From the Fundamental Concept of Leadership to the Workers Role in the Movement
Introduction
The EndSARS protest is considered as one of the largest political movements in the history of Nigeria. It began in October 2020 when videos of the brutal killings of two young men by the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigerian police force went viral on the internet. The uprising sparked far-reaching concerns not only amongst Nigerians at home and in diaspora but also at the corridors of Western powers which had long term and prospective interests in Nigeria. Little wonder, when the protests were crushed by the force of arms with the massacre of over 20 persons in what is now remembered as Black Tuesday by many Nigerians, international bodies threw their weight behind the cry for justice even if at least to feign good intent for the world’s most populous black nation. There are many vantage points to draw lessons from a watershed event like the END SARS protests, however, the series you are about to see focuses on the inner weaknesses and shortcomings of the internal organization of the movement, at least from the keen observation of the author. Chief amongst this mishaps is its leadership.
As conditions in Nigeria continue to worsen, with fuel and food prices going up coupled with general collapse of the security infrastructure of the nation due to ethnic tensions, the EndSARS movement and the leadership questions it raised are defining a new era in history of Nigerian popular resistance! This is the second part of the piece.
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What it doesn’t mean
Here the misconceptions and distortions of the maxim “Everybody is a leader” are enumerated as follows:
It doesn’t mean the absence of coordination/representation.
Through out the two weeks several units rendered certain services from food to cleaning to healthcare to music there were even attempts at forming self-defense units for early detection and deterrence of marauders who would rather disperse the protests. This goes to show that the present society cannot run without a level of coordination. Now let us say that the one coordinating the sound and music is the Disc Jockey (DJ), the fact that we agree to his expertise in this field does not mean there are not other people who are DJ’s amongst the protesters; neither does our admittance that he is a DJ (a kind of expert or leader) mean that the rest of us are not leaders. The same goes for the doctors who manned the make-shift sick bays or ambulances or the cleaners of the public toilets.
What the admittance of the special role of these people stands for is the fact that there are somethings that everyone cannot do at a time. The same way there should be representatives who will coordinate the general direction of the movement just because this sometimes requires not everyone but a handful who are accountable to the collective. Just imagine every protester trying to distribute food for every other person because we are all leaders, this will be preposterous. Hence, having a body to execute or propagate the next steps of the movement is only natural and it does not confer any special leadership role on the members of such a body irrespective of the name (action/coordinating/representative committees) given to the body or its members.
It doesn’t mean the absence of discussion.
Granted most people who manned the cleaning, serving, sounds or even healthcare arms at the protests grounds did so voluntarily yet when this units were gathered they had discussions amidst themselves on how to carry out tasks. If this is the case, general discussions or democratic deliberations are not inappropriate. In fact they they are needed to prevent the formation of a de facto or bureaucratic leadership which forces its will on the generality. If things have been done voluntarily for so long it does not constitute an aberration to discuss or plan events unanimously. Anything other than this is a distortion of such a powerful maxim!
WHY THE MISCONCEPTIONS THEN?
Now these delineations are not new, neither will this be the first time they will be espoused, yet as simple as they may seem they have been distorted by real life experiences. Yes, the masses begin a demonstration or movement spontaneously, most times out of emotional explosions and with very little level of organization having their anger directed, to some extent, at the concept of organizing itself. This initial disgust or repugnance for organization/coordination is born out of the nature of those organizations which have in the past posed as fighting platforms for the masses like civil society organizations (CSO’s). Again it is true that the masses at beginning of a movement will most likely not seek any form of organization if for no reason at all due to the disparity in, or varying levels of, individual consciousness albeit the extent of that hostility towards organization is determined by the way the so-called pro-people organizations have been run in the past.
However, drawing from past experience especially from the END SARS movement itself, everyone sooner or later realizes that without some level of coordination or organization the movement would have collapsed long ago or that the life-span and growth of such a movement depends on the representation which takes directive from the democratic decisions of the whole.
In any case, this lesson is deepened by moments of crises in the movement. An example is when the government-sponsored thugs attacked protesters at the Ikeja express way, there was an immediate crystallization of leadership who after the protesters had apprehended the marauders took charge of the situation, prevented the protesters from continued access to the thugs and handed them over to law enforcement for prosecution. Yet, because this leadership preferred to operate in the shadows but were only forced to come out during a crisis, the movement was again exposed to subsequent attacks in the wee hours of the following morning.
The most decisive occurrence that confirmed the integral nature of some sort of leadership for a movement like this is the fact that now some persons under aegis of Coalition of Protest Groups Across Lagos and Nigeria/Nigeria Coalition of Protest Groups “represented” the youths by entering negotiations and oaths with the Lagos state government. This is while they released the nomination forms of celebrities and influential personalities on the internet. Again this fire-brigade “representatives” surface in a moment of crisis—a period when the state forces of army and police control the streets after driving protesters off with tear gas, bullets and every form of imaginable carnage.