We all remember the #EndSARS story. But let us retell it from the lens of who was a worthy #EndSARS activist and how ‘worthy’ activists were implicated in the very oppressive power they denounced. SARS, established in 1992 to counter rampant robbery and kidnappings, evolved into a malign force notorious for extreme policing, harassment, and sometimes fatal encounters with Nigerian young people. In Guzape, Abuja, fuelled by unchecked power, SARS created a house of torture within their detention centre known as the ‘abattoir’. Ironically, the building itself was a former butcher’s yard. When Amnesty International visited in 2016, they found around 130 ‘emaciated and traumatized’ people lacking access to food, family, and legal representation. The testimonies from these victims detailed severe forms of torture, from beating, hanging, starvation, shooting, and mock executions to threats of execution. Officers involved in torture were rarely held accountable and were often simply transferred elsewhere to continue their work.

The early anti-SARS agitations online in 2017 created a necessary visibility for this issue. However, a hierarchy of worthiness began to form, as a sole body began to act as an intermediary between the police and the Nigerian citizens detained and tortured by SARS. Segun Awosanya, known on Nigerian Twitter as Sega Link, from the late 2010s, became the person to tag (@segalink) whenever one was in trouble with SARS. But there was a silencing of women and queer victims of police violence as they were not recognized as knowers of their own oppression. In a hostile, patriarchal and carceral state, many testimonies self-truncated. Yet through the intentional labour of feminist and queer activists—Feminist Coalition and groups like Queer Union for Economic and Social Transformation, and other individual activists—what began as a movement against police violence toward young Nigerian men evolved into a movement with a strong feminist and queer voice by October 2020.

There is a layer of systematic punishment of ‘improper’ Nigerian bodies to police violence: a masculine-presenting woman with the latest iPhone asked to strip naked to prove her sex; a young man running errands with his mother’s car gunned down because his profile, with his locs or dyed hair, matches a thief they had supposedly been tracing; the girlfriend of an alleged internet fraudster or ‘Yahoo boy’ on the run is jailed, sexually abused and killed in custody. Each of these victims is marked by signifiers of privilege, difference, or transgression. The police themselves, underpaid and mistreated by the same structure that deploys them for mass regulation and discipline, develop frustration, stress, and an ‘us vs. them’ mentality. Who is this them? Anyone who, by their standards, visibly disrupts the performance of proper Nigerian citizenship and submission.

On 18 October 2020, in reaction to the almost fatal harassment of lesbian protesters who waved the rainbow flag onsite, the Feminist Coalition co-signed the queer abolitionist hashtag #QueerNigerianLivesMatter, in a tweet that insisted on the reality of police violence against queer bodies and their rights to protest with their visible identities. However, Awosanya, resisting the emergence of feminist/queer politics within #EndSARS, which decentred his significance as the big man intermediary, spread narratives suggesting the Feminist Coalition was not an anti-police violence collective but rather an ‘LGBTQ+ agenda’, this within a deeply homophobic and carceral state.

By calling feminist and queer resistance an ‘insurrection’ and positioning himself as the sole worthy activist, Awosanya performed the very logic of state power he had spent years opposing. Feminist activists in the movement, despite their central role, were, after all, only a fraction of protesters, who, ranging from other young people to parents, market women, and church crusaders, resisted a violence that had persisted for almost three decades. Rendering this entire protesting population invisible through his deliberate language choices, he accused feminists of staging attacks on ‘reform advocates’ like himself and announced his withdrawal from the movement and alliance with the government. The worthy activist became an intermediary again, this time by transferring feminist ‘transgressor’ to the surveillance and punishing state.

If it was not obvious before, it became clear that a feminist Nigerian and/or queer Nigerian against police brutality and a homophobic anti-feminist Nigerian man who overgeneralizes male victims of police violence have very distinct goals for the movement. The question then becomes: What happens when people refuse to see themselves within the same struggle, even as state violence categorizes them as the same? Who is removed in the creation of ‘Nigerians against SARS,’ and how does this exclusion reinforce the unworthiness of non-normative people?

In the gaps created by this fragmentation, a distribution of worthiness and unworthiness reveals itself. The worthy activist becomes implicated in the reproduction of violence on feminist and queer activists as he folds himself into the very nation-state he had spent a decade critiquing. The state’s unholy alliance with ‘worthy’ activists allowed for justification for what followed: the containment and killing of disposable dissenters, an uncontrollable cycle of violence that would manifest at Lekki Toll Gate and beyond.