The initially peaceful #EndSARS protests gained traction because of people’s pent-up anger only expressed through the protests. Many Nigerians are only struggling to scrape together some money to survive day after day and upward social mobility is difficult for many. An estimated 83 million Nigerians are poor and the unemployment rate is 27.1 percent, an increase from 23.1 percent in 2018, according to the country’s bureau of statistics. Nigeria has one of the world’s worst poverty indices. Many of them married women and men, with kids unemployed and under-employed youth and petty traders are criminally exploiting the near-total absence of regular security services to steal and commit carnage. They are ordinary community folks who live in the cities and towns they have looted. Who are the looters?Īnalysis of interviews with residents and pictures of the incidents show the looters are mostly not the usually dreaded rogues with thuggish appearances and mannerisms. The viral videos from Mazamaza appeared to have inspired people to go in search of similar warehouses in other states like Adamawa, Plateau, Kaduna, Osun, Cross River, and Ondo.īut items other than COVID-19 palliatives were targeted as people criminally exploited the near total absence of the police on the streets to steal and perpetrate carnage in many Nigerian states from north to south. Powerful images emerged from Bode Thomas Street, a popular business area in Surulere, of ruins, forcing comparison with Syria’s devastated city of Aleppo on the social media. In Lagos, as the palace of the Oba of Lagos, Rilwan Akinolu, was attacked and looted, so were the Lagos High Court, Igbosere and retail businesses on the Island and Mainland. The mobs have also been committing arson. Video clips obtained by our reporters depict a chaotic rush by mobs to steal without any restraint from state security forces or by the owners of the goods.
In the best of times, Mr Obasi said, the police are overstretched and are “extremely challenged” in the face of the country’s broken security order. “This must be very demoralising to many officers and should also be of great concern to citizens.” “The lynching of policemen by mobs, sometimes in very gruesome circumstances, also means police themselves are vulnerable, particularly when they are deployed in small numbers,” Mr Obasi said. In an interview for this report, Nnamdi Obasi of the International Crisis Group linked the looting spree to the pre-existing problem of under-resourced police system and the demoralising effects of the recent attacks on the police. The effects of the wanton attacks on police stations and officers, which started in Lagos State in the past week amid the #ENDSARS protests, have appeared in the form of an anarchic chaos: an unprecedented looting spree in which looters are operating almost unchallenged across Nigeria.įollowing the widely condemned shootings at protesters in Lekki, Lagos State, on Tuesday, which witnesses said were by Nigerian soldiers, hoodlums started looting and razing businesses and public facilities in the state on Wednesday.īut the looting has taken an anarchic dimension in many other Nigerian states, forcing a number of governors to declare a curfew.
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