I will begin by making explicit my claim that the shift to the old anthem is a political strategy responding to the democratic awakening triggered by the 2020 #EndSARS protests and subsequent declarations like the Obidient movement. I read this shift as exemplary of a deliberate attempt to redirect youth consciousness away from demands of accountability toward ethnic victimhood. I draw these conclusions from my own felt knowledge and locational awareness of how power consolidation operates in Nigeria, and I use these to examine the chronological order and connections of events across the last five years to understand how democratic movements are undermined to maintain an oligarchical hold on power.

The very promise of the #EndSARS protests was civic responsibility and a democratic awakening amongst young people, in blatant refusal of the oppressive conditions of their lives. From ‘Feminists Against SARS’ to #QueerNigerianLivesMatter to #EndBadGovernanceinNigeria, to even the Gen Z-parlanced ‘Buhari has been a bad boy’, #EndSARS was the umbrella that brought to life different movements based on the particular gendered or other experiential encounters with police violence in Nigeria. This was a moment in the Nigerian youth political consciousness that scholars have continued to document, including myself, and will continue to do so for years to come. In this movement, before its eventual fracturing along unsurprisingly gendered lines, because ‘feminist and queer experiences distract from the goals,’ #EndSARS was primarily directed by cross-ethnic solidarity in demanding police accountability and broader governance reforms. In fact, despite early agitations on social media as far back as 2017, what would lead to offline protests was a video circulating of a young man fatally shot by the members of SARS in Ughelli, Delta state. However, Nigerians noted a divide between the North and the South in terms of responses to the movement. This divide has been critiqued as emblematic of how ‘Nigeria’ as a nation remains a contested political project, as political elites exploit regional divisions to prevent democratic coalitions. In the end, what began as a decentralized consciousness was soon riddled with politically motivated differences, most prominently around the topics of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and religion.

However, for a glimpse, we saw a ‘Nigerian’ identity emerge, not as a mere signifier of our geographic location, but as a statement of a people united in resistance that sent affective waves abroad. #EndSARS situated us firmly within the wave of movements from the #ArabSprings to #BlackLivesMatter that defined the 2010s. What the state’s response, from regional political responses like northern governors strongly endorsing SARS five days into the movement, to the inconceivable violence of the Lekki Toll Massacre, revealed was both the assimilable possibilities of the movement and the state’s fear of this kind of political consciousness and organizing. Feminist historians Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Nina Mba, in their reading of earlier pre-independence Nigerian women’s movements, argue that this kind of cross-cutting coalition has historically posed the greatest threat to elite power because it unites diverse populations around shared material interests.

The democratic possibility triggered by #EndSARS desperately sought someone different from the oligarchs who have been rinsed and repeated through Nigerian politics and settled on Peter Obi. Though himself a poster figure of elite politics, being a former Anambra governor born in 1961, Obi represented a breath of fresh air to young voters mobilized by his overt support during the protests and visions for systemic change. As young people realized that the violently truncated #EndSARS movement could be redeemed electorally, they organized around Obi’s 2023 campaign, and the ‘Obidient’ movement was born. I would have otherwise argued around this time that the optics of this name’s proximity to ‘obedience’ is quite contradictory for a generation mobilizing for systemic disobedience and refusing their socialization into compulsory submission to parents, state, and religion, and more. But let us leave it at the fact that it is just a play on his name, that we should not read too much into.

Obi rapidly gained cross-ethnic support among younger, educated Nigerians. This hyper-focus on the quality of a candidate’s rhetoric over ethnic calculations challenged the established logics of Nigerian electoral politics, at least among the youth. Older voters were less easily swayed, after all, they had been more thoroughly steeped in ethnicized, electoral-driven politics. This mobilization also centred on Lagos, the commercial capital, where Tinubu had built his political empire. The prospect of losing his power base to a movement explicitly rejecting ethnic politics, therefore, became an existential threat to his presidential ambitions and the political machine he had constructed over decades. 

The defensive response from this camp was swift and vicious. Tinubu’s operatives mobilized anti-Igbo sentiment by explicitly threatening consequences for Igbo residents who voted for Obi. The famous ‘emi lokan’ (it’s my turn) slogan triggered a wave of conversations around the politics of entitlement, especially how it is reinforced by weaponizing past favours, class, religion and ethnicity. When Tinubu lost the Lagos election to Obi anyway, the subsequent governorship election saw intensified ethnic mobilization against the half-Igbo, half-Yoruba Labour candidate, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour (GRV), with an Igbo wife, contesting under the Obi-led Labour Party. Young people, themselves stunned by this concrete evidence of the sheer power of their mobilizing, began to whisper from siloed internet spaces, ‘GRV could win Lagos’.

The contentions here began with an unfounded rumour that the said candidate had declared that Lagos was ‘no-man’s land’, detonating anxieties that were rooted in Lagos’s layered demographics (what Caribbean scholars would call an ‘arrivant’ space). Here, indigenous Awori peoples, descendants of enslaved Yorubas who returned from Brazil (the Agudas), Igbos fleeing civil war violence, and Hausas settling through trading networks, and other Yoruba subgroups indigenous to other spaces like Oyo and Egba, but migrating to Lagos, create competing claims of belonging. Therefore, when politicians activate ethnic anxieties in such a space, they weaponize exploitable vulnerabilities derived from the hierarchies of arrival and settlement that dismiss the histories through which different groups legitimate their presence in Lagos.

As Afro-Guyanese scholar Shanya Cordis argues in Caribbean contexts, overreliance on indigenous versus arrivant binaries creates perpetual displacement conditions. The state thrives on manufacturing tensions of division that turn attention from shared material oppression to competing claims about authentic belonging. Lagos’s ‘multiplicities of being and embodiment,’ then, becomes, as we continue to see every day, raw material for political fragmentation, even as economic, gendered and political violence affects everyone.

This is why I interpret the anthem change as one of a series of calculated strategies against democratic possibility. The anthem’s return to colonial vocabularies is not just an old man’s nostalgia; it is an intentional attempt to amplify and normalize colonial frameworks of difference that define Nigeria not as a signifier of a united people with a common post-independence identity, but as a fundamentally ethnically fractured project.