Nigerians take to the streets for second day of nationwide protests

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Demonstrators took to the streets of Nigeria’s biggest cities on Friday for a second day as citizens in Africa’s most populous country came out to decry a severe cost of living crisis and bad governance.

More than a dozen people were killed when law enforcement forces, according to rights groups, fired on protesters on Thursday in several northern states including Borno, which was also among those to introduce a day-long curfew as part of efforts to curtail the unrest.

Organisers of the protests, which also took place in the commercial hub of Lagos and the capital Abuja, had called for Nigerians to show their displeasure at soaring food prices and three-decade high inflation over 10 days of demonstrations.

They have been partly inspired by the demonstrations in Kenya where a youth-led movement revolted against the government’s proposed tax rises to bridge a fiscal deficit.

Nigeria is experiencing its worst economic crisis in decades, with annual headline inflation of more than 34 per cent and food prices rising even higher.

The deep malaise, which President Bola Tinubu’s government pledged to fix when it came into office last year, has pushed millions more into poverty in a country with one of the highest numbers of impoverished people in the world.

Tinubu has deployed a raft of economic reforms to revive Nigeria’s ailing economy. But his solutions have created their own problems, with a move to partially remove popular but costly fuel subsidies leading to a tripling of fuel prices and triggering a jump in the costs of consumer goods and transport. The local naira currency has also lost about 70 per cent of its value against the US dollar following two devaluations over the past year.

Heavily armed police and military have been stationed across the country and police threw tear gas at protesters on the first day of the demonstrations. Nigeria’s national police chief Kayode Egbetokun said all units had been placed on “red alert” and that they may seek increased military intervention.

The government had spent days trying to prevent the protests from going ahead with a mix of thinly veiled threats and cajoling. It secured court orders banning demonstrators from public parks, with security forces hinting they had uncovered a plot to use the protests as a Trojan horse to unseat the government. Traditional chiefs and religious leaders, including powerful imams, were also enlisted to appeal to their followers to shun the dissent.

Tinubu’s administration announced vacancies at the state-owned oil corporation and doubled the national minimum wage to N70,000 ($43) in the days leading up to the first day of demonstrations.

Rights group Amnesty International said in a statement on Friday that authorities should investigate Thursday’s killings and “ensure that security personnel suspected of responsibility for deadly use of force are held to account through fair trial. Violent crackdown on peaceful protesters is unjustified and unacceptable.

“Our findings, so far, show that security personnel at the locations where lives were lost deliberately used tactics designed to kill while dealing with gatherings of people protesting hunger and deep poverty.”

Nigeria has a history of clamping down on protesters. Almost 60 people were killed nationwide in demonstrations against police brutality in 2020, including at the Lekki neighbourhood of Lagos where soldiers opened fire on peaceful protesters.