TRT WORLD
Exactly a year ago, the nationwide ENDSARS protests demanded the end of police brutality, but the Nigerian justice system continues to work ‘in a manner that oppresses and dehumanizes the poor’.
Sunday Okoro, a public bus driver and 36-year-old father of four had to close for the day earlier than usual because of a rioting crowd in Orile, in Lagos, one afternoon in October last year. It was during the ENDSARS movement when thousands of Nigerian youth came out on the streets to protest against police brutality.
Rioters used the opportunity of the peaceful protests to vandalize Orile Police Divisional Headquarters. They broke into the police station and carted away with police ammunition, according to a court document which was seen by TRT World.
Okoro parked his bus and decided to take a walk to his house in the neighbourhood of Orile. His route went past the riot site. What he did not know was that while he walked past the rioters, he had accidentally walked into a picture which was taken by a bystander and circulated on social media.
Two months later in December, he had a scuffle with a man on his way to get bread for his family and was arrested. The man, Okoro alleged, had a relationship with the police and informed the officers about the picture. He has been remanded in Kirikiri Prison, a maximum prison in Lagos since then.
‘’I did not know anything concerning the ENDSARS protests, someone just snapped me. In the picture, they did not see anything in my hand,’’ Okoro told TRT World via a phone call.
He faces seven charges that include conspiracy to commit a felony, burglary of arms/ammunition, unlawful possession, armed robbery and unlawful assembly. His bail was set at 300,000 naira ($730), two sureties and one must be a blood relation, and three years’ tax clearance. For the bus driver and his family, the bail conditions are almost impossible.
Okoro is one of the unknown number of persons who were arrested by the Nigerian police during and after the protests and who are still in police custody or in jails across the country.
Neither the police nor the ministry of justice responded to comments for this story.
ENDSARS Protests
The ENDSARS protests were a string of organic youth-led protests that took place in October last year across Nigeria. They were aimed at a now-defunct rogue police unit, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) which was notorious for brutality and high-handedness.
Founded in 1992 following a spate of armed robbery in the country, SARS grew to be a law on its own. For Nigerian youths, years of accumulated grievances found an outlet when a video of members of the SARS unit killing a man in front of a hotel in Ughelli in Delta state and leaving the scene with the deceased’s car went viral early in October 2020. Heavy protests followed and they reverberated across the world.
The Nigerian government officially disbanded SARS on the 11th of October 2020 and immediately replaced the unit with the Special Weapon Tactical Team (SWAT). But this move which was seen as inadequate response to the problems in the police force did not assuage thousands of Nigerian youth who had poured out to the street, defying arrests and police violence.
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