Point One

You wouldn’t recognise the cause at the last count from where it began. The agitation kicked-started three weeks back as an iconic movement of Nigerian youths protesting police brutality against citizens and seeking the disbandment of the notoriously cruel Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). By the time it ran aground, it had morphed into wantonly vengeful violence and racy criminality as arsonists ran riot, torching private and public assets they had marked out. In a number of cases, hoodlums lynched security personnel perceived as adversaries in a manner reminiscent of arbitrary immolations of alleged witches during the protestant renaissance of the Middle Ages. It was youthful venom unleashed as never seen before in this country’s history. But the upheaval also bore clear markings of a class revolt – with warehouses of government, public utilities and treasure stores of private personages looted and vandalised by impoverished masses who seemed to be exacting a pound of flesh from the...

It was a highly controversial unit of the Nigerian Police that got defunct in circumstances not too different from those in which it sprouted: the squad came into being in a crisis and was dismantled in a crisis. By the time Police Inspector-General Mohammed Adamu felt sufficiently compelled to hack down the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) on 11th October, there was already palpable yearning in the Force for exorcism of its memory from the entire system. This was because no police personnel or facility having the flimsiest connection with the opprobrious SARS was safe from the rage of protesters. The squad’s offices which the Inspector-General ordered taken over by regular police became sitting ducks for public attacks, such that there were reports of new occupants falling collateral victim of public fury intended for SARS. You could guess the fate of any ex-personnel of the controversial squad who dared flaunt that identity. Actually, it became hazardous just to be a personnel of th...

Buffalo soldiers historically were all-Black personnel of the United States Army who served on that country’s Western frontier following the American civil war, and were carved into cavalry and infantry regiments by the 1866 Army Organization Act. Established by Congress as the first peacetime all-black squads in the regular U.S. Army, their functions involved settling railroad disputes, building telegraph lines, repairing and building garrisons (Americans call these ‘forts’), helping the settler population to colonise lands violently taken from native Indians and protecting the colonisers from the displaced natives seeking to reclaim their homeland. Although they mainly served the interest of their Caucasian masters, legendary Reggae icon, the late Bob Marley, in his famous song titled ‘Buffalo Soldiers,’ linked the exploits of these servicemen to survival fighting and recast them as symbolising of black resistance. Incidentally, it was Marley as well who taught the wisdom of measured...