The nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests that are convulsing the neoliberal fundament of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration are redefining and redrawing the contours of protests in Nigeria in many significant ways. Although I’ve been on the road since Thursday, here are lessons I’ve learned from the protests. One, there is now a profoundly consequential decentering of the locus of protest culture in Nigeria.
In the past, protests against unpopular government policies used to be conceived, constructed, and carried out by a self-selected class of professional protesters based mostly in Lagos who earned activist bona fides from their anti-military, pro-democracy, human rights advocacy in the 1980s and 1990s. These careerist agitators are now either in government, in bed with the government, or have suffered significant contraction of their symbolic and cultural capital. Most Gen Z Nigerians whose vim and vigor power the ongoing protests either don’t know them or know them but have no use for their guidance.
So, the conception, planning, and execution of the protests have neither a recognizable locale nor any identifiable dramatis personae. A lot of the known names identified with the protests merely joined and amplified it. They didn’t start the revolt and can’t stop it.
It’s effectively a leaderless rebellion. It started life as anguished, discordant murmurs on social media in response to the increasingly unendurable but relentlessly unabating neoliberal, IMF/Wor.