Soro-Soke. It was sublime poetry couched in the irreverent language of youthful exuberance. On the streets, in the markets, at public rallies, the Nigerian young people were united in their anti-Police brutality campaign, their messages rendered in the zeitgeisty language of the time. The imperative for the #EndSARS agitation was quite plausible, anyway: SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, had become notorious for all things criminal. Across the country, officers of the special unit were quite infamous for extortion and violent confrontations with civilians, mostly young people, not a few among whom were murdered. By the last quarter of 2020, SARS officers had taken their terrorism to a dizzying height and many young Nigerians who struggled to distinguish the police unit from outright criminals had had enough.
Then came the turbulent #EndSARS protest.
Unlike the typical Nigerian agitation, the #EndSARS had no clearly defined “leadership”, even though there were arrowheads in charge of logistics and mobilization. It was a strategy that was as potent as it was flawed. For one, it made it quite difficult for government and its allies to target the “leaders”, either to launch the usual threats or even for financial inducement. But it also threw the agitation open to all sorts of possibilities, the most concerning being the seeming lack of direction and the absence of a clearly defined exit strategy. This was evident with the stalemate that followed the government’s cheeky adoption of the protest demands and things became quite uncertain.
At the height of the protest, I had this interesting conversation with Kolapo Olapoju, Editor of TheCable newspaper, wherein I argued that young people needed to move beyond the stalemate and make use of the symbolic power they wielded at the time. Days earlier, I and KP (as we fondly call Kolapo) had met at the Lagos State Secretariat and I expressed serious reservation about the conducts of some of the protesters, especially in Ibadan, Ilorin and other parts of the country. At the time, protesters had the attention of the (global) media and were literally winning the war of optics against the government. But that notwithstanding, I reckoned that due to the stalemate, occasioned by the absence of direction and actionable plans, there was high probability that things would move from street theatrics to full-blown tragedy.
So much has been said about the crass insincerity of the Nigerian government, the dirty gambits of its agencies, the infiltration of genuine protesters by pro-regime thugs—and how all of these raised suspicion and fuelled anarchy. These are valid stuff. But on the flipside, except for those whose real intent ab initio was to create destruction and unrest only for the sake of entertainment (or as tweeps would say, ‘Vayolence’ and ‘Cruise’), anyone genuinely concerned about social change and heavily invested in the protest knew that it was only a matter of time before such stalemate would graduate into full-blown anarchy——either by government’s own evil machinations, or the excesses and perceived taciturnity of (some) protesters.
A ‘leader-less’ protest could only be as effective as easing the process of mobilising for mass action; it’s a totally different (and really problematic!) concern when the issues move toward executing exit plans and resolution, two key end-results that would justify whatever energy people may have invested in mass action. Even if valid, that young people conceived the idea of “leadership” as total submission of powers to individuals who could betray their trust, was quite troubling. The agency of “leadership” in such situations goes beyond individuals, or so I thought. And as things turned out, precious moments of endless opportunities to effect changes could be lost to discordant tunes and inactivity or stalemate, if not judiciously utilized. For instance, when the government announced its adoption of the 5-point demands, some folks came up with another 7-point agenda that was vague and largely incoherent, asking for “… reform of the health sector…” and all such things that were practically impossible to measure in the short-term as prerequisites for leaving the streets. Since it was natural that the protest was not going to hold forever, it was equally plausible that things could become disastrous midway.
But the chaos notwithstanding, the #EndSARS movement rekindled my hope in the ability of young people to stand for their rights and possibly re-birth a Nigeria we would all be proud of—–IF and WHEN they indeed want to. There were emotional moments protesters danced away to Fela’s songs without any care in the world; when some left late in the night and resumed at dawn to meet folks sleeping on the protest ground through the nights in Ikeja; when young people marched peacefully through parts of Lagos and elsewhere, protecting security officials while at it.
In essence, one key take-away was that the protest provided insights into the futility of hubris: beyond empty (inter-)generational grandstanding, we need a bit of the wisdom of yesterday to navigate the pebbles of today in order to birth a better tomorrow.
In retrospect, I do think that one major thing the energetic youth movement lacked was a strategy designed to leverage on whatever power acquired through mass mobilisation. For many a young person, it was just #EndSARS protest, “cruise”, and as they say on Twitter, “vayolence”, and nothing more. That was foolhardy, to my mind.
And finally, the protest provided avenue for young people to reflect on the one question thrown up by the accidental realisation of the power they wielded as a collective: could they have achieved much more, with better planning? Perhaps.
