This is how you radicalize the phone pressing generation

Letter from a "Lazy Nigerian Youth"

Recently I was talking to my friend, I wanted to know how she was doing and she responded with something that stuck - “Feels like I am just waiting to die”. I think that perfectly encapsulates the prevailing mood of everyone still involved, either directly or indirectly in the EndSARS protests of October 2020 in Nigeria. The air is thick with tears, the mood is dark, we are angry (I have personally felt a kind of rage I did not know Nigeria could elicit from me in the past few days), afraid, and most of all, incredibly sad and defeated. The question is what happens now? Where do we go from here? All we did was ask that the Government disband (properly) and prosecute a rogue police unit with well-documented historical crimes of assault, harassment, torture, rape, and murder against the very people they are supposed to protect.

I watched and read with a sense of foreboding and unimaginable dread the stories of thousands of Nigerians who had at one point experienced the terror of the Nigerian police. Do not get me wrong, previously we had all heard these stories in isolated pockets, but we had never had an outpouring like this - the horror stories from Nigerian Gulags and Death camps like Awkuzu SARS in Enugu and Abbatoir in Abuja sent chills down the very core of my being. The EndSARS protests had started in Lagos and in just a few days - parallel but loosely affiliated protests sprang up in solidarity with the cause in different parts of the country. For the first time in my adult life, young people like me rose up - and with no centralized leadership or organization built a support infrastructure I had never before seen in Nigeria. We asked for the right to exist, to live, to move about freely in our own country without fear of violence from paid state actors who again are there to protect us. And just like clockwork in a couple of days, we had been met with intimidation, violence, neglect, lip service, and death from Buhari’s government. As at the time I am writing this (22nd of October 2020), exactly two weeks from when the protests first started, we have experienced scores (and this is me being extremely conservative) of deaths directly related to this decision to make a stand. The Nigerian government met us with violence and utter disregard for our lives and dignity.

On the 20th of October 2020, a day I will never forget, I watched a man mutter his final prayers as he bled to death on Instagram live because the Nigerian Army decided to make their way to Lekki, the epicenter of the peaceful EndSARs protests, and shoot at unarmed and peaceful protesters. Before this, the Lagos state government had around noon that day announced a 24-hour curfew starting at 4 pm in Lagos, one of the most notoriously traffic-ridden cities in the world. Now here’s the kicker, around the time the Army started shooting civilians in Lekki, the Lagos state government put out a “tweet” again that grace had been extended to 9 pm and people could move around till then. We also learned that earlier in the day, the billboard at the Lekki tollgate had been disconnected and the lights around the protest ground had been taken out. So essentially, the army that till today has not been able to suppress the creeping insurgency of Boko Haram in the north went to murder peaceful Nigerians in the dark. Drone footage the next day would show that the lights were only switched off at the toll, however further down in both directions, the streets were still very well lit. This sparked off a cascade of violence in Lagos and Nigeria, and by the next day, we were seeing videos of policemen gunning down Nigerians in broad daylight and giving themselves high fives.

I still remember the rage I felt as I watched that man bleed to death on Instagram live, for the first time in my life I wished to the heavens that I was there. I am usually apathetic to Nigeria but this was the first time in my life I was ready to die for Nigeria? I realized something rather quickly - that to change Nigeria I had to be ready to lay down my life. I had to ask myself some hard-hitting questions - when I say that I cannot die for Nigeria, what Nigeria am I referring to? Nigeria was not some amorphous authority I had first come to like briefly as a child, develop a coping mechanism to deal with as an adult, and was now forming a remarkable hatred for - Nigeria really was people like me being gunned down on the streets of the country. Nigeria was the millions of unemployed young people with no hope for the future. Now I catch myself thinking, maybe this is a Nigeria I could die for.

The old men in power have zero new ideas and no vision for the future. As long as Nigeria works for the 1% the rest of us (the 99%) can quite frankly and I say this using the best euphemism I can think of right now - go to hell where we have to be content with whatever crumbs randomly fall our way. I would like to say they have lost the plot, but the truth is probably far worse than that. If anything, the past few days and quite frankly years have shown us that Nigeria is being run like a private fiefdom where dissent is met with maximum force, terrorists are rehabilitated with plans to be sent abroad for education (I wish I were joking) and monopoly on violence (the only valid source of power) is wielded to protect monied interests and nothing else. Powerful Nigerian politicians and their professional cronies enjoy waxing lyrical about the sovereignty of Nigeria, they nurse grand delusions about their illusion of control, but after a while, you have to ask yourself if the idea of Nigeria is worth all this strife, tears, and blood. Nigeria takes and takes and takes and then expects you to keep shut. A country that eats its young and treats them like their dreams do not matter constantly demands your silence, in fact, it requires your unrelenting sacrifice and tacit consent to keep functioning as is. Nigerian authorities will ride on our corpses just to keep the status quo - this is not new to us because we always jokingly say Nigeria will kill us, but not like this, not like this we thought.

The Nigerian government had over two weeks to do the right thing for once after half a dozen insincere attempts to end SARS but we all know how that is going at the moment. I still have immense pride in what we have been able to accomplish in two weeks. However, we now understand how they broke our parents. Will they break us too? Is this the end of our drive for a better Nigeria? I feel like we have just crossed a rubicon, but I’m not exactly sure what it is, only time can tell - will this turn out to be the start of a massive infrastructural and cultural change or are we just going to go back to being loyal little subjects? Only time will tell. I just wanted to build technology, chill, and live a quiet life. I am quite content binging on Netflix and Anime, in between working and tweeting, but now I cannot do that anymore. The Nigerian government has forcefully opened my eyes, now I fear I can no longer sleep soundly - this is how you radicalize the phone pressing generation.