: The Movement Against Police Brutality in Nigeria
A Human Rights Solution. #EndSARS has morphed from a protest against police brutality to a movement for social justice and government reforms. Indeed, the protests have been described as a "vector" for broader dissatisfaction with Nigeria's political class. [27] Protests and riots have continued unabated for weeks.
Nigeria's Police Brutality Crisis: What's Happening Now
Shaken by the scope of the protests, Nigeria's leaders have promised meaningful responses that include inquiries into police impunity. The most notable step was a pledge to disband the Special ...
Police Brutality and the #EndSARS Movement in Nigeria
In October 2020, Nigerian youth took to the streets to protest against police brutality in what became the #EndSARS movement. This movement resonated across the world, in the United States of America, in Europe, and in Asia, driven by Nigerians in the diaspora. The #EndSARS movement emerged not only in response to police brutality.
Protests and blood on the streets: repressive state, police brutality
Conceptualising the repressive state in Africa. There has been a long history of police brutality in Nigeria and other African states (Tamuno, 1970; Alemika and Chukwuma, 2000; Abati, 2020).However, Abati argues that the prevalence of police brutality in Africa is a function of political leadership failure rather than colonial legacy.Ihonvbere maintains that the post-independent states in ...
#EndSARS and the History of Nigeria's Failed Police Reform
An #EndSARS protest at Alausa, Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria in October 2020. Adekunle Ajayi/NurPhoto via Getty Images. E arlier this month, in the face of swelling protests in Lagos and worldwide, the ...
Two years after #EndSARS, police brutality in Nigeria goes on
Stories of police brutality are rampant in Nigeria, Africa's largest democracy. Two-thirds of its estimated 200 million people are below the age of 30 and many, like Blamoh, say they have either ...
Protests Test Nigeria's Democracy and its Leadership in Africa
Nigeria's protests against police brutality already were the largest in the country's history before security forces opened fire on a crowd in Lagos on October 20. The protest and bloodshed have only heightened the need for the government in Africa's most populous country to end the pattern of violence by security forces against civilians.
Gone: The lost victims of Nigeria's 'most brutal' police station
In response to the #EndSARS protests, 29 of Nigeria's 36 states reportedly announced the creation of judicial panels, inviting the public to submit petitions on police brutality and ...
Nigeria's police: few promises of reform have been kept a year after #
Police brutality is not unique to Nigeria. ... This has included a report by Amnesty International citing police brutality and human rights violations in south-east Nigeria from January to June 2021.
Nigeria Goes on Offensive Against Youth Protesting Police Brutality
LAGOS, Nigeria — Nigeria 's leaders have made a show of responding to the demands of a massive youth-led uprising over police brutality that recently brought the country to a standstill and ...
Nigeria can defeat banditry by reconstructing the police system
One of the country's most pressing security challenges is described as "banditry". It includes armed robbery, kidnapping, murder, rape and illegal possession of firearms. Attacks by bandits ...
Protests and blood on the streets: repressive state, police brutality
This article investigates how the Nigerian state is implicated in police brutality and clampdown on the #EndSARS protesters and its implications for democracy, development and national security. The article used primary data comprising 38 telephone interviews, 19,609 Facebook posts/reposts and 24,799 Twitter tweets/retweets, complementing it with a wide range of secondary data. From the ...
PDF Addressing Police brutality as a form of Human Right Abuse in Nigeria
The main aim of this study is to ascertain the level of government commitment to addressing human rights abuse expressed as police brutality in Nigeria. Other specific objectives are to: 1. Ascertain the relationship between police daily routine and human rights abuse in Nigeria 2.
End SARS
51 civilians, [1] 11 policemen, [1] 7 soldiers [1] #End SARS was a decentralised social movement and series of mass protests against police brutality in Nigeria. The movement's slogan called for the disbandment of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a notorious unit of the Nigerian Police known for its long record of abuse against Nigerian ...
Two years after #EndSARS, police brutality persists in Nigeria
Nigerians must elect candidates who prioritize ending police brutality and bringing sanity to the policing system in Nigeria. Advertisement Oluwatobi Ojo is a writing fellow at the African Liberty.
Nigeria's harsh police culture grew from colonial abuses
Omeni begins the book in the colonial era before the unification of Nigeria. The book's early chapters show how the culture of the United Kingdom's colonial police force was shaped by both ...
As Lawlessness Roils Nigeria, Police Chief Vows to Take Back Streets
Oct. 24, 2020. LAGOS — Nigeria 's police chief on Saturday ordered the mobilization of all police resources to reclaim public space after more than two weeks of peaceful protests over police ...