Fury in Nigeria
Decades-long corruption has finally got the youth to unite to demand change, writes Nicki Gules
Nigerian youth have done nothing but be quiet and tolerant of all the crap they have thrown at us for years. And it’s a lot of crap. Folarin Falana (Falz the Bahd Guy), left
It was about two years ago that Nigerian rapper Folarin Falana, better known to the world as Falz the Bahd Guy, was driving in the streets of Lagos with his manager. Suddenly a vehicle cut his car off and a group of men in plainclothes jumped out and, guns aimed, approached Falana, screaming: “This is a stolen vehicle.”
“Actually, this is my car. Who are you?” he responded to the members of Nigeria’s notorious federal special anti-robbery squad, or SARS for short.
“My manager got out of my car and tried to calm things down and they slapped him in the face and tried to pull him into their vehicle and take him away,” Falana told the Sunday Times in an interview on the phone from Lagos this week, adding that a long negotiation ensued to get the man released.
So who are the real Bahd Guys?
Fast-forward to October 8 and the 29-year-old rapper and Afropop star, who is a coach on The Voice Nigeria , which is now in production, is leading a march on the Nigeria police, Zone 2 command headquarters in Onikan, Lagos. Beside him is his friend, singer-songwriter Runtown.
The two had announced the march a few days before on social media and thousands of young Nigerians joined them on the 5.5km route between Lekki tollgate and Onikan.
It was then that #EndSARS went from being a social media hashtag to a massive physical movement, with protests spreading from Lagos to the capital, Abuja, and across all 36 states.
They gave the police top brass a week to do something about the extortion, harassment, torture and extrajudicial killings, among a host of other abuses that SARS was notorious for. And the following Thursday on their return trip, thousands more joined the march.
“From the first time I went out to protest there have been back-to-back demonstrations,” he said. “When we went out the first time to present our five major demands, I thought we would have between 50 and 100 people, but there were thousands that day. People saw us on the road and they joined us. The next week there were between 5,000 and 10,000 people.
“After that there have been protests nationwide without us pushing for them. It has been happening organically.”
Falana dismisses the leadership tag that has been placed on him, saying the youth movement has rejected the idea of having any leaders whatsoever “because we know how this goes”.
“This has been a deliberate strategy. If there are negotiations or leaders are put around a table with the government, the leader will be pulled aside and offered a nice job or a bribe and the protesters would have wasted their time and effort and again the leader has let us down.”
He also recounts personal anecdotes of the many friends who have suffered over the years at the hands of dirty SARS cops.
After the unit was tasked with investigating cybercrime, its members would seize phones from owners on the street and scroll through their messages to find bank notifications reflecting their bank balances. The members of the ironically named anti-robbery squad would then march the phone’s owner at gunpoint to an ATM and force them to withdraw money and hand it over.
“This is a big trend,” Falana says. “They are beating people up and locking them up for nothing. And many people simply disappear. And this is a democratic government!”
Falana remarks that the protests have had a unifying effect on the youth of the country, which has an average age of just over 18 years and has suffered decades of sectarian violence.
“We are aligned regardless of tribe or religion. Whether you are Yoruba, Igbo or Hausa, we are aligned because the police are killing and torturing us all. They don’t discriminate.”
Other local celebrities who have taken part in the protests include DJ Switch, the woman who has relentlessly recorded police shootings of unarmed protesters. Another is Nigerian American Afropop star Davido, who led the march in Abuja on October 11 where protesters were sprayed with teargas and water cannon.
Falana says that while there has been no formal discussions between the celebrities about their participation in the protests, he believes that as public figures “we have the biggest voices, and what is my purpose in life if I cannot use it?”
The protests, he says, are the start of something far bigger.
“Nigerian youth have done nothing but be quiet and tolerant of all the crap they have thrown at us for years. And it’s a lot of crap. What we have been discussing is that we have to fight each battle one at a time or it will be chaotic.”
At the root of all those battles — which include shoddy education, extremely poor health care, a shortage of electricity, poor infrastructure and massive unemployment — is corruption, he says.
“The average Nigerian is one sickness or one serious accident away from dying. There is no proper medical equipment and people have to fly abroad for treatment. Health care is in shambles but the government doesn’t seem to care. It’s disgraceful.
“They are not trying to build world-class schools and the children have to be sent abroad to study. But this has backfired on them because we come back from functioning countries and realise that we cannot continue to live like this,” says Falana, who speaks with a discernible British accent thanks to his years at the University of Reading.
Fuelling the protests has been the government’s response to the demands — which Falana says was to disband the SARS unit and simply transfer the officers to another newly formed unit named SWAT, although the government denies this.
Falana addressed an open letter this week to President Muhammadu Buhari, asking for a governing council to be put in place at the National Human Rights Commission, which has spent the past five years without one.
“This is the birth of an uprising.
“This is a loud cry of complaint against the high levels of corruption and mismanagement of our country.
“Everyone is starting to realise it is bigger than this.”