Protests always have economic origins. The main reasons people go out are hardship, hunger and the cost of living. But soon after, the government’s actions make them political.

When a protest starts gaining momentum, authorities will set up counter-protests, paying young people to show up to say everything is fine and the government is doing good work. They deliberately set them up close to where the real protesters are. Another tactic they use is to send people to trigger violence so they can argue they have a reason to use force. The way they interpret the law, people have the right to peaceful protest, but once it turns violent, they have the right to respond. But it is they who create the violence.

They also target protest leaders. The EndSARS protests against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad had clear leadership, and one by one, those leaders were killed or forced to flee Nigeria. Many had their accounts frozen. Some of them are still outside Nigeria, unable to come back for the sole reason that they led a protest years ago.

Now when young people protest, we avoid having someone visibly at the front. We say: we are all leaders. If you want to come after us, you will have to come after all of us.

It always starts on social media. Someone wakes up and hears 40 people were killed in a community. A social media influencer posts a question: what are our leaders doing about this? They create a hashtag such as #EndBadGovernance. The next person picks it up and adds something to it. It keeps spreading.

Then someone says: we can’t just keep tweeting, we must take this to the street. Someone starts a WhatsApp group, sometimes openly, sometimes including only carefully verified members because we all know government operatives try to infiltrate them. The group decides on a date, agrees on demands and coordinates funding for food, water and first aid. Influencers are all asked to post about the protest at the same time. And word continues spreading through personal networks. Everybody tells their friends and their friends tell others.

Social media is how we reach each other, and it’s how we hold the government accountable. We tag officials. We know they see it, and when they don’t respond, that silence is itself the story. During the EndSARS protests, we constantly used hashtags on Twitter/X, which is what most young Nigerians use. When then-President Muhammadu Buhari banned Twitter, young people just used VPNs and kept going.

Another tool I should mention is HumAngle Media, a multimedia platform that tells the human stories behind the crises. When you put a face to conflicts and crises, the story travels. And when you show a video, it makes people pay attention. The video of the delivery man shot by the police has been going around and many people have been talking about it.

The government makes it almost impossible. When I was trying to register Smart Aid Initiative under its original name, I was questioned by the Department of State Services, Nigeria’s intelligence service, for two months. It said it looked like a protest organisation that would be a national security risk. We were not registered. Sahara Reporters, one of the most important media outlets, had to register in the USA and operate from there because it was not allowed to function in Nigeria.

Any process of formalising protest organisations is suffocated before it can take root. And the few formal organisations that do exist face the problem of co-optation. For instance, the Nigerian Labour Congress, the national trade union federation, is enormous and powerful on paper. But the truth is the government has bought it. It gives it money and benefits, and as a result it no longer speaks for Nigerians.

International organisations that provide humanitarian support also face pressure. International NGO Safety Organisation, for instance, was banned for almost a year because it was speaking up alongside its aid work. The government made it clear it could provide services, but not speak.

A major risk is being forcibly disappeared. You haven’t seen a friend post on social media for two days. Then you get a call from their family: they didn’t come home last night. The family eventually finds out that they were picked up on their way home, maybe for going to a protest, maybe just because of something they posted. If they’re not famous, if they don’t have a large social media following, it may be very hard to find them. Their family can’t afford a lawyer. Months pass. After a while the family tracks them to a prison. Maybe someone hears about it and shares it on Twitter/X and it goes viral, and that is how they get attention. If they are still alive.

I have a friend who was illegally arrested and taken to the Federal Capital Territory. We only found out because someone noticed he had gone quiet, and we used social media to pressure the police, tagging their public relations officers over and over, asking questions we knew they could see and were deliberately not answering. We eventually found out where he was.

Some people have been disappeared for a long time. Dadiyata, an activist from Kaduna State who spoke out against bad governance, was kidnapped at gunpoint from his house one night in 2019. His whereabouts are still unknown. He has two children and his wife is still waiting for him.

When authorities identify protest leaders, they arrest them, freeze their accounts, make their lives impossible. The whole point is to make everybody else scared. And it works. A lot of young people are now pulling back from protest, because who will take care of their families if they disappear?

Honestly, not much. We have received support from Amnesty International. Once it speaks out, a single post can change a lot of things. When a young person is illegally detained and Amnesty calls for their immediate release, it can put pressure on the government. Amnesty also provides legal services. When the government had around 20 minors arrested during the End Bad Governance protests, pressure from Amnesty and social media forced it to release them.

There are also volunteer lawyers — activists who are also lawyers — who support those arrested at protests. That legal safety net, as limited as it is, matters.

Established organisations, including international ones, are afraid to support protests openly because that puts them at risk of being shut down. The space for support is shrinking just as much as the space for protest itself.

Funding is always a concern. During protests, people donate to cover food, water and first aid, because otherwise people will go home when they are tired and hungry. But even that is not reliable, because sometimes those handling the funds embezzle them. That demoralises everybody.

Protests have yielded results. The EndSARS movement achieved the total disbandment of the SARS unit, known for brutalising young people. The government tried to just rebrand it and move on, but protesters wouldn’t let it.

As for the End Bad Governance protests, they produced short-term responses, including conditional cash transfers and subsidised transportation. Some corrupt agency leaders were removed. President Tinubu eventually revised some prices. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.

Just recently, a planned protest against telecommunications companies over poor service and expensive data forced MTN to give almost all Nigerians free airtime as an apology before the protest happened. That is the power of a credible mobilisation.

But protests haven’t solved the issue of leadership. Every time a movement produces leaders, they are eliminated, corrupted or chased out of Nigeria. Until that stops, gains will keep being rolled back.

The push for change has to be intergenerational. Gen Z has the right to call for good governance and go out and protest. But older generations have experience, institutional knowledge and political influence we do not yet have. No generation can do it alone.

Protests will keep happening, because bad governance keeps happening. We have a general election in 2027, and young people are going to vote. But Tinubu is already strangling the opposition. One of the strongest opposition figures is now detained in a perfectly timed strategic move. That’s who we are dealing with. When the big protest comes — and I believe it will come — it has to be sustained, it has to be intergenerational and it has to be built on solidarity.