Today, Explained - #EndSARS

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

Alexis Akwagyiram, bureau chief for Reuters in Nigeria, explains how a protest to reform the country’s police made its way around the world. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Just about anywhere you look on our planet, people are worried about COVID-19. But everyone on the internet is talking about SARS. Beyonce, Biden, John Boyega, this weekend's musical guest on Saturday Night Live had her entire band outfitted in t-shirts that featured the hashtag end SARS. As you may well know, it's got nothing to do with a respiratory disease and everything to do with a protest in Nigeria, so we got in touch with Alexis Akwajiram to explain. He's the bureau chief for Reuters in Lagos. Alexis, what is SARS?

So SARS was an elite police unit in Nigeria. It actually stands for Special Anti-Robbery Squad. The squad was set up in 1992 with the aim to fight armed robbery. The idea was that it was there to tackle violent crime, things like armed robberies, kidnappings, that kind of thing. Over the years, there have been cycles of alleged human rights abuses by these officers because these guys are in plain clothes and their remit is to go out and basically just really crack down on violent crime but people say they've abused that power and accused them of actually doing all kinds of things

its critics say SARS is now engaged in harassment extortion violence and even killing and all of it with impunity victims have been subjected to mock execution, burning with cigarettes, near asphyxiation, using plastic bags and sexual violence. You look like you're making a lot of money, they'll stop you, they'll harass you, they'll go through your phone. They search for messages from your bank, for example, so they could see your bank account balance.

And when they do that, they drive you to an ATM, get you to withdraw money, and before they let you go, if they can't get money off you, they lock you up. Over the years, police have repeatedly denied these allegations. So what sparked these protests were specifically sparked by the killing of a young man in a southern state of Nigeria called Delta State. A video went viral of a man who had allegedly been killed by SARS officers and then they allegedly drove away in his car. And people videoed this and the video went viral and people were up in arms about it. And they said that this was the latest example of these human rights abuses. Off the back of that, people started using the hashtag NSARS to share their own experiences of

what they said were examples of kidnappings, extrajudicial killings, beatings. So these videos just started flooding Nigerian Twitter and Instagram. And what did the reaction look like? I mean, initially the reaction was outrage on social media, but then it really kind of entered the streets when a number of Lagos-based influencers who had massive followings on Instagram and on Twitter, they got involved and they said that really this needs to be amplified. Myself and another artist named Runtown, we had shared on our Twitter and Instagram pages

that we were going to do a walk, just a march, a peaceful protest against all forms of police brutality, all forms of police misconduct in general. And we did that with the hashtag End SARS. And then also civil society groups in Lagos and the capital of Abuja decided to hold nationwide protests from the 8th of October. So this is maybe less than a week after the video went viral.

Stop killing our boyfriends. Stop killing our children. Stop. Mothers are crying. Stop killing them. End SARS now. Today, killing them. End SARS now. Today, not tomorrow. End SARS now. Every single day there were protests from the 8th of October. And after that, the government started to sit up and take notice. Yeah, tell me more about how the government responded.

They basically said that they would just give them everything. The Special Anti-Robbery Squad of the Nigerian Police, otherwise known as SARS, is hereby dissolved across all formations. They shut down SARS three days after the protests began. They said that they would hold judicial panels and inquiries, and they said, look, this can all be done. However, maybe two days after SARS was shut down, a new unit was set up

called SWAT. And this unit basically was meant to do the same thing. Again, it was meant to be a specialist high-grade crime-fighting unit with the same powers as SARS. And so the protesters said that they were not going to stop their demonstrations because ultimately they didn't believe that any meaningful change was going to happen. They said this was purely rebranding exercise. And they have precedence to point to on that because this has happened before. So, for example, there was a Senate investigation in 2017 and the vice president actually said the unit had to be disbanded. The police have disbanded or overhauled SARS about three times in the last five years. Wow.

So protesters are skeptical about there being any meaningful change. So the protests continue? So then the protesters continue. They go out on daily marches every single day. And then over time, the protests started to become infiltrated, attacked by armed groups. These were kind of street thugs. In Lagos, we call them area boys. And these guys would turn up and they're armed with things like machetes or even just sticks, and they would try to disrupt the protests. Now just for context there is a history

in Nigerian politics of paying armed street gangs to disrupt. Now there's nothing to say that that actually is the case here it might be that they're just violent factions and these are things that we've put to authorities and they've denied any involvement. But for whatever reason, there were attacks. And so the protests kept on going. And what the protesters did was they crowdfunded to fund their protests. And the money that they crowdfunded was used for things like paying for free food for people, but then also paying for security, for medical bills for anyone that was injured and also for legal bills for anybody who was arrested.

And then the protest kept on going until the 20th of October. Keep shooting without going anywhere. Keep shooting. It's a fucking piece of protest. At the main campaign site in an upmarket area of Lagos called Leki, there was a shooting. So in Lagos, the commercial capital, the governor on the 20th said there will be a curfew and the curfew comes into effect from four in the afternoon and so you got people all day at the main campaign site the main protest site in Lagos and they said that basically they were going to stay put that evening at around 6 45 coming up to 7 p.m multiple witnesses say that

the lights went out at this campaign site and to to paint a picture, we're talking about a place where you've got probably at least a thousand people who've congregated. There's a stage with people giving speeches, call and response. You've got music and the lights went out. Multiple witnesses say that they saw soldiers advancing and they had guns and they started shooting. Everyone sit down, sit down, sit down. I spoke to multiple people who were there who said that they saw people dropping and that people died. We were hunkering down while hundreds of bullets were shot.

The lights on this side were switched off. There was panic, there was chaos. People were praying, others were chanting, we are ready to die. And again, there were people who were injured that were carried to the side where my cameraman and me were laying down. It's not clear how long the gunfire went on for.

And then the soldiers retreated, they left. And I must say that the Nigerian army said that they were not there. They said that this is fake news. So at this point, that's what they say. Amnesty International say that 12 protesters were killed in two locations on that night. In Leki, at the toll gate where this main demonstration was being held, and then in one other district of Lagos as well. Since that horrifying scene,

it really, really, really turned into something completely different. The initial protesters that we had, who were very tightly focused, they went into hiding, basically. They stopped going out on those daily protests, and they're actually very scared. After that, there was just a massive, massive explosion of street violence in different parts of the country, particularly in Lagos. To the east of the city, in Leckie, armed men chased away police, and several police stations were burned to the ground. The area boys, these street gangs, started building barricades and

blocking off major roads. They were charging people to get through. If you didn't pay them, then they would hurl, what are they, like rocks and sticks at vehicles. There were a couple of jailbreaks in different parts of the country. Like there were two in a city called Benin in the south of the country. There was a jailbreak in Lagos as well. And there was just general anarchy, basically. And I must say, these were not protesters.

These were not the type of protesters who were out looking for police reform. These are people who, for the most part, are poor and angry. They were setting fire to buildings and just generally venting their anger and frustration. Half of people who are aged between 15 and 34 are either unemployed or what they call underemployed,

i.e. they don't have enough work. So there are a lot of people who are struggling to make ends meet and are angry and frustrated. And this was basically just a tinderbox. I mean, I spoke to a security analyst about this, and he said it was just, it was the perfect storm and it had been brewing for a while. Where does this leave you this week? What's going to happen next? Well, it's really hard to tell what's going to happen next. I mean, bizarrely, Lagos seems much calmer. They eased the curfew so that the curfew is only in place at night.

And during the day, you have people going out on the streets again, basically reclaiming the city. One thing is the original protesters who were calling for the police reform, those people, they've agreed that they're going to keep it online. They say that they don't want anyone else to get hurt, and they feel that essentially their protest was hijacked by criminal elements. And to actually amplify their message and to have a voice, they need to do it online. And help me understand how N-SARS has gotten so much attention internationally. You know, celebrities like Beyonce and Rihanna, and as you may have seen,

her performed on Saturday Night Live this weekend with her entire band wearing N-SARS t-shirts. A lot of people who aren't usually talking about Nigerian politics all of a sudden are. I mean, I think it's very much of the zeitgeist. I mean, I think, you know, people can relate because we've got Black Lives Matter in the US and you've got issues over there with police brutality. And, you know, even in the UK, for example, people have been protesting about Black Lives Matter. So people can see that this is a global issue, the kind of role of law enforcement and human rights. And there's also, bear in mind, a very large kind of West African diaspora in the

US and in the UK in particular. But above all, it's just something that I think on a human level, everyone can relate to, because people want to trust law enforcement officers. But above all, it's just something that I think on a human level, everyone can relate to because people want to trust law enforcement officers. And that's the universal. So I think that's why. Alexis Akwajiram is the Nigeria Bureau Chief for Reuters. He spoke to us this morning from Lagos. More after a quick break on Today Explained.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Okay, Alexis just drew a line from George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests to end SARS, which is helpful in understanding how this has become such a big deal online throughout the world. But we wanted to know more about how end SARS is being received in Nigeria. Amaka Unka, you specialize in sub-Saharan Africa at the Eurasia Group. What do we need to know about Nigeria to better understand this protest movement? So the subtext here that a lot of people are not talking about is that for the past, I would say, five, ten years or so,

this particular police unit, SARS, had been going after and profiling what they saw as internet fraudsters. Probably you've gotten those emails from Nigeria, right? Like the internet scams. Yeah, actually I have. So the SARS unit really cut its teeth going after those guys. And they profiled them as young men with laptops and phones, sometimes with a nice car, but they're dressed casually. So they don't fit the profile of people who have money in Nigeria. And this is particularly in the South. This is a Southern phenomenon, right?

Now, just over the past 10 years, Nigeria's tech sector has grown, tripled, from like 5% of GDP to 15% of GDP. So now you have a lot more people engaged in tech, like legal tech, right? There's a huge tech ecosystem and lots and lots of people are carrying cell phones and laptops and fit this profile. So all of a sudden, something that was impacting like a much narrower section of the population is impacting lots of middle class Nigerians getting harassed. And that really helped kind of bring this into the public consciousness. And of course, a lot of these tech people have strong social media presence, have strong connections with the international community.

Learning from BLM is definitely a factor, right? Because there's a motivation of what happened that kind of drew people to say, you know what, enough is enough. We need to take a stand this time. The fact that there were a lot more people working from home made a difference, right? So all these different things made it such

that this time around, it got on the streets in a big way. And once you got on the streets, there are lots of other people with other grievances, kind of broad frustration that would join in. There was always abuses, right? That's the thing. But the more people you had engaged in the actual legal tech sector, the more opportunities there were to profile and to harass people who were innocent.

And you mentioned that these protests are mostly happening in the South. Why is that? Why is this sort of limited to a specific part of the country? So the internet fraud stuff phenomenon is really a Southern phenomenon, right? The nucleus is Lagos and a lot of the southwestern states. That's where you have a lot of educated young men who initially were kind of engaged in, you know, Internet fraud. In the north, you have a much smaller middle class. There's a lot more poverty. And so while you have police brutality in the North, the dynamics are very

different because there's so much more insecurity in the North, not a big middle class to kind of stand up, make a stand in this way, and so much more insecurity that it's much harder to convince people that their priority should be disbanding a police unit when you have kidnapping. And, you know, this police unit is trying to, you know, in their view, bring back some security. SARS is seen as a useful addition, a useful public, you know, good rather than the opposite. Interesting. So where does that leave the country? Is half the country saying abolish this law enforcement unit while the other half is saying, you know, this is essential to our lives? Yes and no, right? So it's a little bit more complicated. End SARS is a movement that has garnered nationwide support, okay?

There wasn't as many people in the streets in the North for the reasons that we talked about. But at the same time, there is a shared consciousness of the importance of the problem of police brutality across the country. The hesitation and the concern was maybe that some elements in the North, particularly the politicians, right, were concerned that this was something that was being stoked by maybe the internet fraudsters in the South, you know, maybe the politicians in the South to undermine a Northern president's regime, Buhari. So that's why politically the country hasn't been united just in terms of the political leaders and how they've viewed the protests, right? So they definitely, the politics in the North make it such that there's a little bit more suspicion of what's really going on, even though there is a shared consciousness

about the problem of police brutality. Is that going to discredit the End SARS movement? The fact that politicians in the North might be able to say like, oh, that's just more fraudsters? What's really important is where we go from here. There's been a sense by some people that there are elements of the opposition

and other elements that are trying to hijack it, at least from the perception of government, right? That are using this to advance the anti-Buhari sort of sentiments. That is not the intention of the movement. The people who are kind of instigating and, you know, were the leaders intended it squarely to address on police brutality and other issues to some extent. So I think what's important really is where they go from here, where we go from here, how the movement is organized.

There's a lot of talk now about moving this on, you know, organizing around issues that will impact the next election, you know, social justice issues, economic justice issues. So I think that the test is really now, right? How does this generation kind of evolve, use this to drive their political engagement and drive the issues that will matter for the next election? I didn't really know this until I was preparing for this interview, but Nigeria is a country with an exceptional number of young people. I'm told more than 60% of Nigerians are under the age of 25. Is that true? Absolutely. Yeah, that is true. That sounds dramatically different from like what we've seen in the United States with protests happening here where it's really united lots of different age demographics. But in Nigeria,

I imagine that means that the End Stars movement is mostly a movement of younger Nigerians. Is that true? Absolutely. It has been a movement of young Nigerians. Is that true? Absolutely. It has been a movement of young Nigerians, which is extremely encouraging, right? It's basically been a movement of Nigerians under age 35. And that I would say is at least 70% of the population, if not 75, right? So it's the majority, you know, it's a huge, huge constituent bloc for Nigeria. The biggest, I would say, takeaway is that this is the first time this generation, the future of Nigeria, is really taking a stand and engaging in an organized, passionate way in politics. And if you look at the data, you know, even though youth are about 50, over 50% of registered voters, they tend to vote in less numbers, like is the case globally, right? But they tend to vote in less numbers. It's more impactful in Nigeria, just given how big a proportion of the population they are. But I do think that this will drive engagement from that

younger generation, which will then impact the shape of politics moving forward. I wonder, you know, did all this international attention, did it help? There are a lot of people within the government that are very suspicious because it's people see there are a lot of people within government that see this as a as an opposition strategy but on the other side it also brought a lot of attention that has forced people to pay attention whether they like it or not right it's forced Nigerian politicians to pay attention it's trending globally for days on end. I would say it's overall a net positive because bringing attention to the issue, encouraging the youth by feeling, giving them a sense of power, of political power, I think is all in the end a net positive. Amaka, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

Same here. Thank you. Amaka Anka is the head of all things Africa at the Eurasia Group. I'm Sean Ramos for him. It's Today Explained.