115 years ago, in 1909, Walter Egerton, the barrister-turned-colonial administrator, and then governor, introduced the Sedition Ordinance into the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. This drew a sharp response from Christopher Sapara Williams, Nigeria’s first lawyer, the son of an Egba mother and an Ijesha father, who challenged the Ordinance, describing it with considerable prescience as “a thing incompatible with the character of the Yoruba people, and (which) has no place in their constitution…. Hyper-sensitive officials may come tomorrow who will see sedition in every criticism and crime in every mass meeting.” Sapara Williams was Nigeria’s first articulate defender…

The nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests that are convulsing the neoliberal fundament of the Bola Tinubu administration are redefining and redrawing the contours of protests in Nigeria in many significant ways. Although I’ve been on the road since Thursday, here are lessons I’ve learned from the protests. One, there is now a profoundly consequential decentering of the locus of protest culture in Nigeria. In the past, protests against unpopular government policies used to be conceived, constructed, and carried out by a self-selected class of professional protesters based mostly in Lagos who earned activist bona fides from their anti-military, pro-democracy, human rights advocacy…