On the morning of July 26, as conversations raged across the country about the looming August 1 #EndBadGovernance protests, another comrade and I had a conversation about the impact of the press conference we had planned for that day. We discussed how it was important to “play our part,” rather than try to be heroes of the movement. This moment was the most sober part of the previous three months because the press conference we had that day was what put a face (our faces) to the planning (largely ground up and covert until that time) of the #EndBadGovernance protests in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city.

For example, a YouTube video caption for news media that covered the press conference read “Planners of Protest Emerge, Dare Tinubu To Do His Worse; Warn DSS, Police, ENDSARS Will Not Re-Occur.” This coverage reached hundreds of thousands of viewers and promoted some form of heroism despite the fact we made clear in the press conference: “We are not leaders of the protests. We are mobilizers of the protests. Just like #EndSARS, our protest is the protest of the masses. No leaders are going to be picked up, coerced, and manipulated to relinquish our struggle until our demands are met.”

Those words were uttered because we knew that the hero complex has been used against resistance movements in Nigeria over time, as a tool to co-opt or pacify genuine movements because heroes can be easily manipulated, corrupted, or neutralized by the state. Indeed, this was one of the issues that neutralized the #EndSARS movement.

The intentional chorus of “leaderlessness” that emerged during #EndSARS was because the Nigerian masses were experimenting with ideas that could make their resistance movement far more difficult to infiltrate, coerce, or dismantle—a goal that the Nigerian ruling class has historically strived for. Nigerians only wished for a situation where no single person or group would be able to control or dominate the entire resistance movement, even when the movement thrives on the distributed, decentralized actions of all its parts as we saw on August 1, 2024.

We witnessed the vulnerability that weakens the movement and its integrity and wanted it addressed. The masses were learning and the response from the civic space (especially the Nigerian Left, which I am a part of) to that learning process has been largely hostile. We have dismissed such tactics of the ruling class that wishes to control the resistance secretly for its interests. However, we have yet to acknowledge that it would be impossible for such tactics to successfully exploit the phenomenon of leaderlessness if a consciousness was not already in existence. Consciousness is not something we can just wish away. It has to be engaged materially.

The fact that we refused to engage with the experimental learning process of the people during #EndSARS was not harmless. For example, the former Governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi, was invited to an #EndSARS panel that focused on the use of the brutal SARS police against the people. Obi was re-packaged for the masses because we refused to engage with the psycho-political roots of the “leaderlessness” consciousness. One of the strongest roots of the #Obidient consciousness of the 2023 general elections was that the masses retreated sharply back into the hero culture because the Nigerian left was too hostile to the social experiment.

The hero culture has been buried deeply in the Nigerian civic space by activists, journalists, and labor leaders, so much so that we now deprive Nigerians of the ability to own their protests and mass movements. This age-long culture of always creating a hero for every resistance movement in Nigeria was what made MKO Abiola—an intimate friend of the military regimes and a brutal capitalist—the “hero” of democracy in Nigeria.

The oral history of Nigeria’s democracy is taught through heroes, and these heroes rarely represent the organic spirit of the movement. The fact that we are not consciously rooting out this culture from the civic space in Nigeria means that we are enabling learned helplessness among the masses, and we are contributing to the belief that they are incapable of initiating or sustaining resistance without a figurehead. This disempowers the people and prevents them from realizing their potential for self-organizing.

The #EndBadGovernance movement already existed in the minds of most Nigerians before the August 1 date was fixed. It was the #RejectFinanceBill protests in Kenya that pushed the words out of our mouths. In Abuja, the Network of Abuja Left Groups organized a solidarity protest at the Kenyan embassy in early July. The protest was successful, and we fully demonstrated solidarity, with the contagion of protests spreading to Uganda, Kenya, and Ghana, and putting the state on the defensive.

The Kenyan protests, coupled with increasing hunger and hardship in Nigeria, inspired many young Nigerians to confront the state. Omoyele Sowore and the TakeItBack movement’s planned August 5 protests added momentum. Ethnic tensions, with a Yoruba faction labeling northern resistance as tribal, further fueled opposition to Tinubu’s regime, particularly in the North. Wike’s vocal opposition to the protests, as Tinubu’s ally and Rivers’ political strongman, alienated many in the South. Upcoming off-cycle elections in Edo, where the president’s party lacked control, also played a role. Class politics, tribal sentiments, and partisan dynamics shaped the August 1 protests, while fear of the Tinubu-APC regime generated reverse publicity. Beyond Abuja, there are untold protest stories from northern cities like Kano and Jos, southern states like Lagos and Osun, and the diaspora in New York and the UK. These storytellers are all heroes.

The tag of “leaders” of the protests was not only forced on us by the media but also by a Nigerian state that was desperate to fish out the “sponsors” of the protests so that they could be victimized. The state apparatus found it hard to shut down a largely leaderless and organic mobilization. Thus, the Inspector General of the Police ran to the media to illegally require the organizers of the protests to submit their names and addresses. This was why they organized counter-protests to make it look like the organic mobilization of the August protests was a recipe for chaos. It wasn’t. In Abuja, the August 1 protests were peaceful until the police began shooting tear gas and live ammunition. It was so organized that we thoroughly searched for ourselves to ensure no ammunition was brought to the protests.

Over the past two years, the labor leadership of NLC and TUC in Nigeria have betrayed Nigerians more than five times by calling off long-overdue protests on social issues like fuel hikes, electricity tariffs, and minimum wage without achieving the goals of the actions, yet until August 1; we were calling on the labor leadership to lead protests and mass actions against the government. We needed them to be our heroes. On August 1, the entire Abuja Federal Secretariat Area was shut down to an extent that no labor strike has ever achieved in over a decade. We must think beyond mobilizing Nigerians through trade unions, our organizations, or elections alone. We must build a consciousness that empowers the people psychologically so that they can organize themselves, with or without those of us who are known activists, to fight for any of their interests.

We draw examples from our indigenous, precolonial African forms of resistance and social organization, which were largely communal and leaderless, like the Igbo’s acephalous (leaderless) societies. This is the only way we can reject the colonial idea that societies and movements need a charismatic figure to thrive. Leadership should not be a fixed concept but a shifting responsibility that emerges from the needs of the moment and dissolves when no longer necessary. The Nigerian people’s resistance should be seen as a living organism, where every part has a role, but no one part becomes a permanent or central authority.

As the dictatorship in Nigeria continues to unleash its wicked austerity measures systematically through the continual increase in fuel prices, electricity tariffs, and other taxes, our task as activists is to go back to the grassroots and ask the people to stand up for themselves. Rather than ask them to stand up and follow us, we must go back to the people and ask them to stand up for themselves in the interests of their immediate society and show them how victory is more feasible through a collective action where everyone is personally connected to the struggle.  We must do this with the words of Frantz Fanon in mind: “To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them.”