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Ehh, nothing much. It is a typical Nigerian month with COVID-19 induced characteristics.There are about five things that will help keep things in perspective.The first is that I was not joking. The current events really are typical. Nigeria has been in a state of suspended anarchy all my life. A civil war, ethnic pogroms every five or so years, large swathes of the country under the thumb of criminals, and tens of millions in internally displaced camps were not the straw. I doubt another urban riot is going to break this camel’s back.Second, the Nigerian population is very young. I am three days into my 26th year, that is old by Nigerian standards. For many of those young, very online Nigerians, this is their first real taste of ‘typical Nigeria’.The ensuing hysteria is understandable. Especially when you take into consideration that many of them do not read through the national dailies daily. ‘Bloody Tuesday’ is trending, well…Bloody Sunday in Enugu as security agents hunting for IPOB kill unarmed people That was from two months ago.Third is that Lagos used to be different. Before the advent of the 4th Republic(1999-), it used to be more like pre-Giuliani New York or like Baltimore from The Wire. The first 4th Republic governor, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, decided on a transformation masterplan that is now the stuff of memes.He and his successor, Babatunde Raji Fashola, wanted to upscale the image of Lagos. Less Lagos in Nigeria, more Lagos beside Nigeria. A bit like the Republic of California, except that Lagos, for Nigeria, is both New York and California. Lots of murky rumoured deals between the powerbrokers of the state and the local criminal syndicates help keep the peace and provide enforcers. The big winners were finance, transport, real estates and ubiquitous ‘public-private’ partnerships, usually involving foreign money. Unexpected winners were a burgeoning tech industry reputed to be Africa’s largest as well as the entertainment industry.Workers in those industries moved into their exclusive middle/upper-class estates, built on the tears and blood of evicted squatters, and promptly forgot that they were still Nigerians. That is until 'Bloody Friday' reminded them.At 5:30 a.m. on April 9, Salako Hunsa awoke to the sound of gunfire. He left his wife and five children inside the house, and ran out to a shocking scene: A squad of police officers shooting indiscriminately and setting fire to his neighbors' homes.Slum Dwellers In Africa's Biggest Megacity Are Now Living In CanoesNigerian security forces, shooting? How surprising.‘Eko Atlantic’, the poster child of a new Lagos and the symbol of a new alliance between Nigerial capitalists, our old Lebanese moneyed elite and the Chinese State. This article provides a decent summary as well as glimpses into ‘typical Nigeria’: New, privatized African city heralds climate apartheidFourth, there has been a wave of protests packaged for virality since the Arab Springs. I mean that is the whole point of Social Media, no? Yet, it is hard to point out what any of those revolutions have achieved other than the usual theatre. It took an obscure British Communist ‘tankie’ blogger to make the scales drop for me.We all know how the Arab Spring ended. The Sudanese started this year’s cycle, so here is recent news from their end. Sudanese back on streets to march against dire living conditionsMaybe I’ve gone too far to the other side of the pendulum, but at this point witnessing the euphoric stage of any online campaign activates my inner Thatcher. I pull out The Revolution Will Not Be Trending from my bookmarks and go, that is what I believe. The Revolution Will Not Be Trending – Hong Kong, Social Media, and The Failure of Attention PoliticsFinally, youth unemployment in Nigeria is 27%. Underemployment is nearly 30%. And those numbers were before the pandemic which shut down events and informal sources of income for many young Nigerians. Thus there is a huge army of cheap young people available for mobilisation, for any activity, across Nigeria.The recent protests were triggered by a video of a SARS operative brutalising a young man in Delta state and then fleeing with his car. SARS is complicated, but long story short, Nigerians have a bad habit of creating institutions that turn on us. The SARS operatives, who murdered that poor man, should more accurately be described as the ‘reformed’ SARS. In response to a previous cycle of protests about old SARS, the government had a whole now ‘we’ve seen the light of human rights dance’. Committees and a press conference debuted a ‘reformed’ SARS.SARS has been a particular target of scorn because they’re annoying. Normal cops have low expectations and set checkpoints. Avoiding them is easy. Even if you do get caught, you can negotiate. SARS, in contrast, are undercover and greedy. They caught some of my friends in front of the university campus, after a party. They then drove them to an ATM and emptied their accounts. They got off lightly. Being taken to their holding cells is practically a death sentence. In Lagos, a demographic that bore the brunt were the young men who were beneficiaries of the city’s rise, especially in entertainment and tech. Centres of virality, in other words.Nigerians aren’t used to having the same problems as the rich. Normally, only those on the periphery of society are bothered. And they die with few people caring. However, unlike the other rich in Nigeria, those in tech and entertainment are powerless, they have no backers in other words. So they have no levers to deter SARS other than linking hands with the poor.To give an idea of what I mean by ‘typical rich’.The Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, has registered his displeasure with continuous patronage of illegal harbours known as secure anchorage areas…There is a crisis in the maritime sector. The crisis is on the issue of security. “Today, we have a single individual partnering with the military that is collecting $1,200 to the detriment of shipping companies.Nigerian collecting illegal $36,000/month from ship owners – AmaechiThe ‘typical rich’ have police escorts and army backers, I pity the SARS man that looks at them sideways. The new money types in entertainment and tech are outside of those networks. So they are very lucrative prey. Sadly for most young Nigerians, there is no way to identify them other than profiling young, tech-savvy people. The majority of Nigerians, in other words. That is why the initial sharing of stories documenting SARS abuses had such a massive impact. To put it into perspective, the first of the last two viral social media stories was Big Brother. A popular female housemate had her fans raise millions of naira in days. At the end, a young man won more money than most Nigerians will see in ten lifetimes. The second story was when one of Nigeria’s richest men bought three matching Ferraris for his daughters. Most such viral stories usually involve situations in which most Nigerians will never participate. #ENDSARS was different.The nexus of a threat shared by the rich yet powerless, and the poor and powerless coalesced into the #ENDSARS movement. That was unprecedented. Another example of everyday normality below.Authorities in Nigeria evicted thousands of impoverished residents from a Lagos slum, leaving many homeless, residents and eyewitnesses told CNN.Mohammed Zanna, a resident and paralegal, told CNN that the forces shot sporadically in the air as residents, who said they had no prior notice, scrambled to find their families and pack their belongings."Everyone was panicking and packing everything they could carry. The men were shooting in the air and shouting that people should leave," Zanna told CNN.Thousands of Nigerian slum dwellers left homeless after mass eviction From January 2020The new money types leveraged their skills and connections to create Nigeria’s second-ever viral protests, and the second since our version of #Occupy. Their concentration point was one of the symbols of Lagos’ ‘private-public’ partnerships, the Lekki Express tollgate. As usual, the government had its ‘time for more committees about how we’ve seen the light of human rights’ dance. To which the protesters responded with ‘fool us once’. The problem is that their ‘occupation’ was costing somebody money. Lagos loses N234m to tollgates’ closure I scrolled past that story on the 19th; on the 21st, the protesters were cleared out with extreme prejudice and casualties ranging from 10–70 or 90. A 48 hours curfew, extended to 72 hours, was declared.It is fair to say that the techie protests are over. They have not trended globally since the curfew. In their place has been the protests of the dispossessed. Those have a more violent edge, with looting and crime. Rather hilariously, the Oba of Lagos, one of the state’s many traditional rulers, had his palace burned and his property auctioned. Hoarded foodstuffs meant to be distributed during the pandemic lockdown have been liberated. Symbols of public-private partnerships and the properties of some relations of prominent politicians have been burnt down.Note the name to whom it supposedly does not belong?But most importantly, there has been a subtle rise in crime and normal people have had their properties destroyed. That means a return to normality is in the offing. The radio has been full of songs of unity and appeals for calm. The governor has been visiting destroyed structures and spreading the theme of ‘healing Lagos’. The earlier protests have been tarnished, in the public mind, by their violent ending.My instinct is that we find ourselves at the crest point: the beginning of the end. The curfew has been eased. Schools will resume, entrance exams will restart, youth corpers will report to their areas of primary assignment and the lip-service to ‘social distancing’ will be put to bed. Things will return to normal, Nigerian normal that is. Not to brag or anything, but a warlord/ Robin Hood in the ethnic wars of the Middle-Belt was murdered by soldiers on his way to receive amnesty from the governor. His followers are, of course, promising to stay in the bush. That barely made national headlines. It did not displace Big Brother Nigeria voting trends from the social media conversation. The transformation of Gana: How military turned Benue tormentor-in-chief into hero Nigerian news is very twilight-zoney. The social media virality spiral is just young-uns discovering one aspect of that fact. Maybe their outrage changes everything; most likely, it will not change anything. SARS will become SWAT. The armed forces will stay the armed forces and APC, the ruling party, will romp to victory in upcoming Senatorial by-elections on 31 October.Very nearly forgot…This old song, as you can tell from the video quality, is basically saying that Nigeria acts like the scrawl of a toddler learning to write, everything is scattered, the poor man suffers and the background noise is gunshots.Mildly ironic is that one of the activists praised in the song is now in government and against the current protests. Contrary to the false history that things are as they are because our parents’ generation did not protest and fight, they did. They also grew up and became ‘the government’.

Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, morher of Miles Vorkosigan, the hero of Lous McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.Before Miles is even born, Cordelia leads a guerilla operation into the enemy capitol to retrieve the uterine replicator in which he is being held hostage, killing and beheading the usurper who captured her unborn son, and bringing both the unborn Miles and the head, neatly packaged in a plastic shopping bag (the head, not the baby) back to her husband.For the next thirty years or so, she raises her son in a loving, but ruthlessly psychoanalytical fashion in an attempt (only moderately successful) to insulate him from some of the military madness that afflicts their planet, does the same thing for the young emperor, and puts her relentlessly sensible stamp on at least two planets, any number if young officers, and a significant portion of the behind the scenes powerbrokers of the next generation (all the women of a seriously sexist society).Yeah, Cordelia. Mother of Empires.

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