Nigerians vs Nigerians: The SARS We Never Ended

Nigerians vs Nigerians: The SARS We Never Ended

By Mudashir ‘Dipo’ Teniola

In October 2020, millions of Nigerians poured into the streets during the historic #EndSARS protests, rising against decades of police brutality, extortion and arbitrary abuse by the now-defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigeria Police Force. The movement gained global attention and forced the government to announce the unit’s dissolution.

Yet, five years later, the deeper affliction that gave rise to that uprising remains largely untouched.

On 12 December 2025, Dangote Petroleum Refinery announced a major intervention in Nigeria’s downstream sector, cutting its ex-depot petrol price from about ₦828 per litre to ₦699 per litre — the most significant price reduction recorded that year. The refinery also introduced a 10-day credit facility for marketers, a move widely seen as a genuine opportunity to ease fuel prices, transport costs, and Nigeria’s crushing cost-of-living crisis.

Yet the nation barely stirred.

There was no widespread reduction in transport fares, no noticeable drop in food prices, no collective sigh of economic relief. Even as some marketers adjusted prices in line with the new benchmark, large segments of Nigeria’s petrol retail network continued selling fuel at ₦850–₦900 per litre, effectively neutralising the impact of the price cut.

The silence was telling — and troubling.

Nigerians rose against SARS because it embodied weaponised impunity: the arbitrary use of power to extract pain from citizens. But what SARS practised in uniform was already deeply embedded in everyday Nigerian life — the instinct to impose hardship on others whenever leverage exists.

SARS did not invent extortion. It merely wore a badge.

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Today, that same impulse thrives in the marketplace:

• Transport operators hike fares overnight, regardless of falling fuel prices.
• Landlords raise rents without corresponding improvements in services.
• Traders inflate prices based on rumours rather than actual costs.
• Relief materials and palliatives are hoarded, delayed, or monetised at every level.

This is not inflation in the classical economic sense. It is opportunism, unchecked and normalised — a social habit of transferring hardship to someone else because it is easier than mutual accommodation.

The Dangote petrol price reduction was a clear economic signal — a rare alignment of supply conditions with the possibility of real relief. Yet the market’s muted response exposed a deeper truth: we have normalised enforcing hardship against one another.

There are, of course, counter-arguments. Many rightly point to government responsibility — regulation, enforcement, price monitoring, and anti-profiteering laws. Governments are indeed meant to legislate and regulate. But the belief that law alone can civilise conduct ignores a basic moral reality: laws reflect values; they cannot replace them.

No law can follow every trader into a shop, every driver into a motor park, or every landlord into an estate to compel ethical behaviour. In societies where moral responsibility is fully outsourced to the state, citizens begin to see themselves as passive subjects rather than active participants in the economy.

This expectation — that government must police our morality — is itself part of the problem. It assumes fairness must be enforced, not practised.

If, in the face of a genuine reduction in petrol prices, Nigerians respond with silence rather than collective repricing; if we wait for enforcement instead of exercising restraint and fairness voluntarily; then we have not truly ended SARS — we have merely stripped it of its uniform.

True transformation must begin in the marketplace, not only in protest marches. It begins with a shared rejection of extractive behaviour, whether by those in uniform or by ordinary citizens wielding economic power.

Ending a police unit does not dismantle the social logic that produced it. The real SARS was never confined to the streets of Lagos or Abuja; it lived in the everyday choices Nigerians made when given power — often at the expense of one another.

Until that reality is confronted, the cycle of protest, policy announcements, and disappointment will continue.

Nigerians vs Nigerians: The SARS We Never Ended