COVID 19 PROTEST MOVEMENT AND ITS AFTERMATH EFFECT ON THE NIGERIAN STATE

Abstract

This paper examines the popular youth protest of October, 2020 tagged “ENDSARS” (SARS standing for Special Anti-Robbery Squad) in Nigeria organized to challenge police brutality. In spite of the protest being held during the Covid-19 lockdown, the number of youth that trooped into the streets in the southern part of the country and in the North too, tagging theirs “ENDINSECURITY”) signified that beyond police brutality, the Buhari administration was due for questioning. As expected of any protest without effective coordination, the march was later hijacked by hoodlums and looters who burnt down, looted, and pillaged public infrastructure and private property, in the same vein attacking some politicians. The paper treats ENDSARS as Nigeria Spring of October, 2020 which had its roots in the wave of protests that started in the 1980s. The earlier protests were about calls for civilian government, claims of election mandate and fuel hike. The methodology applied in this study is both interview and secondary sources of data collection through the use of Nigerian dailies, journals and textbooks. For the interview, some youths in some towns were asked questions for the purpose of extracting variables that would explain the causes of the protests. The paper reveals that the thought that led to the “ENDSAR” is as a result of lies in the past to end police brutality which never materialized and the frustration is as a result of bad governance. We suggest that in a situation of another popular youth protest, the governments at both the federal and state tiers should act fast to solve the problem before it degenerates into a state of anarchy.

Keywords

• covid 19
• protest
• nigeria