#End SARS
This week we delved into a decentralized movement by the youth of Nigeria against police brutality.
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What comes to your mind when you hear the phrase “End SARS”? Well for most of us, the acronym SARS has inhabited itself as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome generally associated with the coronavirus. I was browsing through Twitter the other day and found the hashtag #ENDSARS trending. As a lot of us would have presumed I anticipated it to be something related to the year-long pandemic. Much to my dismay, I was introduced to the ongoing protests against police brutality in Nigeria! This was followed by my analysis of the situation. I found the situation to be highly underrepresented and decided to write about it.
What is SARS?
SARS along with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is an acronym for Special Anti-Robbery Squad which was a sub-branch of the Nigerian Police founded in late 1992 with the ability to investigate, detain and prosecute people involved in violent crimes. The hashtag (#EndSARS) comes from a protest from 2017 aiming to disband the said force. The annual report by Amnesty International showed how SARS officers had been involved in at least 82 cases of torture, ill-treatment, and extrajudicial executions between January 2017 and May 2020. It was also observed that most of the victims of this torture were young (aged 17-25) and predominantly men. Other special units with similar objectives with different names and at different times have been created by the Nigerian government to combat the rising violent crimes following the Nigerian Civil War of 1970.
The Nigerian Civil War
The Nigerian Civil war is also known as the Biafran war named after the secessionist state of Biafra. Secession is when a group withdraws from a larger entity especially a political entity for example Pakistan seceded from British India in what is known as the partition between the two nations. Interestingly the conflict was a result of political, economic, ethnic, cultural, and religious tensions that preceded Britain's formal decolonization of Nigeria. Now, this war was fought between the government of Nigeria headed by General Yakubu and the state of Biafra. Eventually, the federal government surrounded the state of Biafra barring them from commodities and hence ensuing mass starvation. This event led to controversies across the globe and was the cause of the circulation of images of malnourished and starving Biafran children throughout the media.
More about SARS
Now as we have mentioned before SARS was a masked special forces unit created to combat the rising violent crimes in Nigeria following data represents the downward trend of violent crimes in the nation from the year 1993 to 2013. Nigeria has continued to experience a high rate of population growth and as a country has one of the youngest populations. Nigeria has also been fighting a growing unemployment rate which can be worked out to be the reason for the growing crime rate. It can be deduced from the data that the infamous squad was somewhat successful.
Moving towards the implementation of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, by the early 90s armed robbers were terrorizing southern Nigeria especially the most populous city (then) of Nigeria, Lagos. With this crime rise, Simeon Danladi Midenda formed this unit and named it the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in 1992. Fun fact, Lagos was one of the first few cities where END SARS protests started.
Fulani Kwajafa, a former commissioner of police behind the creation of the disbanded special anti-robbery squad (SARS) in an interview with BBC said that he regretted creating the unit.
About the Protests (END SARS):
End SARS is a movement against police brutality in Nigeria. Under this movement, a series of mass protests have been organized with slogan calls to disband the SARS unit. Celebrities like Beyonce, Rihanna, and Kanye West have supported this movement through social media. These officers are being accused of profiling innocent Nigerians, extorting, raping, and extrajudicial murders.
According to the protestors the government has promised to disband the unit in 2017,2018 and 2019 too and now want concrete measures to be taken against the police force.
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