The Night Nigeria Lost Its Loose Foothold on The Claim to Democracy

On the 20th October 2020, a few minutes before 9pm, I decided to cooperate with my heavy eyelids and find my way into bed. With the lights off, I opted for the dulcet, Alsatian, tones of Arsène Wenger to serenade sleep. Wenger reflecting on his life and time at Arsenal was surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) an effective lullaby. Anticipating that sleep was dangerously near, I reached for my phone to hush the former manager and take a final glance at my notifications.

‘Nigeria is making me sad’. This was one of the few messages that would greet me. The words were understandable. In recent weeks, Nigerians around the world had challenged the brutality of the state entrenched in the Special AntiRobbery Squad (SARS), a branch of the Nigeria Police Force.

The struggle had revealed — or confirmed to the suspicions of many — that the country and its institutions needed deep and total reform.

This was how I processed those words. As a generalized sentiment of many within and outside the diaspora. They were innocuous when they should have been alarming.

It was only through tapping through Instagram stories that the pieces of a truly harrowing jigsaw fell into place. A Nigerian flag drenched in the sanguine tones of blood should have told me all I needed to know. But in this case, these 1000 words barely scratched the surface of the iceberg that would crush me in ways I was yet to know. I would piece together through frantic swipes and scrolls a living nightmare.

A plan. A cold and premeditated plan. A plan that directly looked peace and civility in the eyes and saw only an opportunity for brutal violence. I would gather that the government imposed a sudden curfew on the area where protestors had gathered, the Lekki Toll Gate. It would then proceed to take down CCTV cameras and deactivate a billboard which served as the primary source of light. This would all be an ominous prelude to the massacre of unarmed protestors.

Irony is an understatement for the heart-stopping reality that a government whose people had pleaded it to stop needless killings responded with more.

I took this all in with a visceral pain that lingers as I write these words. Of the few words I could find in the immediate aftermath of discovering all this, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so shaken or paralyzed to the core by a political event in my life’ captures how significant this event was to me.

In a mental state looking not for answers or analysis, but a quiet end to a hopeless anxiety, I searched the ceiling for distractions. I later picked up my pen, before putting it down at 23:59, knowing that this was just the beginning.