Two years after #EndSARS, police brutality in Nigeria goes on

Activists say victims of security agencies are yet to receive compensation or justice and police brutality is ongoing.

Ilorin, Nigeria – Theophilus Blamoh and two of his friends were walking to buy items for their dinner in the central Nigerian city of Ilorin on the evening of September 6, when a black pick-up truck stopped beside them. One door opened and someone shouted at them to enter. It was a policeman.

When they didn’t reply, two policemen jumped out and cocked their guns. The trio, now scared, entered. Just before the vehicle drove on, a policeman recognised one of the young men as a fellow church member and let him go before driving off to the nearby police station.

“They searched our phones but they didn’t find anything incriminating,” Blamoh, a 23-year-old performing arts undergraduate at the University of Ilorin told Al Jazeera. “They checked my account balance and found I had just withdrawn my last 1,000 naira.”

One officer asked why they were not Yahoo-Yahoo boys [internet fraudsters], ostensibly so there could’ve been more money for the taking. When Blamoh asked why a police officer would ask that, they started hitting him with the butts of their guns.

#EndSARS

Stories of police brutality are rampant in Nigeria, Africa’s largest democracy. Two-thirds of its estimated 200 million people are below the age of 30 and many, like Blamoh, say they have either had a personal experience with the police or know someone who has.

As decades of torture, maiming and killing by the country’s security forces stacked up, young people across the country took to the streets for days, beginning on October 8, 2020.

The target of their anger was the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a rogue police unit accused of extrajudicial killings, extortion and kidnapping among other nefarious crimes.

Called #EndSARS, the protests ballooned into a massive call for the abolition of the squad. It flickered out on October 20 that year after soldiers opened fire on unarmed protesters at a popular landmark – the Lekki tollgates – in the commercial capital Lagos.

At least 12 people died and hundreds of others were wounded, according to Amnesty International. A leaked report by a panel of inquiry launched by the Lagos state government found the Nigerian military culpable but the authorities rejected the report.

source: aljazeera.com