#EndSARS: Power Returns To The People

Power has returned to its rightful repository the people. Our liberators did not come from the north, the south or the east and west of Nigeria.

They emerged from the ruins of the country; they broke free from the noxious culture of silence and shattered the substructure of generational complicity and conspiracy.

They are the youth of Nigeria; the deliverer of the colony of slaves from the fowler’s snare and deadly pestilence.

The #EndSARS protests did not only end a ferocious unit of the police and constrained the capricious hands of the government into making pledges of initiating reforms in the force; it also galvanised Nigerians, particularly the young, across religions and ethnic groups to put the government to task.

Government should be in the service of the people and not the other way around. Really, there is no mortar that can crush a people forged into a fist; when the people kill fear, the government becomes afraid.

#EndSARS could be the beginning of the end of all Nigeria’s maladies. Citizens of all ages have realised their voice counts.

They have seen the government tremble in trepidation of a united assemblage of people. Just like Xerxes, the god-king, bled from the spear of King Leonidas, they have seen the very intransigent regime bleed.

Nigerians have been unplugged from the matrix by a legion of young resistance. It may never be the same again. Power has returned to the people. The government should be afraid.

The youth have pointed us to a path out of darkness, state repression and oppression. They have given us hope in the possibility of a new country where possibilities are not impossible. They have seized the baton on the relay race to a contemporary Nigeria. It could be a dawn of new beginnings.

I have seen arguments on the need to be cautiously optimistic about the fruits of the recent agitation. Some say the old order of things could return as soon as the #EndSARS protests peter out. Well, I do not want to be cautiously optimistic.

I am very optimistic about the far-reaching and indelible impact of this movement. It may never be the same. A new precedent has been set upon which other exemplars will follow.

I do not think there has been anything of this magnitude in our recent history. When any government becomes insouciant about the plight of citizens, the #EndSARS protest will be an aide-memoire – to remind that government of citizens’ wrath. No sane government will want to be on the testy side of the people.

Really, Nigerians are on a fight for survival, and nothing else matters. By the time this night is over, I believe a dawn of healthy government-citizen relationship will set in.