Chidi Odinkalu, a former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), says the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which secured electoral victory through protests in 2015, is now clamping down on demonstrations.
Odinkalu spoke on Tuesday at an event hosted by Global Rights, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), with the theme “Protest in Nigeria: A democracy that disqualifies dissent.”
The event was held on the X microblogging platform to commemorate International Human Rights Day.
“I’m not quite sure it’s within my pay grade to assess the performance of the Nigerian government on the right to protest. Partly because the right to protest is not given by the government,” Odinkalu said.
“It is a right that belongs to the people. What you do under the existing law and really in a republic is liaise with the state, notify the state, so that the state and its assets can lend you its assets for the purpose of protecting the protest, making sure that other people who wish to exercise similar rights can do so peacefully.
“Nigeria is currently led by people who specialised in protests over the years, from the president to several other people within his government.
“They protested their way to an electoral victory in 2015 as a political party, the APC, the All Progressives Congress. That’s for the benefit of the non-Nigerians in this conversation.
“And, you know, so to that extent, if you were talking about the past decade, the fact alone that people who were serial protesters came to power by political alternates is itself evidence that the right to protest in Nigeria, at least up to that point, was strong and reasonably well-respected.
“Not without some pushback, but reasonably well-respected and fruitful. Now, that said, it’s also the case that since then, since they came to power, they’ve done a heck of a lot to shut down the right to protest.
“And if you’re looking for physical evidence of that, you’ll find it in the venue in Abuja from which the Bring Back Our Girls protests convened.
“And the Bring Back Our Girls protest, by the way, was part of the infrastructure of protest deployed by the current ruling actors in Nigeria to gain public support in order to win political power in the country at the time they did.
“But after coming to power, they shut down that venue and they shut down those protests.
“And having not done anything to alter the fate of the girls who were lost or stolen or abducted, they then shut down those protests.
“And they have basically fenced off that site of protest and therefore made it unavailable for that.”