12 October 2020
It has been five days of protest and appeals to the Government, to give us back our lives. For years, the murders, now rampant, have gone unnoticed by the Government, and the murderers swollen with impunity continue to wreak havoc on the lives of thousands of Nigerians all over the country.
All Nigerians can relate to this; the uncouth barely-uniformed but heavily armed-men on the roads, who wave down luxury cars to demoralize and extort the occupants.
Younger Nigerians can tell endless tales of their encounters with FSARS, the daylight criminals, who seek only to steal, kill, and destroy.
The Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (FSARS), a unit of the Nigeria Police Force, was created as an advanced division to tackle armed robbery and kidnapping across the country. The sect. has decomposed into a societal menace. The power-drunk sect. thieves and hardened criminals have become the worst version of the entities they were created to fight against.
Gory tales, accompanied by graphic pictures of their terror have surfaced intermittently on social media - Twitter particularly - as it is the fastest medium for simultaneous information dissemination.
But time again, there was no concern on the part of the Government. People kept dying, young men and women shot to their death by the system-backed criminals.
We, the Nigerian youths kept crying to the Government to do something about it. And our pleas fell on deaf ears. The Government, heralded by Mohammed Buhari, the most silent government in our history of democracy retained deaf ears. Whenever the Presidency got tired of our social media rants, they released obscure statements reminding us that they were still in charge, and everything was under control. The President never engaged us to encourage or assure us that our cases were being handled. There was barely an inkling that our plights mattered to them.
For three consecutive years, they released the same statement, painted with different verbs:
In 2017, F-SARS was banned.
In 2018, F-SARS was reformed.
In 2019, F-SARS was disbanded.
On the 3rd of October 2020, a video of a young man murdered by the Police resurfaced. His body was shoved out of his moving vehicle as the police sped off in his car.
To add salt to injury, there was no acknowledgment of the deceased, there were no plans to prosecute the perpetrators. Matter of fact, the police lied blatantly and these lies were spread through the local news channel.
We were tired of the prevarication. We wanted the Government to take action, we wanted the Government to show concern for our lives, we wanted Buhari to address the menace and nip it at the bud. But all we heard was silence.
Buhari’s twitter timeline remained solely dedicated to felicitation. From a mere glance, a visitor would think all was well within his state.
Buhari was either ignoring us or basking in ignorance.
When celebrities started to call Buhari out, his media aides took to his defense, massaging his ego and demanding respect.
People were dying, those who had the means were calling for help, and the best his media aides could come up with was ‘ show respect for elders.’
Some of us wondered about the dubiety of being cursed to belong to a nation with such conceited leaders, and together we came to the decision that the Government was not going to get away with unstamped twitter promises. This time, we were going to make them stay the course of its implementation.
This time, our demand for the termination of the FSARS must be met.
Twitter influencers led the first protest, and soon celebrities chimed in, and the youths gathered in unity to protest in one voice. It was an organized protest. It was universally agreed that there would be no leader, or followers. We had one goal, and we would no stop until we achieved that.
Our youths slept on the bare ground outside the statehouse in Lagos state, demanding an audience with the House of Representatives. They ignored us for 36 hours hoping we would get tired. When we didn’t relent. The Commissioner of Police sent his minions to oppress us.
Some of them laughed at us, saying we were wasting our time.
This is what the Government and their forces thought of us, a country with the median age of 18 years of a population of about 207,530,415. They thought us a nuisance.
One local media house (TVC) threatened its staff with unemployment if they joined out cause on the internet. Another tried to sabotage the movement by directing their pioneer’s hidden objective (Sahara Reports). The majority of the traditional media kept quiet.
They watched us, waiting for us to give up.
We were after all the Lazy Nigeria Youths, as described by our president. The same government that gave us nothing; not jobs, not security, not education, not health care.
After three days of peaceful protest across major cities in the country, there was a tweet from the presidency.
It would have been better the Government stayed silent.
We were treated to a vague tread from the timeline of the president, with no tangible take away. F-SARS wasn’t even mentioned.
It was now obvious that we were worth nothing to them. They only needed us as pawns for their political aspirations.
But we are not our fathers, so we refused to play into their little trap.
Already, we have grown bigger than could imagine. Years of training had taught us to stand for ourselves. We struggled to survive in a country that gave us nothing. They refused us jobs, so we went to the internet in search of livelihood.
We learned to build ecosystems in the virtual world. We learned to code. We learned to entertain virtual audiences. We registered for online courses to train ourselves and applied for international scholarships to practice knowledge learned.
We were no longer constricted in the rat race our parents were trapped in.
We didn’t need the government. We bought generators to fuel our houses, we built high fences around our homes to keep us safe.
We ignored the Government because there was nothing it could do for us. The elections were not our concern, and so we refused to vote. We thought it didn’t matter because they are all criminals, all greedy folks after their own pockets.
The majority of us, with sound judgment stuck to the good ways, with persistence, we made our money. Admittedly, some fell astray.
With the money we made, we bought better phones and good cars. We didn’t have to wait for delayed salaries. We didn’t have to protest for unemployment or hunger. We employed ourselves.
The Government still wouldn’t let us be. They tried to stifle our entrepreneurs with heavy tax and heightened the barrier to entry for businesses. And when they saw they couldn’t control the internet in their favour, they tried to restrict its usage.
They won’t help us, they won’t let us breathe.
Now, the young men, unlike their fathers didn’t have to suffer a 9–5, not that it was available for the taking. Still, the Government turned a blind eye while the FSARS — from jealousy and bitterness (of their meager salary and pathetic living conditions) -profiled young boys and ended their lives because they had the power to.
F-SARS breaks into hostels and arrests young boys for working on their laptops.
F-SARS mutilates people on the road for carrying iPhones. F-SARS arrests young boys for wearing clean clothes and sneakers.
F-SARS murders those who try to resist them.
When we tried to speak out, they teargassed us. They aimed and shot water cannons at us. They arrested us. They beat us up. The most unfortunate of us lost our lives
While they announced the dissolution of the F-SARS online, for the umpteenth time, the terror continued. The police officers in collaboration with F-SARS still raided us. They dragged us on the ground and locked us up in jail. They convicted us of Murder and sentenced us to life imprisonment, all in a space of 48 hours. The Government fought us.
But this time, we won’t keep quiet as our fathers did.
We have the internet to show the world that while we are fighting for our lives, the Government is fighting against us.
All we asked for was the right to live. Our fundamental right to live.
We are not okay. We have never been okay.