A protest organised by unions and youth groups about the cost of living crisis on Nigeria’s Democracy Day in June passed off quietly, drawing just a few hundred people in the country’s biggest city, Lagos, and the capital, Abuja.
Then things started to kick off in Kenya. Young Kenyans angry at the prospect of increased levies on essential foodstuffs occupied parliament in Nairobi amid violence that claimed more than 20 lives. Kenya’s president, William Ruto, was forced to withdraw his finance bill and dissolved his cabinet.
Across the continent, that gave a shot in the arm to the young people in Nigeria, who announced 10 days of protests across the country for August. And it struck fear into government officials, still on edge after the protests in October 2020 against police brutality that cost more than a dozen lives.
With one eye on securing re-election in 2027, Bola Tinubu, the first career politician to become president in decades, and officials in his government swung into action.
Tinubu, 72, approved a 70,000 naira (£34) minimum monthly wage against a backdrop of 40 per cent food inflation, after weeks of prodding by the unions. On 25 July, he held several closed-door meetings with governors of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and his national security adviser Nuhu Ribadu, as well as traditional rulers from across the country, the justice and information ministers and police chief. The national economic council meeting due the same day was shelved.
In the days that followed, the military and secret police said they would take to the streets to forestall violence in Africa’s most populous country. Sources say ruling party members gave money to ulemas (Islamic scholars) in the north and activated influencers in the south. Then ruling party members, several leaders of student groups, religious clerics and even opposition leaders began urging their compatriots not to protest.
“Why the news about the protest got to the highest point at the moment is because Kenya had an outing . . . Kenya is a small country compared with Nigeria,” Benjamin Kalu, deputy leader of the house of representatives said in parliament, while offering to slash his salary by half. “Tell your children to stay at home … the president is doing well,” said the women affairs minister Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye .
As rumours began to swirl in Abuja that their addresses had been handed to youth groups in order to target them, politically exposed people flooded the airports at Lagos and Abuja, heading for London, Riyadh and Washington with their families.
“It’s their modus operandi,” Oshioks Philip, a representative of Take It Back movement, one of the youth groups, said. “They suppress us and the moment we cry out, they set the country in flames and run to other countries where democracy in its true form is practised.”
The protests began early on Monday in the north-central state of Niger. Nigeria’s largest state by land mass, it is bigger than Belgium and Denmark combined, with lots of ungoverned space that has made it a hotspot of armed bandits whose kidnapping activities have become a national problem.
Beyond the lack of security, changes implemented by Tinubu from his first day in office in May 2023, triggered a rise in cost of everyday items. While his predecessor Muhammadu Buhari had paid a controversial fuel subsidy and pushed the central bank to stabilise the naira and peg inflation, Tinubu did away with both.
Petrol now costs 1,000 naira (49p) litre or more. Bakeries in the north have shut due to increased operating costs and declining demand.
That made the president, who only won a third of all votes in a heavily disputed election and lost the popular vote in the northern states of Kano, Katsina, Kebbi and Kaduna – known as the Kardashians because of their capacity to deliver bulk votes – and Sokoto, deeply unpopular.
Analysts say northerners felt slighted as Tinubu, a southerner, dislodged the northern establishment to build a new base of allies that includes national security adviser Nuhu Ribadu, traditionally an outsider.
In January, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission raided one of the businesses of Kano-born Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, who is involved in a spat with top officials of the state oil company over the sourcing of crude for his recently commissioned refinery.
Last month, Ali Ndume, an influential senator from the north-east, was also removed as chief whip for criticising the government’s handling of the economy.
The president’s allies claim the protests are being sponsored by his rivals: one governor claimed former ministers are backing the protest, hours before a minister accused a serving senator of backing them too.
“Ndume has a horrible reputation for being a loose cannon and careless talker,” one presidential adviser said in July. “People like him only remember the poor and the fact that ‘Nigerians are suffering’ when their personal agenda and indulgences can’t be met.”
“This is Nigeria’s Magna Carta moment,” said Adewunmi Emoruwa, head of global policy at Abuja-based public strategy firm, Gatefield. “Amid the elite infighting, the struggles of ordinary Nigerians experiencing hunger and poverty are brought into focus. If this turmoil forces greater government accountability, the true beneficiaries would ultimately be the people.”
In the north, a region known for shunning socio-economic protests, citizens defied all the warnings, pleading and injunctions delivered to limit the protests to certain parts of cities, and turned out on Thursday.
By the end of the first day of protests, looting had begun and over a dozen people had been killed across three northern states, forcing four governors to order dusk-to-dawn curfews. In Abuja, protesters were teargassed and some taken to holding facilities of the dreaded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), which the government had supposedly disbanded after the 2020 End SARS protests.
“One distinguishing factor of these protests is that I could see a more national representation at the protests,” said Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, research analyst at an Abuja-based thinktank, the Centre for Democracy and Development.
In all of this, the south-east has been eerily quiet and in Lagos, bands of pro-government groups, some of whom confessed to being paid 5,000 naira (£2.42) each to protest, have taken to the streets.
Unlike previous protests, this one started with little buy-in from social media and there is little or no crowdfunding. And as demonstrations surged in suburban areas, analysts say there is a degree of uncertainty that could derail their momentum.
The Kenyan protest and the End SARS protests had specific agendas but “there are disjointed requests from different and uncoordinated groups”, said Adekaiyaoja. “Although this is a very difficult period for all Nigerians, the [groups] in the south have different asks from those in the north. If there is no clear ask, it is easy for the government of the day to get away with anything . . . we don’t know the point when we can say the protest is successful.”
Airports were shut and banks closed on the first day of the protest, while more security personnel were dispatched to the streets. But those on the streets say they are determined to face whatever the government throws at them.
“[This is] a protest that will make Nigeria a nation as against the banana republic that it is today,” said Oshioks Philip. “The protest is the rise of the oppressed asking for their destinies returned back to them.”
• This article was amended on 4 August 2024. A reference in an earlier version to “40 per cent inflation” should instead have been to food inflation.
