#13 International Hard or Featured News

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'I Really Thought My Life Was Going to End.' Inside the Protests Taking on Police Brutality in Nigeria



 

  Police brutality and racial violence can be categorized as a sensitive topic in America due to recent events that have occurred. Pretty much all over you hear stories about police brutality and how people have tried to protest to fight against it. You don't typically hear about police brutality protest going on in international countries and if you do it isn't really paid attention to or taken as serious as it would in the United States. This leads me to talk about a recent protest that has been going on in Nigeria. As of October 15, 2020 Nigerian protesters stood on the Lagos- Ibadan expressway during a demonstration to protest against police brutality. The also stood to fight against the scrapping of Special Anti-Robbery Squad in Lagos. This new wave of demonstrations actually begins in October, with protesters speaking out against the brutality of the (SARS) which is the anti-robbery squad. The SARS is also a unit of Nigerian police forces that operates in plain clothes.

     Furthermore, one protester shared her story about what she experienced during the protest. She stated, " We were marching to the police headquarters in Abuja when police started spraying water cannons and throwing tear gas canisters at us to disperse the crowd"." She even went into more depth about what her and her friend experienced together. She said that, " Police officers ambushed my friend and I, grabbed my phone and smashed it on the floor. I was not aggressive, but it did not stop them from beating me up, from ganging up on me and hitting me. I was saying my last prayers. I really thought my life was going to end. It made me realize the danger of a system that has given savages the right to be unsupervised.





 



Lastly the Nigerian lady stated that one of the police officers transferred her and her friend to the police headquarters. When they arrived at the headquarters one of the officers told them that they were lucky that the encounter they had was during the day because had it been at night the officers would have killed them and erased every trace of their existence.  According to Amnesty International, 10 people had died and hundreds were injured as a result of the protest. Overall , according to protesters, the Nigerian government has done a terrible job at recognizing what the people of Nigeria are protesting for. The outrage is not just about police brutality but its about years of people being undermined by the system. The people of Nigeria feel as if the government is not acknowledging their sense of grief. 

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