Nigeria’s government has unleashed
deadly violence against the anti-
police brutality protests that have
rocked the country for nearly two
weeks. On Tuesday night, it sent in
soldiers firing live ammunition to
massacre peaceful protesters and
quell a movement that has posed an
increasingly direct challenge to the
rule of the corrupt bourgeois state
headed by the former general and
coup leader, President Muhammadu
Buhari.
Social media posts showed
protesters killed and wounded in the
military attack on a large crowd that
had blocked the toll gates at the
Lekki-Ikoyi bridge, paralyzing an
expressway that links Lagos island
with the Lagos mainland in Nigeria’s
sprawling commercial capital. While
the scale of the massacre was not
immediately clear, one witness
reported to the BBC that he had seen
at least 20 bodies and more than 50
wounded. Before the troops moved
in, they cut off the lights and the
CCTV camera at the toll plaza.
There were reports that troops were
carrying away bodies to hide the
extent of the death toll, while one
medical professional reported that
wounded were being evacuated from
a nearby hospital for fear that the
army would come to round them up
and kill them.
Lagos authorities Tuesday
announced the imposition of a 24-
hour curfew across the city of 20
million, declaring, “We will not watch
and allow anarchy in our state.”
Previously, the Nigerian army warned
it was prepared to step in against
“subversive elements and
troublemakers.”
Nonetheless, crowds continued to
block major roads, including access
to the city’s international airport,
while witnesses reported that a
police station in the Orile Iganmu
district of Lagos was set on fire on
Tuesday. While the curfew was
supposed to begin at 4 pm, the
authorities extended the deadline to
9 pm in the face of mass defiance,
which continued into the night.
What began as a movement
demanding the dissolution of the
hated SARS (Special Anti-Robbery
Squad)—an elite unit of the Nigerian
Police Force known for killing,
torturing and extorting Nigerian
civilians, particularly the country’s
youth—has continued to grow.
The Buhari government claimed last
week that it had disbanded SARS—
replacing it with a new unit, dubbed
Special Weapons and Tactics, or
SWAT, the same name given to elite
police killing squads in the United
States. The president insists that he
is committed to “police reform” and
that he regards the protesting youth
as a father would his children. The
government’s vicious reaction in the
streets, however, tells a very different
story.
Dozens of people have lost their lives
in the protests, while many more
have been detained by the police.
One of them, a 17-year-old girl,
identified only as Saifullah, ended
her life in a jail cell in the northern
Kano state, reportedly tortured to
death.
The government has unleashed hired
gangs of thugs armed with clubs and
knives against the demonstrators,
severely wounding many. The police
themselves have attacked protesters
with tear gas, water cannon and live
ammunition.
The protests demanding a halt to the
operations of the SARS police date
back to at least 2017, with the
government repeatedly claiming that
it had “reformed” the unit and the
cops themselves continuing their
brutality with complete impunity.
According to a report issued by
Amnesty International, the SARS
police routinely engaged in extra-
judicial killings, kidnappings, rapes
and “torture including hanging, mock
execution, beating, punching and
kicking, burning with cigarettes,
waterboarding, near-asphyxiation
with plastic bags, forcing detainees
to assume stressful bodily positions
and sexual violence.”
In addition to the deep-seated hatred
of the repressive and corrupt police,
Nigeria’s mass protests are fueled by
popular anger over conditions of
mass unemployment, endemic
poverty and unprecedented social
inequality in Africa’s largest country,
with a population of 206 million. All
of these longstanding conditions
have been sharply exacerbated by
the COVID-19 pandemic and the
government’s disastrously
incompetent response, combined
with its drive to reopen the economy
with complete indifference to
workers’ lives.
According to Oxfam, Africa’s three
wealthiest billionaires—Nigeria’s
Aliko Dangote the richest among
them—have more wealth than the
bottom 50 percent of Africa’s
population, 650 million people
across the continent. The five
wealthiest Nigerians have a
combined net worth of $29.9 billion,
according to the aid agency, which is
enough to lift 112 million Nigerians
out of poverty.
Today’s revolt in Nigeria has deep
historical roots that reach back to the
colonial oppression exercised by the
British empire. The country’s
independence was granted by the
United Kingdom in 1960 under an
arrangement that kept Queen
Elizabeth as Nigeria’s monarch and
head of state. Far from spelling the
liberation of the masses of
oppressed, this deal, like similar
arrangements reached elsewhere on
the continent, ushered in an aspiring
national bourgeoisie, eager to lay
hold of the existing state apparatus
and forces of repression inherited
from the colonialists and committed
to defending the artificial borders
that they created as a guarantee of
their own wealth and power.
The first four decades of
independence were marked by
continuous military coups and bitter
civil wars, including the Biafra
conflict that claimed the lives of 3.5
million, most of them children who
were starved to death.
The internecine struggles within the
Nigerian national bourgeoisie, which
continue to this day, have centered
on who gets their snouts deepest
into the country’s oil wealth, which
accounts for 90 percent of foreign
exchange earnings and 80 percent of
government revenues and is largely
controlled by transnational energy
corporations, including Royal Dutch
Shell, Agip, ExxonMobil, Total S.A.
and Chevron.
The bitter experiences in Nigeria, as
throughout Africa and the rest of the
former colonial world, have provided
confirmation in the negative of the
Theory of Permanent Revolution
elaborated by the great Russian
revolutionary Leon Trotsky and
upheld by the Fourth International
that he founded in 1938. He
explained that in colonial and
oppressed countries, only a fight for
power by the working class can
advance the struggle against
imperialism and ensure genuine
national liberation and democratic
and social rights for workers and the
oppressed masses. This revolution is
permanent in that the working class,
having seized power, cannot restrict
itself to democratic tasks and will be
compelled to carry out measures of a
socialist character. At the same time,
the revolution is permanent in a
second sense in that it can achieve
victory only to the extent that it is
extended in a unified fight of the
international working class for world
socialist revolution.
The conditions for such an
internationally unified struggle are
rapidly emerging, founded objectively
upon the unprecedented global
integration of capitalist production
and the increasingly similar
conditions confronting the workers of
the world.
The emergence of simultaneous
mass protests against police
murders and brutality in Nigeria, the
United States, Chile, Colombia and
other countries provides stark
confirmation that the critical issue in
these struggles is class, not race, as
posited by the Democratic Party and
its pseudo-left satellites in the US in
an attempt to divert and stifle a
united movement of the working
class against capitalism.
While the Nigerian protesters clearly
drew inspiration from the mass,
multi-racial protests that swept the
US in the wake of the police murders
of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and
others, they chanted the slogan “Our
Lives Matter,” speaking for working
people and youth not only in Nigeria,
but across the planet.
The police constitute the guardians
of private ownership of the means of
production and of the obscene wealth
accumulated by financial and
corporate oligarchs and the most
privileged layers of the upper-middle
class. They stand guard over the
yawning chasm of social inequality
dividing this ruling elite from the
masses of workers and oppressed.
In every country, an end to police
brutality requires a struggle against
capitalism that can be waged
successfully only by uniting the
working class across racial, ethnic
and gender lines, as well as across
national borders in a common fight
for socialism.
A powerful revolutionary movement of
the working class is emerging not
only in Nigeria but across Africa and
the entire planet. The immense task
of providing this movement with
political and programmatic direction
requires the building of sections of
the International Committee of the
Fourth International (ICFI) in every
country.


https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/21/pers-o21.html

Massacre with two confirm death

Biodun556:
Massacre with two confirm death

and the calamity that befall those two confirm dead will also befall you. Idiot

If international community allow those youth to die in vain we will never forgive them