Pluralism and Mass Movement in Nigeria: The Case Study of ENDSARS Movement

• In Event: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries Virtual Poster Session 2

Abstract

In recent years, four major mass movements have been organized by the people against some perceived injustice by the government or its agency. The protest against the annulment of the June 12 presidential election, the January 2012 mass movement in protest against the increase in gas price by over 100 percent, the 2013 bring back our girls’ protest and the October 2020 ENDSARS mass movement in protest against police brutality. Out of these four mass movements, the protest against the annulment of June 12 1993 presidential election failed, the protest against the January 2012 gas price hike achieved its aim in part as the government was forced to reduce the pump price by over 50 percent. The bring back our protest failed. The last mass movement of October 2020 recorded partial success because while the government disbanded the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit created by the police to tackle incidents of robbery, kidnapping, and fraud among others, the use of force by the state against the protesters led to the death of many protesters. The government did this with impunity because the northerners, particularly most important social, political and economic groups in the Norths did not support or join the protest. Therefore, it was treated as a southern protest. The lack of support from the northern youths and elites robbed the movement the opportunity of forcing the government to introduce some major reforms that would have had tremendous political, social and economic impacts on the state and the people. Thus, this study will focus on the two recent mass actions of 2012 and 2020 and examine the issues around them and why the 2012 partially succeeded while the 2020 mass movement did not go far enough to achieve its targeted goals. The study will use the secondary data to be generated from the library and internet. We will use the theory of pluralism to discuss the two movements with a view to accounting for the partial success of both. The study will argue that, the 2012 mass movement partially succeeded largely because every critical stakeholder keyed into it. This was not the case in the 2020 protest.

Authors

• Joseph Olayinka Fashagba, Federal University Lokoja

• Chiedo Nwankwor, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced Innterntional Studies