Nigerian President and alleged CIA asset Bola Tinubu implemented a nation-wide crackdown on protests against hunger and the cost-of-living crisis, resulting in dozens of deaths
End Bad Governance in Nigeria protests. Photo: Amnesty International
by Pavan Kulkarni
Extrajudicial executions, mass arrests, custodial torture and charges of treason were among the methods used by the Nigerian government to crack down on protests this August against rising hunger and economic hardships. Nigerian civil society, demanding a reversal of President Bola Tinubu’s aggressive implementation of IMF policies that brought about this cost of living crisis on Africa’s largest population, led these protests for 10 days at the beginning of August.
In a report released on November 28, titled “Bloody August,” Amnesty International (AI) documented 24 killings, while “scores of additional cases reported by activists and journalists” are yet to be verified. Many of these lives were taken by security forces firing live ammunition at close range to “head or torso, suggesting that they were shooting to kill,” the report stated.
Most of the victims were in their twenties and teens. Chased down by soldiers of the Nigerian army, 16-year-old Ismail Muhammad, a resident of Kaduna state’s Zaria city, ran into his home and locked the door behind him. Shooting through the door, the soldiers killed him, according to the minor’s father.
A young boy shot by a policeman in the Rijiyar Lemo area of Dala district in Kano state was rushed to a hospital by 20-year-old protester Usman Hassan. Upon finding the policeman on his way back from the hospital, Hassan demanded to know why he had shot the boy. The policeman responded by executing Hassan with two bullets on August 3.
Friends of 21-year-old Shafiu Mukhtar, shot on August 5 in the capital region of Katsina state, said they “could probably have saved” him if they had not been chased by the police and dispersed with teargas.
Police violence spills over from the protests
Several victims had nothing to do with the protests. Five-year-old Muhammad Sani was playing with his sibling outside his home in Rijiyar Lemo on August 3 when a bullet fired by police pierced through his lap. Firdausi, a 30-year-old single mother of two children, was shot dead in the same locality on August 3 when she had stepped out to buy charcoal after her cooking fire began to dim. Abduljalal, a shopkeeper, was killed in his provisional store when bullets perforated the walls. In the Yakasai suburb of Kano municipality, a neighbor found 63-year-old Mustapha “with his intestine pouring on the floor” of his shop after policemen stormed the area. Hurling a hand grenade into a fuel station, police killed three workers in a station near the Bolori Junction of Borno state’s capital Maiduguri on August 1.
Despite such violence, the #HungerProtests – also popularized as #EndBadGovernance protests – continued for 10 days, culminating in what was dubbed the “One-Million Man March” in the capital Abuja on August 10. The crackdown on protesters continued well after the protests.
According to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), about 1,200 protesters had been arrested and detained across the country by security forces. Most of them were held in custody for longer than constitutionally permissible before being produced in court, AI reported. Even after appearing before a judiciary, constitutional relief was not available to many who were detained. Contravening the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, which limits pre-trial detention to 14 days, on August 24, a Nigerian court allowed the police “to hold 124 arrested protesters for 60 days pending the conclusion of the investigation and filing of charges,” AI said in its report.
At the beginning of November, charges were dropped for 119 of the arrested protesters, including most of the 61 children arrested. Many of them had been charged with offenses of treason, carrying a possible death penalty. Some of the children collapsed in the courtroom during the November 4 hearing. “The footage reveals minors, some so weak that they could barely stand, others fainting from sheer exhaustion and lack of nourishment,” said Peter Obi, former Governor of Anambra state. “These children appeared visibly malnourished and starved—a condition that should alarm the conscience of every citizen in our nation,” added the presidential candidate of the Labor Party, who lost to Tinubu in a contested election in 2023.
Less than a week later, allegations of treason were made against Bola Tinubu himself, after investigative journalist David Hundeyin reported that “the CIA effectively confirmed that Nigeria’s sitting president is an active CIA asset.”
Hundeyin, the author of the documentary “Bola Ahmed Tinubu: From Drug Lord to Presidential Candidate,” had sought the unredacted files of an investigation the US had conducted into Bola Tinubu’s role in laundering money for a major heroin ring in Chicago in the early 1990s. Entering into a plea bargain to avoid a trial, Tinubu had forfeited USD 460,000 to US authorities in 1993.
The investigation’s publicly available files appear with several redacted portions. In response to Plainsite founder Aaron Greenspan’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the release of the unredacted version, the CIA filed its opposition on November 11. “In the case of a person who has been cooperating with the CIA, official confirmation of that cooperation” could put the asset in danger, it explained. Releasing the full records of the investigation on him could “cause damage to US national security by indicating whether or not the CIA maintained any human intelligence sources related to Tinubu.”
The US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) also opposed full disclosure of its investigation, reportedly stating: “because we believe that while Nigerians have a right to be informed about what their government is up to, they do not have a right to know what their president is up to.”
Human rights lawyer Adeyanju Deji marveled at the irony that a President, who had charged minors with treason, is himself a “CIA agent”.
In IMF’s service
One of Bola Tinubu’s first measures upon becoming president in 2023 was to fulfill the IMF’s long-standing demand that petroleum subsidies be removed in Nigeria, Africa’s largest producer of crude oil.
“The fuel subsidy is gone,” Tinibu, who promised he would slash petrol prices if elected, announced in his inaugural speech on May 29, 2023. At the time, a liter of petrol cost 175 Naira (0,12 USD). The announcement was followed by a nearly 500% price increase by October 2024, when the same amount of petrol cost 1,030 Naira (0,69 USD).
The rising cost of petrol has plunged many areas, especially in rural Nigeria, into darkness: 60% of the country’s households, left out of the national electricity grid, depend on petrol and diesel generators. Tinubu also appears to be en route to achieve another IMF demand, having announced a nearly 300% hike in electricity prices in April this year.
Skyrocketing prices of petrol and electricity have led to the increase of prices of essential items, including food. The situation has been further aggravated by Tinubu’s ending of government oversight over the official exchange rate in June 2023. The value of the Naira has dropped from 475 Naira per USD to 1,670.65 Naira per USD by late October, making the Nigerian currency the third-worst performing in the world.
The effects on the population were harrowing. The number of food-insecure people rose from 66.2 million in early 2023 to 100 million in early 2024. By July 2024, the prices of staples like beans and maize had increased by 400%. The year-on-year food inflation rate of 37.5% in August was among the highest globally. Today, more than 31.8 million Nigerians experience acute food shortages.
In this context of rising hunger, civil society organizations like the Take It Back Movement, Nigerians Against Hunger, Initiative for Change, Human Rights CoAdvocacy for Change, Students for Change and Youths Against Tyranny organized the protests from August 1-10.
Amid these protests, unfolding during “Nigeria’s worst cost-of-living crisis in decades,” Tinubu appeared on television announcing that he would not accept the demand for the government to reverse the removal of petrol subsidies and the floating of the Naira.
This article was produced by Peoples Dispatch / Globetrotter News Service. Pavan Kulkarni is a journalist with Peoples Dispatch.
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