Safeguarding Nigeria’s democracy

The events around the #EndSARS protest have shown that Nigerian struggle for democracy has not ended.

Under a democratic government, some rights and liberties are taken for granted. Under a democracy, principles such as ‘freedom of association’, ‘freedom of expression’, ‘right of protest’, and ‘freedom of the press’ are non-negotiable. The #EndSARS protest has revealed how quickly the Nigerian authorities will eliminate these markers of democracy when faced with a semblance of mass protest.

The retributive actions of the Nigerian government against organisers of the #EndSARS protest have reversed our advances toward a democratic society. Freezing bank accounts of protesters, placing them on travel ban or arresting them in their homes, and in the process scaring their family members, are what military dictators do.

One could understand if old habits die hard, but it is unacceptable for us as a nation that the gains of more than twenty years of struggle against military dictatorship relapse, because the government has no answers to protesters’ questions.

It was not wrong to have participated in the #EndSARS protest. The #EndSARS protest did not begin in October 2020. The unprecedentedly low turnout recorded in the 2019 general election was a protest against the broken promises and level of poverty in the country, when compared to the enthusiasm Nigerians showered on the same President in 2015.

We are not better off as a people than we were in 2015. With 40.1%, about 80.6 million of our people, living in extreme poverty, we are believed to be the poverty capital of the world. The number of unemployed youth in Nigeria is larger than the population of Rwanda. Upon that, is the existence of an extortionate police force that randomly kills young people. The justification for a citizen’s protest is just as self-evident.

One would expect that the government deploy economic resources to address the underlying economic problems substantially. Instead, we have seen showy announcements that cannot scratch the surface of Nigeria’s monstrous poverty and unemployment problem. The government accompanied it with a clampdown on protesters to make them rue exercising their fundamental human rights. But this is not just some mistakes by the regime; it is a calculated attempt to re-write a narrower conception of democracy in Nigeria.

The terror of the state is not only visited on protesters; the state threatens the free and objective trade of journalism too. The National Broadcast Commission (NBC) fined the trio of Arise TV, Channels and AIT for reporting the stories as they were, without granting these stations a fair hearing. The Commissioner of Police in Lagos has equally announced that the force will not allow any form of protest in the state. There is systematic asphyxiation of democracy ongoing here. A government should not threaten journalists with monetary loss because the government is afraid of what they will write or say, at least not under a democracy.

Wole Olubanji from Abule-Egba, Lagos State