Human Rights Workshop: Scholars Consider Role of Policing in Light of #EndSARS

At the April 2, 2021, Human Rights Workshop titled “Protests and Policing: Nigeria’s #EndSARS Movement,” Audu Bulama Bukarti and Krystal Strong discussed the merits, drawbacks, and future of systems of policing in light of a history of police brutality in the United States and Nigeria.

Bukarti is an analyst in the Extremism Policy Unit of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, where he focuses on violent extremist groups in sub-Saharan Africa. He discussed the culture of impunity for crime in his native Nigeria. Drawing on his research on Boko Haram at the University of London, Bukarti argued that Nigeria needs a strengthened police force to remedy the failure to address crimes.

An Assistant Professor of Education, Literacy, Culture, and International Education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, Strong’s research and teaching focuses on community activism and the role of education as sites of political struggle in Africa and within the African Diaspora. She challenged Bukarti’s argument for an expansion of the policing system.

Bukarti offered a historical trajectory of policing in Nigeria, leading up to the #EndSARS protests. He described the country as being “infested by criminality and terrorism” with Boko Haram in the northeast, separatist groups in the south, and criminal groups in the northwest killing “thousands of people every year.” Because the police are the “major institution charged with the responsibility of fighting crime,” according to Bukarti, the “systemic impunity and corruption” that characterizes Nigeria’s police force is particularly harmful. He explained that the Nigerian police were a “colonial creation” established to “protect British colonial interests and officers.” He stated that the police’s purpose, to protect the interests of the people in power, was exacerbated by the 20th century’s authoritarian dictatorships and preserved to the present-day. Bukarti noted that the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS, the subject of the protests) has been particularly infamous for impunity and corruption. But despite being a “broken system with the colonial legacy, the military legacy,” Bukarti said, the police are still an “important institution, especially in a country infested with crime and impunity.” He lamented the police’s “gross lack of manpower,” with about 360,000 police officers — 40 percent of which are on VIP protection duty (attached to politicians, judges, etc.) and 20 percent of which hold administrative roles — serving a population of 200 million.

Strong affirmed Bukarti’s account of the history of Nigerian policing, but disagreed with his conclusions. The importance of this history, she said, is that it “not only...requires us to really understand the historical roots and transformations of policing, it requires us as well to understand and question, what then is the function of policing?” Strong argued that these imperial histories can “become lost in a kind of pathologizing discourse that understands the African state as fundamentally pathological.” She continued, “I think when we trace these roots, we are able to see that actually it is imperialism, it is the colonial project that is the genesis of the need for policing in and of itself.” Strong believes the Nigerian police’s true function is “to actually be repressive, to be corrupt, to be inefficient, to maintain rule by the political and economic elite.”

Bukarti described the frustrations Nigerians have felt about the lack of accountability for crime. For instance, he said, no one was prosecuted for the kidnapping of more than 300 students. Bukarti recognized that police seem to view their ineffectiveness as acceptable. He recalled the SARS policeman, who poorly oversaw his client’s son’s murder when he worked as a lawyer, rose through the ranks of the force afterward.

SARS, Bukarti indicated, was created in 1984 after a surge in armed robberies following the Nigerian Civil War, when weapons became “common.” The hashtag #EndSARS began in 2017, according to Bukarti, and there have been protests advocating for the disbanding of SARS sporadically for twenty years. “No Nigerian is just hearing about SARS and its impunity,” Bukarti said. “It is something every single one of us has felt.” On-the-ground protests coupled with online activity helped the decentralized movement rise to international prominence in 2020, marking a turning point, Bukarti noted. He characterized the movement’s lack of national leadership as both a strength, in that each local organizer can coordinate for their community, and a weakness, given that a “movement without a leadership cannot articulate anything.”

Strong and Bukarti both recognized the key role social media plays for #EndSARS. Strong highlighted the “importance of international social media-based solidarity” in the past decade. “We should recognize that what is happening in Nigeria is not happening in a vacuum,” Strong argued. These protests, she noted, are happening in the “midst of a pandemic that brings into relief political and economic contradictions” across the globe. Strong saw evidence of international solidarity in Nigerian protesters’ use of the slogan “Nigerian Lives Matter,” which adopts the language of the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. Recognizing #EndSARS as a predominantly youth-led movement, Strong concluded, “we can’t deny the importance of social media in #EndSARS.” Still, Bukarti saw some drawbacks in the dependence on social media, since it is “used for disinformation and fake news.” He also noted that the Nigerian government made sustained efforts to shut down the internet, putting the movement at risk.

Strong observed an important distinction between the Nigerian and American movements: defunding and abolition of police are not the goals of Nigerian protesters, whereas they have “some level of salience” in the U.S. She noted that among #EndSARS’s five demands, there was one that advocated for increasing police funding — which directly contradicts abolitionist goals in the U.S. She was skeptical of “state-initiated police reform” since, she said, it was “akin to the state reforming itself.” She recognized that the “security challenges” in Nigeria are “very serious,” but she also said that she has “never seen a situation where more police doesn’t cause more problems.” Even though there needs to be “measures in place” to prevent school kidnappings, for instance, she expressed concern about the prospect of a “more empowered and militarized” police force. This future, she said, is likely “not the vision for society that the average citizen has” and would “create a host of new challenges.”

“Defunding is not on the table” in Nigeria, Bukarti affirmed. “Abolition is not on the table.” Instead, he said, “what we are asking for is better policing in Nigeria.” Bukarti said that there is “popular support” for greater use of violence against criminal groups and many agree that about 300,000 police officers is not enough for the entire population. “There is definitely a need for more policing and more security in the country,” he said. “It’s a question of where do you find the balance between more police...with less human rights abuses and impunity that delivers on eliminating criminality.” Strong posed a question in response, sympathetic to his position: “Is more policing actually addressing the reason the criminal exists?” Bukarti clarified that “more policing is not an alternative to addressing the root causes” through investments in education and job opportunities. “What you need is a security force that will contain the violence...together with addressing the root causes of the violence,” Bukarti said. “For me, it is not ‘either...or.’ It is a combination.” Strong believes this clarification is a “very important” one: “So, the goal is not to have a policed society. The function of increasing policing is to secure the current conditions in order to, in conjunction with that, reorganize the way Nigerian society currently functions.”