END SARS

In October 2020, Nigeria youths took the streets of major cities in the country including Lagos and Abuja demanding their elected government treat them with dignity and protect their constitutional rights and democratic freedoms of expression, association and assembly, both online and on the streets riding on the back of the #EndSARS campaign which had earlier started in 2017 as a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #EndSARS to demand the disbanding of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a notorious unit of the Nigerian Police with a long record of abuses including 82 cases of police abuse by SARS documented by Amnesty International between January 2017 and May 2020, which included beatings, mock executions, disappearing citizens, waterboarding and sexual violence.

After experiencing a revitalisation in October 2020 following more revelations of the abuses of the unit, including reports of the shooting of an unarmed young man by SARS officers, mass demonstrations occurred throughout the major cities of Nigeria, accompanied by vociferous outrage on social media platforms. About 28 million tweets bearing the hashtag were accumulated on Twitter alone.