EndSARS

For two weeks in October the young people of this country stood in the road. Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, even here, at the roundabout by the government house, boys and girls my age with placards against SARS, the police unit that has been robbing and killing us since before we were born. I went. I stood. I did not carry a placard, because a man like me at a protest is a man with two things to be arrested for, but I stood.

And for two weeks I let myself think it. That the same boys who were beaten at checkpoints for a Biafran flag might understand what it is to be beaten for anything. That a country which could say no to the police might one day say no to a law. There were rainbow flags in Lagos, I saw the photos, actually in the road, and they were not torn down for a whole afternoon.

Then Tuesday night at the Lekki toll gate, in Lagos, the soldiers came and the lights went off and they shot into the crowd, and the government said it did not happen, and the flags came down, all of them.

I am writing this a week later, from the room by the stadium. I stood in the road for two weeks and I do not regret it. I am also not going to pretend I still think the country is going to change for me. It will not change for anyone. It will have to be changed. That is a different sentence, and it will take longer.