As I write these words in the early hours of Friday, October 22, 2021, the first anniversary of the #EndSARS nationwide youths and citizens protests and demonstrations has come and gone. Deliberately, beyond a few headliners that I have seen, I have kept away from reading press reports and commentaries on the anniversary. This is because I wanted my observations and reflections in this piece to be mine, exclusively. By this, I am not restricting myself only to my own views, my own perspectives. #EndSARS was and is too big, too important for that and I will read up as widely as I can on press and media discussions of the anniversary after I have revealed my thoughts in this piece. This, in my view, is all the more necessary because I am basing my reflections in this piece on the basic opinion that I had last year of #EndSARS when I wrote a few columns on the protests and demonstrations. What was this opinion? The opinion was, unequivocally, the view that despite the loss of lives, despite the unexpected and unanticipated hijacking of the tremendous momentum of the demonstrations by govt goons and quasi-official thugs, #EndSARS achieved a great moral victory which redounded throughout the country and the world.
I insist that any account, any retrospective on #EndSARS must start from this acknowledgement that it scored a great moral victory over the government and the forces that felt so threatened by it that they immediately set about crushing it and thereafter doing everything possible to confuse the nation and the world concerning what the protests were about and what those who organized them had as their objectives. For instance, let us keep in mind and never forget that #EndSARS was a nationwide phenomenon; at a time when, not without justification, so much is being made of how very divisive and sectionalist politics has become in our country, #EndSARS was insistently and powerfully all-Nigerian. And it was organized and “led” by the youths themselves. I place these brackets around the word, “led” because, as most people know, there were no “leaders” as such in #EndSARS. Coordinators, yes; inspirers, yes; and spontaneous or incidental spokespersons, yes. But as in many other countries in our contemporary global experience of popular revolts, uprisings and demonstrations, #EndSARS belongs to movements that political scientists and media pundits have characterized as “leaderless”. Does this “leaderlessness” arise from the fact that many of the “spokespersons” and “coordinators” were/are women? Yes, if by this we are giving an indication that there was a brilliantly non-sectarian feminism about how #EndSARS conducted its campaigns against police violence against women as compared to their brutality against men.
We must dwell sufficiently on this issue of the many dimensions of the great moral victory of #EndSARS. To do this, we must realize how fortunate we are that the protests and demonstrations lasted for almost two weeks before the attempts of the government to hijack #EndSARS, distort its objectives, sow disunity among its ranks and confuse it with the work of hoodlums began to have the impact that ultimately placed #EndSARS in the defensive and irresolute state from which it has yet to reemerge into the great clarity that it had in the beginning. This is absolutely critical: even with the robustness, flamboyance and gaiety of its beginning protests and demonstrations, #EndSARS was remarkable in the depth and clarity of its views on the causes and expressions of police brutality in particular and, more generally, the corruption and criminality of the security apparatus in our country, especially with relevance to the everyday experiences of the majority of Nigerians. But once the government and the security forces began to deliberately force #EndSARS to show that it had no connections with hoodlums and the forces they represent, once the government saw that it could sow disunity in the ranks of the movement through the mobilization of regional and ethnic irridentism, EndSARS went into a moral and discursive tailspin from which it is still struggling to emerge. This is why we were very fortunate as a society that before that happened, before the government got to work and effectively forced it into a defensive and irresolute moral and discursive space, #EndSARS showed us that it, and not the government, possessed the truth and the clarity that we needed in order to be able to deal with the pervasiveness of official and unofficial violence and insecurity in our society.
If, compared with its beginnings, the idea of a great moral victory that it can still reclaim and inhabit seems too farfetched against the background of the current uncertain level of the “popularity” of the #EndSARS movement, it might help us see better if we recall the number of prominent public intellectuals and dignitaries at home and abroad that gave their support and expressed their solidarity with #EndSARS when it burst on the local and global scenes last year: Wole Soyinka; Chimamanda Adichie; Femi Falana; Niyi Osundare; Edwin Madunagu; The Secretary General of the U.N., Antonio Guterres; The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby; then Candidate, now President Biden; the European Union; Former President Clinton. But there’s a rub in invoking this particular factor and it is this: whatever access to truth and clarity that #EndSARS can validly make, this cannot be operationalized as a popularity contest. What #EndSARS needs to do is give Nigerians and the world a strong, secure and convincing sense of its awareness that people believed in its message, its vision. To do that, #EndSARS must give the impression that the government not only never took this access to truth and clarity from it , it could indeed never have taken that away from it, no matter how hard the government has tried and continues to try.
If there are those who (will) think that these words of mine amount to no more than empty braggadocio, I counter with the argument that as long as #EndSARS and its supporters still believe – and believe very strongly – in the validity of their vision of the injustice and inhumanity of the violence that the Nigerian government of Mohammadu Buhari and its agencies perpetrate on most of its citizens, so long will #EndSARS remain a very relevant factor in our country’s affairs. Permit me to express this in idea in concrete or practical terms. Right now, in the context of the movement’s first anniversary, spokespersons and supporters of #EndSARS have been calling on both the federal government and relevant state governments to implement agreements reached with them with regard to compensations, reparations and, more generally, restitution. This is all well and good. But it would be a grave misconception for #EndSARS to think of its role now and in the future as only or primarily as that of a negotiator or a supplicant. Indeed, nothing would please the government, federal or state, more than to reduce #EndSARS to the fully administered status of a supplicant or negotiator, one of the hundreds of such negotiators and supplicants whose management is one of the “portfolios” of governance in a modern state. Well then, if not a supplicant or negotiator, could #EndSARS aspire to become a political party? No! A pressure group? No! A self-interest advocacy formation? No! A movement? Yes! Why a movement? Well, in my closing thoughts in this discussion, permit me to offer some ideas on why it is primarily as a movement whose potential impact on our society has barely begun that #EndSARS can hope to fulfil its immense promise of a better, more humane, more just and more peaceable Nigeria.
Compatriots, do let me know if I am overstating the following celebratory view of the impact of the first few days or entire first week of the irruption of #EndSARS on our consciousness: It was an extraordinary breakout, not of violence, not of thuggery, not of looting, not of shakara but of a demonstration for non-violence and peace that deployed peace and non-violence as strategies! Music and laughter! Dancing and singing! Food and drinks, not for gorging and imbibing to the point of throwing up and getting heartsick but in hopes of uniting with earth’s promise of unlimited replenishment if we live together in amity and solidarity. Far away in America, I felt like being there and would have rushed home at the time if I was not in the second of several hospitalizations that I had in the period. We always read only of the outbreak of war, but here was an outbreak of peace in a land in which warmongering, actual and manufactured, is always threatening to overrun the human and social parameters of the land. Yes, we had seen something similar to this in the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, but this seemed bigger and more infectious than anything that I saw in television reports and newsreels in the streets of Egypt, Tunisia or Morocco. It even seemed more joyous, more Dionysian than the dancing and the festivities that erupted in the streets of Soweto with the end of apartheid in 1994.
In its beginnings lie the vision that made #EndSARS the movement which it became, a festive and joyous phenomenon which was utterly serious in its affirmation of peace and life and its confrontation with the merchants of violence and death, especially those in government. In the modern world, non-violent peaceful demonstrations and protests have had hugely successful and honorable vocations as movements. In other words, #EndSARS comes to us in the wake of an easily recognized tradition that has been tried in many other lands and climes – India, the United States, South Africa, the Arab world. In virtually all of these instances, the movements went through confounding trials, appearing and disappearing, thriving and floundering, but never losing their unique imprimatur of the union of peace and life through the deployment of music and dance as instruments or strategies and tactics of peaceful protest. Since music, dance and singing have often been used as instruments of warlike electioneering campaigns in our society, it would seem that #EndSARS probably drew inspiration from this particular cultural source or tradition. But endemic police brutality and miasmic state violence against a whole citizenry entail things that are much greater than the programs and policies of electioneering political parties. In other words, facing sadistic and murderous “kill and go” policemen is not the same thing as facing the hired thugs and hoodlums of politicians and state governors. Thus, if #EndSARS and its supporters and followers hope to stick to their non-violent peaceful protests and demonstrations – as they should – they must profoundly think through the strategic and tactical implications of their non-violence vision.
In order not to end these reflections in any undue or unhelpful complexities, I will conclude on an issue that calls for the clearest, the most unambiguous perspectives. Thus, I wish to end on what has been identified as the extraordinarily tough implications of the choice of non-violence as strategy and tactics for many social justice movements in the modern world. It seems to me that right now, #EndSARS is going through an acute instance of this perennial challenge that all non-violent movements have always, sooner or later, confronted. In this case, the government of Muhammadu Buhari or elements within it – which amounts to the same thing – unleashed both uniformed “kill and go” operatives and hired thugs and “area boys” on #EndSARS demonstrators and protesters who were dancing, singingand celebrating their rejection of police brutality and governmental disdain for the lives and livelihoods of the citizenry. In almost all cases in modern history, when non-violent activists and protesters confront brutal force, the impulse is, first, to rethink if not reject non-violent tactics and strategies; and then to readopt and finesse those same non-violent strategies and tactics. It seems to me that #EndSARS has no other choice than this historic one.
But first, it must claim and expand its great moral victory last year.
