SIX YEARS AFTER #ENDSARS, THE BULLETS HAVE CHANGED, THE UNIFORMS HAVE CHANGED, BUT THE IMPUNITY REMAINS

Six years ago, precisely on the third day of October, 2020, a video went viral. A young Nigerian, in Ughelli, Delta State was being manhandled by men in uniform.

The footage was grainy, the audio indistinct, but the story it told was one that millions of Nigerians already knew by heart.

Within days, the hashtag #EndSARS had metastasized from a social media complaint into the largest youth-led uprising this country had seen in a generation.

On October 8, 2020, young Nigerians took to the streets, in Lagos, in Abuja, in Kano, in Port Harcourt, demanding an end to a police unit that had become synonymous with extortion, torture, and extrajudicial killing .

They were peaceful. They were organized. They were, for a brief and extraordinary moment, united beyond the fault lines of ethnicity and religion that the political class has spent decades exploiting.

They brought food for each other. They cleaned up after themselves. They played music.

They spoke—Soro Soke—with a clarity that unsettled the powerful .The government responded with the usual choreography.

The Inspector General of Police announced the disbandment of SARS. A presidential panel was constituted. Five demands were approved. There were press conferences, promises, and the familiar language of reform.

And then, on the night of October 20, 2020, the Nigerian Army opened fire on protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate.

The CCTV cameras had been disconnected hours earlier. The streetlights were off.

Between twelve and fifteen people were killed, according to the evidence that eventually emerged .

The government denied it. Then it denied it again.

Then it set up a judicial panel that confirmed it. Then it issued a White Paper rejecting its own panel’s findings.

That is the anatomy of impunity in Nigeria. It is not simply the act of violence. It is the denial, the delay, the whitewash, and the quiet expectation that the public will eventually forget.

THE REFORMS THAT WEREN’T

Let us be precise about what was promised and what was delivered.

SARS was disbanded. But the officers were not dismissed. They were “redeployed” into other units.

The police insisted, years later, that SARS no longer exists in any form .

Yet the logic of SARS, the idea that a special unit can operate outside the oversight of state commissioners, answerable only to itself, persisted.

SWAT was created to replace SARS.

SWAT was then scrapped and replaced by the Violent Crime Response Units in 2026 .

Each iteration comes with a new acronym, a new press release, and the same structural problem: armed men, minimal accountability, and a population that has learned to fear the people sworn to protect them.

The judicial panels of inquiry, established across the states, were a genuine attempt at accountability. They listened to victims. They awarded compensation.

In Abia State, the panel recommended N511 million for victims of police brutality. As of late 2025, that money had not been paid .

In Edo State, N190 million was recommended . The pattern repeated across the country: recommendations without implementation, justice without remedy.

The families of those killed at Lekki were told to wait. They are still waiting.

THE NEW UNIFORMS, THE SAME BULLETS

If you want to understand what has changed since 2020, do not look at the press releases. Look at the bodies.

In April 2026, a young NYSC member was shot dead inside his father’s compound in Abuja by military personnel.

A police officer in Effurun, Delta State, shot a young civilian in broad daylight over a suspected waybill parcel. The officer was later dismissed and recommended for prosecution .

That is accountability, of a sort—but only when the cameras are rolling, only when the outrage is loud enough, only when the victim’s story happens to go viral.

Amnesty International documented that Nigerian security forces killed over 190 protesters between 2014 and 2024, including at least 56 during the #EndSARS protests themselves .

During the #EndBadGovernance protests of 2024, at least 24 more were killed.

The killings did not stop when the hashtag stopped trending. They simply became less visible.

The government will tell you that reforms have been implemented.

The police will tell you that human rights training is now standard, that the Red Cross was involved in retraining, that the rules of engagement are clear .

Perhaps some of that is true. Perhaps some officers have been disciplined. Perhaps the VCRU is better than SARS.

But a country where a minister can call a critic a “bastard” on social media, where a nurse is strangled on night duty and the hospital management tries to cover it up, where a car dealer loses N40 million because a suspect was released on bail, that country has not reformed its culture of impunity.

It has simply changed the names on the door.

THE POLITICAL UNDERTOW

The #EndSARS movement was never only about SARS. It was about a generation that had grown tired of being governed by people who did not see them.

The protesters demanded an end to police brutality, yes.

But they also demanded dignity.

They demanded accountability. They demanded a future that was not defined by the failures of their parents’ generation.

The political class understood this, and it was terrified.

What followed was not simply a crackdown on protesters. It was a crackdown on the possibility of protest itself.

Activists were harassed. Bank accounts were frozen. Journalists were intimidated.

The government attempted to regulate social media, to control the narrative, to ensure that the next viral video would not have the same effect as the last one.

Six years later, the youth vote is the most unpredictable variable in Nigerian politics.

The Obidient movement of 2023 was, in many ways, a continuation of the energy that #EndSARS unleashed, a demand for something different, something that the traditional parties could not offer.

But the energy has not yet translated into power. And the institutions that were supposed to protect the people remain captured.

WHAT JUSTICE WOULD LOOK LIKE

I am not naive enough to believe that justice will come from the same institutions that have consistently failed to deliver it.

But I am stubborn enough to insist that we name what is missing.

Justice would mean that the officers who fired at Lekki are identified, prosecuted, and punished. Not redeployed. Not promoted. Punished.

Justice would mean that the judicial panels’ recommendations are implemented, not shelved. That the N511 million in Abia is paid.

That the families of the dead receive not just condolences but compensation and acknowledgment.

Justice would mean that when a police officer kills a citizen, the default response is not a press release defending the Force but an independent investigation with a timeline and a public report.

Justice would mean that the next time a young Nigerian is shot in the street, we do not have to wait for a hashtag to force the government to notice.

SIX YEARS LATER

The Lekki Toll Gate is back in operation. Cars pass through it every day, driven by people who may or may not remember what happened there.

The streetlights have been repaired. The CCTV cameras have been reinstalled.

But the bullet holes are still in the concrete, if you know where to look.

And the families of the dead are still waiting for someone to say, officially, that their children mattered.

The #EndSARS movement did not fail.

It did what protests are supposed to do: it forced the powerful to acknowledge, however briefly, that the people were watching. What failed was the promise that followed. The promise of reform. The promise of accountability. The promise that never came.

Six years later, the uniforms are different. The unit names are different. The press releases are different.

The impunity is not.And until that changes, the ghost of #EndSARS will continue to haunt this country—not as a memory of what happened, but as a warning of what will happen again.