Opinion

#EndSARS: Picking up the pieces

Published

5 years ago

October 26, 2020

-By Simon Kolawole

How can a peaceful protest end up with killing and maiming, burning and looting in a matter of days? For those of us who have seen plenty “peaceful” protests in our lives, it is not too hard to explain. The moment you hit the streets and fail to read the road signs — so that you will know where and when to turn, reverse or park — you are at the risk of losing control of the steering wheel. You will end up carrying all kinds of passengers — thugs, hoodlums, gangsters, cultists, politicians and all manner of opportunists. In fact, you may unwittingly provide cover for state agents to target the assets and possibly the lives of perceived opponents and rivals. So it goes.

In the best of times, peaceful protests can go awry — much less in these hard times, with oil prices down, government revenue falling, the currency losing value, prices of goods and services rising, and, to add fuel to the fire, COVID-19 taking our breath away. A majority of the people are already bleeding and groaning with the removal of subsidies on petrol and electricity. And with the huge population of unemployed, underemployed and unemployable youth, we knew all along that an uprising was a strong possibility at some point. That a peaceful protest against police brutality, tagged #EndSARS, would spark off this massive carnage was what we probably did not budget for.

With the protests infiltrated by rogues, the anarchy was inevitable. My biggest fear was military involvement. Those who witnessed the massacres by soldiers during the pro-June 12 protests in 1993 and other riots under military regimes would agree with me that it was not a pretty sight. I was praying that troops would not be called in to quell the #EndSARS protests. But I was wrong. On Tuesday evening, soldiers invaded the Lekki ground and started shooting. Initial reports said there was a massacre, although there is yet no identified victim: no names, no addresses, no relatives; just grainy videos with tailored commentaries. Hopefully, we will have a much clearer picture soon.

This is my “executive summary” of the #EndSARS campaign. It started as a genuine protest on social media. It went to the streets. Government saw the danger and accepted the five demands of the protesters. Police disbanded SARS. States set up judicial panels to probe police brutality. Despite getting these concessions, protesters remained adamant. Then came the partisan and sectional dimensions — with #BuhariMustGo and #EndNigeria added to the hashtags. Mayhem started. Looting. Shooting. Lynching. Curfew. Then Lekki happened. And President Muhammadu Buhari, silent for so long, finally addressed the nation, basically declaring: “The fire next time!”

After Buhari’s broadcast, I could see defeat on the faces of the youth. Many started tweeting about relocating to Canada, declaring a total loss of faith in Nigeria. #ItIsFinished began trending. This is sad but I would like to appeal to the Nigerian youth not to give in or give up. The #EndSARS protest did not fail. For one, the protesters got the government to act on their demands — which is a major victory by any definition. SARS has been disbanded. I can bet that whatever police unit replaces SARS will come under stricter scrutiny. Judicial panels have been set up. We expect to see the murderous police officers face justice. Police reform is now an imperative. These are big wins.

Moreover, the youth have shown that they have the ability to organise. These are the same youth we condemn for voting more in Big Brother Naija than in general election. We have often described them as lazy, entitled and obsessed with Instagram, fast cars and bling. By starting a campaign against SARS and taking to the streets to protest police brutality, they brought the country to a halt and attracted international interest. Everybody started paying attention to them. We started celebrating the coming of age of our youth. Older people started scrambling to associate with the cause. Ladies and gentlemen, this is surely a positive development. Let’s not discard it.

What next? According to data from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) released before the 2019 general election, the youth — described as those between ages 18 and 35 — made up about 51 percent of the 84 million registered voters. If you expand the age bracket to 50 years (to accommodate other young Nigerians like me), the figure jumps up to 81 percent. That is mind-boggling. What the youth should be thinking now is how to use these humongous figures to bring about new things in Nigeria in 2023 — rather than flee to Canada. They should realise Canada was not built in a day. Its people fought hard to build the country with their sweat and blood.

Just a brief journey into Canada’s history: there were two rebellions against “bad governance” between 1837 and 1838. The rebels were arrested after the uprisings and put on trial. Samuel Lount, one of the organisers of the Upper Canada Rebellion, was publicly hanged. He is regarded as a martyr till today. Over 100 rebels were sentenced to life imprisonment. What the rebel leaders wanted was political reform. They had a common agenda for Canada. Even though they paid the ultimate price, Canada was never the same again. Reform came. Today, Canada is one of the most developed countries in the world. But Canada was not always like this. People paid the price.

What’s my point? The youth must begin to conceive a new political order and the role they can play in birthing it. The #OccupyOjota protests of 2012 helped in building the momentum that uprooted the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from power in 2015 and installed the All Progressives Congress (APC). In 2023, the #EndSARS momentum can become a movement that will help uproot both APC and PDP from power and birth a new political culture where government officials will begin to pay less attention to the perks of office and more to their responsibilities to Nigerians. And I mean at all levels — local, state and federal. That would be the best legacy of #EndSARS.

Behold, how good and how pleasant it would be for Nigerian youth to unite in the quest for good governance! They can be more politically active. They can be more involved in choosing councillors, council chairpersons, state lawmakers, governors, federal lawmakers and the president. It does not mean only the youth will occupy these positions. In addition to contesting, the youth can engage with the aspirants and candidates, scrutinise them, advance the agenda of good governance, monitor the performances of those elected or appointed, and mobilise for recall or removal if they fail to deliver. Canada was not built in a day. Nation-building is not a sprint. It is a marathon.

I hope the youth have also learnt their lessons from the #EndSARS fiasco. One, you don’t go to war without visible leadership. You will end up creating anarchy and mob action. We can now see the consequences. Things completely went out of control and there was nobody to call the mobsters to order. Leadership is key in every life endeavour. Two, you don’t go to war without a plan. There should be Plan A, Plan B and even Plan C. I did not see any plan apart from “we no go gree o”. Three, because of lack of leadership and strategy, the protests continued when they should have been called off. Now over 70 people are dead. This is extremely disturbing and disheartening.

Four, you must take your wins and know when to retreat without surrendering. When SARS was disbanded and judicial panels set up, that was the time to retreat. That was the time to say: “We are suspending the protests. If nothing changes, we will return to the streets.” Some people were even demanding that Buhari should sign an “executive order” to show that SARS had been disbanded. It got that ridiculous. Some rejected the panels because there was no “youth” and declared a boycott. I have come to learn that boycott is not an effective strategy. Campaign for youth inclusion in the panels but mobilise to engage with the process and follow through to get justice.

Five, you must stay the message. Nigerians were united in the call to stop police brutality. It was nationwide. Contrary to the propaganda, there were #EndSARS protests in Kaduna, Kano, Kwara, Nasarawa, Adamawa and some other northern states. It was not a purely southern thing. Unfortunately, some people sneaked in their #BuhariMustGo and #EndNigeria agenda and things began to fall apart. More so, protesters started losing focus when they moved from the unifying agenda against police brutality and expanded it to an omnibus campaign for restructuring and ending corruption and bad governance. It is impossible to achieve everything at a go.

Finally, the youth must learn from their elders. As the Yoruba would say, no matter how many Gucci shirts a child has, he can never have as many rags as an elder. Some youth actually think the story of Nigeria started in 1999 or 2015. Actually, people have been fighting for a better Nigeria for 100 years. Our forefathers played their roles and left. We are still fighting for a better Nigeria. We cannot all adopt the same style and strategy. Ultimately, we need to engage constructively to change the rigged and warped system. From my little experience, starting a mass action without a strategy, without a fall-back plan, and without giving an inch can only lead to anarchy. Lessons learnt?

Simon Kolawole is chief executive officer of The Cable, an online news platform.

Related Topics:#EndSARS COVID-19 protest

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Opinion

Obituary for the PDP, By Farooq Kperogi

Published

6 days ago

March 14, 2026

Trends Admin

Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism

Farooq Kperogi

Obituary for the PDP, By Farooq Kperogi

The diminution of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) reached a symbolic pinnacle this week when a wave of defections swept through the National Assembly. Several PDP senators, including former Sokoto State governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, formally dumped the party for the African Democratic Congress (ADC), while multiple members of the House of Representatives also abandoned it for the ADC or the ruling APC.

Not every PDP legislator has left yet, but at this point it’s only a matter of time. With only two term-limited, lame-duck governors in Bauchi and Oyo states (whose continued membership in the PDP can’t even be guaranteed until 2027), I think it’s safe to say the PDP is officially dead.

For people of my generation who followed Nigerian politics closely in the early years of the Fourth Republic, the extinction of the PDP feels surreal. There was a time when the party seemed as permanent as the Nigerian state itself. It governed Nigeria for 16 uninterrupted years and so completely dominated the political landscape that opposition parties looked like pitiful ornamental appendages to the system.

At its height, the PDP controlled 31 of Nigeria’s 36 states, similar to today’s APC. Governors, senators, representatives, ministers, retired generals and career political jobbers all gravitated toward it. It was the ultimate receptacle of power and influence. In those days, joining the PDP was the closest thing Nigeria had to acquiring political insurance.

The arrogance that flowed from that dominance was legendary. In April 2008, the party’s then national chairman, Vincent Ogbulafor, boasted that the PDP would rule Nigeria for 60 years. He added, with startling candor, that he didn’t care if Nigeria became a one-party state. At the time, the statement sounded like the confident exaggeration of a man who believed he was speaking from the center of history.

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It turns out he was speaking from the edge of a cliff. Today, the PDP that proclaimed itself, with egotistical airs, to be Africa’s largest political party is a shell of its former self.

The previously expansive PDP umbrella now effectively shelters only two governors and a sprinkling of legislators (about seven senators and 17 representatives) who are plotting exit strategies from it.

That is a dramatic, never-before-seen political evaporation in Nigeria. But the PDP did not die suddenly. Its collapse has been a long, drawn-out process of self-sabotage punctuated by opportunistic defections, personal vendettas and spectacular displays of elite treachery.

The first decisive blow to the party came in 2015 when the party lost the presidency to the newly assembled All Progressives Congress (APC). For 16 years, the PDP had been the gravitational center of Nigerian politics because it controlled the federal government. Once that power vanished, the coalition that sustained it began to unravel.

Many Nigerian politicians do not join parties because of ideological affinity or programmatic conviction. They join because of proximity to power. When the PDP ceased to be the custodial party of federal authority, it also ceased to be the natural home of political opportunists.

The defections began almost immediately. Ogbulafor, who had said PDP would rule for 60 years, was one of the first PDP politicians to visit the APC secretariat in April 2015, a month before the inauguration of Muhammadu Buhari as president.

Politicians who had sworn eternal loyalty to the party discovered overnight that their political convictions had changed. Governors defected. Legislators defected. Party chieftains switched allegiances with a speed that would impress Jamaica’s Usain Bolt.

Nothing captures the PDP’s institutional collapse more vividly than the fate of its own former leaders. At least four former national chairmen of the party eventually ended up in the APC: Barnabas Gemade, Audu Ogbeh, Ali Modu Sheriff, and Adamu Mu’azu. In other words, men who led the PDP at the highest level later abandoned it for its main rival.

What remained after 2015 was a wounded party that still had a chance to recover if it had managed its internal conflicts with maturity and discipline. Instead, it chose fratricide. No individual embodies the party’s self-destructive impulses more distinctly than Nyesom Wike.

Wike’s quarrel with the PDP became especially bitter after he lost out in the struggle for the party’s presidential ticket. What followed was a prolonged campaign of internal destabilization that culminated in the notorious rebellion of the so-called G-5 governors, who are now at odds with each other.

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During the 2023 election cycle, these governors effectively turned their backs on their own party’s presidential candidate and openly fraternized with Bola Tinubu of the APC. It was one of the most extraordinary acts of partisan self-immolation in Nigeria’s democratic history.

A ruling party undermining itself from within is not unheard of. But a major opposition party actively assisting the ruling party to defeat itself is an entirely different category of political absurdity.

The strange part was that the PDP never summoned the courage to discipline the rebellion. Instead, it spent months pleading for reconciliation with politicians who had already crossed the psychological Rubicon separating loyalty from hostility.

The party leadership appeared incapable of recognizing that the rebellion was not a temporary disagreement but a permanent structural rupture.

In Nigerian politics, when a politician begins to work openly against his own party’s presidential candidate, reconciliation meetings are unlikely to restore trust.

The result was predictable. The PDP entered the 2023 elections deeply fractured and emerged from them even weaker.

Since then, the party has existed in a state of perpetual crisis. Leadership disputes, court cases and factional rivalries have turned the party into a theater of endless internal conflict. Instead of projecting the image of a credible national alternative to the APC, the PDP has appeared increasingly like a quarrelsome family fighting over inheritance while the house burns.

Nothing illustrates this political dysfunction more vividly than recent events in Abuja’s local government elections. A candidate who won a chairmanship seat on the PDP platform reportedly wasted no time switching allegiance to the APC. That act captured the party’s predicament more eloquently than any formal political analysis.

Winning an election under the PDP banner now appears to create immediate anxiety about political survival.

It also reflects the ambiguous political posture of figures like Nyesom Wike, who continues to claim PDP membership while acting in ways that frequently align with the interests of the ruling APC.

The cumulative effect of these developments has been the gradual hollowing out of the party. The PDP still exists as a legal entity. It still has offices and officials. But its actual institutional authority has vanished. What remains is largely the disguised extension of the APC.

There is an irony in all this. The PDP helped normalize the culture of defections that is now destroying it. For years, it enthusiastically welcomed defectors from rival parties, rewarding them with positions and privileges. Party loyalty was never a particularly prized virtue in its political culture.

The party’s strategy was simple: absorb everyone and expand the coalition of power. That strategy worked for as long as the PDP controlled the federal government. Once it lost that advantage, the logic of opportunism that benefited it began to operate against it.

Politicians who previously defected into the PDP now defect out of it. In other words, the PDP became a victim of the political habits it cultivated.

The party’s decline also illustrates a larger truth about Nigerian politics. Political dominance should never be confused with institutional strength. APC will do well to learn this elemental truth.

For 16 years, the PDP looked invincible. It won elections easily, controlled most state governments, and occupied the commanding heights of the federal state. But it never built a durable institutional structure capable of surviving the loss of power.

It was essentially a coalition of powerful individuals held together by access to the resources of the federal government. Once those resources disappeared, the coalition gradually disintegrated.

What we are witnessing today is the final stage of that disintegration. For a political organization that had proclaimed it would rule Nigeria for 60 years, this is a remarkably brief lifespan.

Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.

Obituary for the PDP, By Farooq Kperogi

Opinion

The world dislikes the weak, by Hakeem Baba-Ahmed

Published

2 weeks ago

March 3, 2026

Trends Admin

Former Northern Elders Forum spokesperson, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed

The world dislikes the weak, by Hakeem Baba-Ahmed

You just knew they would not turn tail and get back to the US empty-handed. All those ships and planes and everything else that can destroy a country’s critical infrastructure and terminate its leadership massed against a country, Iran. Still, Iran negotiated between being beheaded or being disarmed.

Whether it ‘negotiated’ for a humiliating reprieve out of fear or out of ignorance will be sorted out by historians of chaos. What was beyond doubt was the certainty that Trump and Israel would hit Iran very badly. A virtual and seemingly popular uprising against a regime with its head still bowed from the last foray by the US/ Israel had been active against leaders and agents of a brutal state.

Iran’s leadership had been swamped by encircling hostility and crippled by poverty of ideas on getting out of tight corners. Still, it went through the motions of discussing with the US/Israel over demands that it dismantle its strategic assets and plans and submit to a regime of intense scrutiny reserved only for the conquered. Even as it was being surrounded by an assemblage of weaponry rarely seen in history, the Iranian leadership was negotiating through third parties, apparently hoping for a miracle.

US/Israel struck at a time and place of their choice. Iran may have misread Trump. Perhaps it thought it could buy time while he involved the US Congress before embarking on an adventure that would make the entire region immensely more unstable. Not Trump. He does not go by the book. Especially not after the last humiliating pummelling Iran received at the hands of Trump/Israel and its thunderous applause from his base.

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Perhaps Iran thought it had friends in influential places, enough of them to rein in a US/Israel virtually on the loose. If it did, it was a poor reader of the international context: the world has little sympathy for the weak, and has even less leverage over Trump/Israel. It may even have exaggerated its circles of friends and allies. Modern warfare makes it difficult to reach friends when the threat is overhead and can cause more damage than a year of ground fights. Actually, Iran should have known a long while back that it lacks friends and allies, the type that will make Trump/Israel think twice. Surrogates and proxies, yes, but friends with muscle and enough interests to scare away threats or stand with you in battle? No.

Actually, if Iran had read the world well, it would have known that only the strong make real friends and allies. The weak has no friends. If you are Israel and you exist to keep an entire part of the world in line so that you and your allies can establish their hegemony over it, you can get away with hundreds of thousands of murders. Iran forgot Gaza. Iran missed the key lesson in US positions over Ukraine, an abdication of historic magnitude. Europe is coming to terms with the futility of getting Trump to stand up to Russia over Ukraine.

Europe could have taught Iran a lesson or two on the fallacy of collective regional security and destiny, if Iran had been disposed towards building alliances. For a country that had acquired a place of note in the manner it related with the world with an identity that stepped on toes, Iran should know the global community has no power over strong nations like US/Israel. It had built a formidable military, developed advanced technology and exported its interests at great cost to itself and other countries, but it is a poor judge of reading the deeply unimpeachable relationship between the US and Israel. It thought it could exist in a neighbourhood where it is one of two sworn enemies. It saw Israel and failed to read US.

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Well, the world will now count another casualty of power. Iran will expend a few more missiles before it submits to the power of US/Israel. This will not necessarily be a victory for US/Israel. Iran will go through the torture represented, on one hand, by attempts at preserving remnants of the leadership of a regime severely damaged by its stubborn failures to accept some changes in its basic character and disposition to the world around it. On the other hand, it will battle resistance to forces that will seek wholesale capitulation and radical change that will please US/Israel.

This tussle will involve a lot of sweat and blood, such is the depth and spread of the regime in the Middle East and parts of the world. Either way, Iran will not easily settle what it represents without a fight. Iranians who want radical change will not find a world waiting for them with open arms. US/Israel are not seeking regime change for the liberal Iranian, for the oppressed, the frustrated and poor Iranian. These have to fight their battles, and they will have to take on other Iranians who will fight to recapture the basic character of the regime US/Israel think they have dislodged.

Iran’s neighbours will pay a steep price for the activities of US/Israel. The entire question of Palestinian rights will now become more complicated as proxies and surrogates chart their own courses with greater autonomy. Arab surrogates of the US who tip-toe around Israel will submit even deeper to the protection and dictates of US/Israel. The entire region will go through massive turbulence as forces fight to preserve what is left of the defiance against US/Israel, or decide over the cost of capitulation. Israel will keep at least one eye open for old, wounded or new enemies.

The world dislikes the weak, by Hakeem Baba-Ahmed

Opinion

Our children must be kept away from Obi’s mob

Published

3 weeks ago

February 28, 2026

Trends Admin

Vincent Akanmode

Our children must be kept away from Obi’s mob

Any Nigerian with an iota of conscience would be miffed at the content of a video that trended on the social media during the week. It was the motion picture of three children whose age ranged between 10 and 12 professing to be supporters of former Anambra State governor and presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 presidential election, Mr. Peter Obi. Oblivious in their pristine innocence that they were being initiated into the triple crimes of lying, cheating and forgery by those who contrived the issuance of voter cards to them, they heartily flaunted the cards meant only for adults above 18 years, threatening to vote Obi in the 2027 elections like they did three years ago.

Instructively, it was Obi’s supporters, led by the then Chief Spokesperson for the Labour Party Presidential Campaign Council, Dr. Yunusa Tanko, who embarked on a peaceful protest in Abuja against alleged registration of underage voters in the build-up to the 2023 elections.

During the campaign rallies that preceded the 2023 elections, the world had watched with bated breath as a 15-year-old boy identified as Alabi Quadri jumped into the road arms outstretched as Obi’s convoy approached during a campaign rally in Lagos. I was personally alarmed at the stupidity of young man’s action, seeing the possibility of him being hit by the advancing convoy of vehicles. But while I thought it was the dumbest act anyone could muster, Obi, rather than rebuke Quadri’s foolery, alighted from his vehicle, walked towards the scallywag and embraced him in the full glare of cameras. Obviously, the Labour Party presidential candidate was in full agreement that the rascal did very well staking his life for his (Obi’s) presidential ambition.

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Obi, who had earlier prided himself with not giving shishi (a dime), reportedly rewarded Quadri’s foolhardiness with an unspecified sum of money, which later put him into trouble with his colleagues and earned him a stay in Kirikiri prison for about three months after an alleged frame-up for armed robbery by some thugs in his Amukoko (Lagos) neighbourhood, who were said to be angry that Quadri did not deem them fit for a slice of Obi’s cake. They handed him over to the police, who kept him in custody until some human rights activists intervened and secured his release.

Not surprisingly, many other admirers of Obi celebrated Quadri’s display of obtuseness as a heroic act worthy of emulation by anyone worth the helm of the presidential aspirant’s black gown. Little wonder the teenager’s example has since caught on among his followers with other dumb actions and utterances. Last week, another youthful follower of the mob took the malady to the precincts of blasphemy, saying that Jesus Christ would lose if he contests an election with Obi in Nigeria. And rather than condemnation, this reckless delivery has enjoyed the approval of many Obidient members in a country where religion is as sensitive as the mimosa plant.

And before the dust generated by the sacrilegious utterance could settle, another teenager identified as Mc Aha from Imo State said he would gladly sacrifice his father and mother if that was all Obi needed to become the President of Nigeria. Commendably, the teenager’s obviously embarrassed father did not allow his son’s misguided utterance to go without a consequence. Convinced that the teenager’s outburst bordered more on crime than insanity, he ignored psychiatrists and psychologists and promptly handed his errant son over to the police.