•DSS ex-Director Ejiofor speaks on the differences between the 2012 (peaceful), 2020 (violent) and looming 2024 protest
Looming protest, if it goes ahead between Thursday,August 1 and Saturday, August 10, will be the third major nationwide protest in more than one decade. There were 2012 and 2020 protests, and now 2024 uncertain protest. The 2012 protest, tagged Occupy Nigeria, began on Monday, January 2 of that year in response to then-fuel subsidy removal by the Federal Government of President Goodluck Jonathan on Sunday, January 1. Protest took place across the country, including in the cities of Kano, Surulere, Ojota (part of metropolitan Lagos ), Abuja, Minna, and at the Nigerian High Commission in London.
The protest was characterised by civil disobedience, civil resistance, strike actions, demonstrations and online activism. The use of social media services such as Twitter and Facebook was a prominent feature of the protest. President Bola Tinubu was said to have taken part in the protest at that time. The 2020 protest was a decentralised social movement against police brutality in Nigeria that mainly occurred in 2020.
The circumstances of the two protests are the same. But again if you look at 2012, the protest didn’t turn violent because of the body language of the sitting president then. He allowed everything to go, and the situation was not as bad as what we have now. Now it can be exploited because people are hungrier now, people are desperate and may want to use anything to ventilate their anger. And that is why the government is saying that people can protest but it should not go violent.
If you look at the 2020 protest, it was mainly organized by the youths and that is why it turned violent and the demands why quite different from the 2012’s and that is also why it turned violent. The 2020 protest was particularly against police brutality.
You recall how it started from Delta State. And as people were talking about #EndSARS, there was maximum force used to suppress the riot after it degenerated from protest.
But in 2012, people gathered, they were there carrying out their protest peacefully, nobody worried them. If it is going to be like that now, I don’t think government will stop anyone from protesting but the fear is very high that this protest will be hijacked. The fears are there.
Vanguard
