The Southerner
OPEN EYES

On the night of October 20, 2020, young Nigerians sat at the Lekki Toll Gate, draped in the green-white-green and singing the national anthem, and were met with gunfire. Six years later the grief has not thinned. A Lagos judicial panel found that a massacre occurred and indicted the Nigerian Army for using excessive force on protesters. Yet the federal government have never fully acknowledged the incident, and for years they denied it outrightly.

Some families still do not know where their children lie, and still have no grave to visit and no closure to the tragedy. To remember these young people is not to indulge in nostalgia. It is a duty owed to the dead and a warning to the living, that a nation which cannot account for its dead cannot claim to have healed.

The anger of 2020 did not come from nowhere. The hashtag #EndSARS began in 2017, and SARS was officially disbanded on October 11, 2020, the fifth time since 2015 that the federal government had pledged to reform the police and disband the unit. Five promises in five years made the sixth one hard to believe, and the youth were right to say so.

Behind the pledges sat a colonial inheritance. Nigeria’s police structures were built to guard the interests of the state rather than the safety of the citizen. Regional police forces were dissolved and policing was centralized under millitary rule. Decades of underfunding, poor wages, weak welfare, thin training and political interference followed.

An institution that is poorly paid, poorly supervised and rarely punished will eventually prey on those it is meant to protect.

Obstructively, brutality fed on prejudice. In the eyes of too many officers, a young man with dreadlocks, tattoos, a laptop or a smartphone became a suspected fraudster. Youth itself became a charge sheet, and poverty and appearance became probable cause. Extortion at roadblocks, torture in detention and extrajudicial killings were treated as routine. Impunity was the real engine of it all. The few officers who were sanctioned were the exception, and everyone knew it, the officers included.

Honesty also requires us to speak of the other side of the ledger, because a nation cannot be educated by half-truths or alternative facts. Nigeria faces real crimes; armed robbery, kidnapping, corruption, banditry, and cultism. Many officers work under dangerous and thankless conditions, and many have died in service, unremembered. In the weeks after Lekki tragedy, police stations were torched and officers were killed.

Looters stripped warehouses, and criminals exploited the chaos. Amnesty International, for its part, found that while most protesters were peaceful, there was violence, mostly instigated by pro-government supporters.

Lawlessness among citizens is real and must be confronted, yet it can never justify lawlessness by the state. A police force that answers disorder with disorder deepens the very problem it claims to solve.

On reforms, we should state unequivocally what has changed and what has not. The Police Act of 2020 replaced the colonial-era law of 1943, with provisions on rights of suspects and the conduct of officers.

It built on the Anti-Torture Act of 2017 and the Police Trust Fund. After the protests, 28 states set up judicial panels of inquiry, and some awarded compensation to victims. Yet a year on, Amnesty reported that no police or military officer had been prosecuted for the torture and killings of protesters. Reports of harassment, illegal checkpoints and detentions have kept coming, and some who were jailed around the protests have, by advocates’ accounts, never been freed. Laws on paper are not reform in practice, and reform without prosecutions is only theatre of the absurd.

To this end brings us to state policing, which is now the great hope of the hour. The Constitution (Sixth Alteration) Bill, 2026 has cleared the National Assembly. It has been sent to the 36 state assemblies, and at least 24 must approve it before it can become law. Its proponents argue that local police who know their communities, languages and terrain will respond faster than a distant federal command.

The bill also has safeguards, which is why I hold my optimism with care rather than with abandon. No state force may start operating until a state law creates it and it meets national minimum standards, and state commissioners would be appointed by governors on the advice of the Nigeria Police, subject to confirmation by state assemblies.

Still, the risk is obvious. Some governors may be tempted to turn local police into a private army against opponents, journalists and critics.

Decentralization brings the police closer to the people only if it also brings oversight closer; independent complaints bodies, civilian review, transparent recruitment, adequate funding and real prosecution of offenders. Without these, we will simply have moved the same abuses from Abuja to thirty-six state capitals.

To the young, to the grieving, and to the powerful, I will say it as it is. Protest is a constitutional right and a moral duty when a state wounds its citizens, and the demand for justice at Lekki will not expire with time. But vigillance cuts both ways. Political actors have always known how to ride genuine anguish toward their own ambitions, with an election season approaching.

The young should guard their movement against hijack, remembering that a cause is honoured by the discipline of its pursuit as much as by its passion. The federal government should stop denying and start answering; publish the findings, prosecute the guilty, release those held unjustly, account for the missing, and compensate the bereaved. Peace in Nigeria will not be bought by silence. It will be earned by truth, accountability and a police force that fears the law more than it is feared by the people. That would be the only memorial worthy of those who fell. May their souls rest.