Just like in 2023, Nigeria continued to experience a free fall in critical areas like the economy, security, leadership, the employment rate and human rights protection in 2024.
What made matters more interesting was President Bola Tinubu’s insistence in his first ever media chat on December 23 that “Nigeria was on the right path” despite citizens claims’ that the future has continued to look bleak.
Some events and policies impacted Nigerians negatively in 2024, leading many to their pessimistic outlook. FIJ highlights these key incidents as the year approaches its final day.
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ELECTRICITY TARIFF INCREASE
On April 3, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) increased electricity tariffs from N66 ($0.0465)/kwh to N225 ($0.1585) for about 15% of the 12 million grid-connected customers who were supposed to get up to 20 hours of power monthly.
NERC said the increase was to reduce the burden of the N3.13 trillion subsidy the government would have to pay on electricity in 2024. The commission also stated that the increment of tariff price for Band A customers, who enjoyed up to 20 hours of electricity, meant the government’s payment would be reduced by 63.58%, making the amount they would pay to be N1.14 trillion.
A day after the increase, Adebayo Adelabu, Nigeria’s Minister of Power, said Nigerians lacked the culture of power consumption management due to its affordability. Adelabu’s comments angered many Nigerians, who were already paying heavily on petrol purchase.
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NATIONAL ANTHEM CHANGE
While Nigerians were still battling the petrol subsidy removal and electricity tariff increase, the National Assembly passed a bill legalising the change of Nigeria’s national anthem from Arise, O Compatriots to Nigeria, We Hail Thee!.
The bill was speedily passed within one week. Members of the Federal House of Representatives first debated on the bill on May 23 and then passed it on to the Senate on the same day.
The Senate passed the bill on May 27 and the President signed it into law on May 28.
The hasty change of the anthem coincided with the commemoration of Tinubu’s first year in office. While the administration believed the new anthem would “inspired deep patriotism among Nigerians”, Nigerians saw the move as a way of reviving a colonial input that ought to be abandoned.
Interestingly, many young adults do not know the lyrics and cannot recite the anthem to date. Some stated a deliberate boycott and refusal to learn the anthem as a form of protest.
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HUNGER PROTESTS (#ENDBADGOVERNANCE), SUBSEQUENT SUPPRESSION
Between August 1 and 10, Nigerians took to the streets to protest against the extreme hardships experienced in the country due to the federal government’s economic policies.
Tagged the #EndBadGovernance or hunger protest, the 10-day exercise saw Nigerians nationwide demand changes to policies that impoverished the country’s citizens.
READ ALSO: Amnesty Int’l Demands Public Apology From FG for ’24 Killed, 1,200 Arrested’ in #EndBadGovernance Protest
A briefing published by Amnesty International, a global organisation that focuses on human rights, later stated that at least 24 protesters were killed and 1,200 were arrested y Nigeria’s security agencies during the nationwide protest.
The 24 recorded killings occurred in Kano, Jigawa, Katsina, Niger, Borno and Kaduna states. 12 people were killed in Kano, three in Jigawa, one in Katsina, three in Niger, three in Borno and two in Kaduna.
The briefing also revealed that the deceased were aged between five and 63.
ARREST AND ARRAIGNMENT OF MINORS
On November 1, Kayode Egbetokun, the Inspector General of Police (IGP) arraigned over 25 minors at a Federal High Court in Abuja.
The police arrested the minors for their participation in the #EndBadGovernance protests, with the IGP going ahead to secure remand warrants to keep them in custody for over 60 days.
READ ALSO: VIDEO: Child IGP Egbetokun Arraigned Over #EndBadGovernance Protest Slumps in Court
During the arraignment, one of the minors fell to the ground and lost consciousness in the court.
On November 2, Minister of Justice Lateef Fagbemi took over the cases filed against the minors. Subsequently, the court quashed the cases on November 5.
The takeover by the minister was compelled by the public outcry following the poor and malnourished appearances of the juveniles in court.
INCESSANT COLLAPSE OF THE NATIONAL GRID
Nigeria’s national grid collapsed 12 times in 2024. This is nine times more than it did in 2023. In 2023, it only collapsed three times.
The major collapses were recorded in October and November when it stopped generating power at least three times each within both months. These outages were also within days of each other; the least being 24 hours.
READ ALSO: National Grid Has Collapsed 9 Times More Than It Did in 2023
The 12 grid collapses occurred despite promises by he president and Bayo Adelabu, the Minister for Power, to resolve the country’s power supply crisis.
This was also in spite of the $1.4 billion loans Nigeria’s power sector had gulped in the 10 years.
INDISCRIMINATE ARREST OF JOURNALISTS AND ACTIVISTS
Nigeria’s security agencies on many occasions arrested journalists and activists indiscriminately during the year.
On August 5, plainclothes policemen numbering about 15 broke into a hotel room in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, occupied by Isaac Bristol whom they claimed was a microblogger and leak journalist popularly known as PIDOM Nigeria. They abducted him.
He was kept in solitary confinement for many days, and without food and water. There was no communication of his detention until investigative journalist David Hundeyin raised the alarm. Bristol was eventually released in October.
Soldiers took Segun Olatunji, the former editor of FirstNews, from his home in Lagos on March 15 and held him in an underground military cell for two weeks.
His arrest was linked to a publication on how Femi Gbajabiamila, the President’s Chief of Staff, attempted to corner $30 billion and 66 landed properties traced to Tunde Sabiu Yusuf, a former aide to former president Muhammadu Buhari.
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Daniel Ojukwu, an FIJ reporter, was abducted by men of the Intelligence Response Team (IRT) of the Inspector-General of Police on May 1. He did not regain freedom until May 10 amid public demands for his release.
When Ojukwu was abducted, neither his colleagues nor family and friends knew about it until the third day after a missing person report had been filed at police stations in the area he was headed.
FIJ would later learn of his detention at the State Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department (SCIID) in Panti, Lagos State. He was later accused of violating the 2015 Cybercrime Act in his investigative report on how Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire, Senior Special Assistant on Sustainable Development Goals (SSAP-SDGs) to former president Muhammadu Buhari, allocated N147.1 million to an account linked to Enseno Global Ventures (Enseno GV), an Abuja-based restaurant, supposedly for the construction of a classroom.
Michael Adaramoye, one of the conveners of the nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests, was arrested on the orders of the National Security Agency (NSA) in August.
Adaramoye was charged with treason alongside nine other protesters and remanded in prison by the Federal High Court in Abuja.
READ ALSO: Police Abduct FIJ Reporter Daniel Ojukwu ‘On IGP’s Orders’
Muktar Dahiru, a broadcast journalist with Pyramid FM, was arrested in August for sharing posts critical of the state government on his Facebook page.
In one of the social media contents Dahiru shared, an interviewee had accused Abba Yusuf, the governor of Kano, of corruption and requested that he allow federal anti-corruption agencies to investigate the multi-billion drug scandal in the state.
The broadcast journalist was secretly charged before Magistrate Court 24 at Gyadi Gyadi in August with criminal conspiracy, defamation of character, and intentional insult. The court remanded Dahiru in a correctional facility.
DSS operatives arrested and detained Adejuwon Soyinka, a journalist with the Conversation Africa, as he arrived in Lagos from the United Kingdom on August 25.
The DSS claimed that Soyinka was detained for six hours because he was on an unnamed agency’s watchlist. Although the DSS released Soyinka, it withheld the journalist’s international passport.
Sanyaolu Juwon, the national coordinator of the Take It Back (TIB) movement, was arrested in June.
Juwon was one of the coordinators of the 2024 Democracy Day nationwide protest. The police arrested him on June 11, the eve of the protest, and detained him for two days.
Police officers arrested Abdulrazaq Babatunde, the publisher of Just Events Online and Lukman Bolakale, the publisher of Satcom Media, on September 11.
The two publishers were arrested on the orders of some officials of the Kwara State Government for reporting the abuse of office by a politician.
They spent 10 days in detention before their release by a Magistrate Court.
READ ALSO: BREAKING: ‘Fisayo Soyombo Freed After 10 Hours at Force Headquarters
On August 14, ‘Fisayo Soyombo, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ), voluntarily reported at the Nigeria Police Force National Cybercrime Centre (NPF-NCC) in Abuja based on publicly available information that “he was wanted by the police”.
Soyombo honoured the invitation in the company of Abimbola Ojenike, FIJ’s lawyer.
He was subsequently kept for eight hours before being eventually released on bail. As part of the bail conditions, he must report at the NPF-NCCC headquarters in Abuja for bi-weekly meetings.
It would later be revealed that the police extended the invitation to Soyombo as a result of the same story Daniel Ojukwu had initially been abducted and detained for.
In late November, the 6th Amphibious Division of the Nigerian Army based in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, detained and held Soyombo incommunicado for three days.
Soyombo was investigating the underworld of illegal multi-billion-dollar oil bunkering in Nigeria’s oil-abundant Niger Delta region when the army detained him.
In the course of the investigative journalist’s work, the army came to the location where the oil theft was being carried out and the oil bunkerers immediately fled. This happened on Wednesday, around 2 am.
READ ALSO: FLASHBACK: How Soldiers Detained, Held Another Journalist for 2 Weeks
Having nothing to hide, Soyombo chose not to flee just like the oil thieves. Instead, he approached the soldiers, hoping to have an interaction with them. Rather than engage the journalist in a conversation, he was detained for three days without the opportunity to contact his lawyer or staff. While in detention, Soyombo was grilled by different army officials until about 11 pm on the same day.
While Soyombo was being detained, the army also issued a misleading statement claiming he was “arrested alongside suspected criminals at an illegal oil bunkering site”.
The army eventually had no choice but to release Soyombo when calls for his release by Nigerians reigned supreme on several social media platforms and across media houses.
READ ALSO: UPDATED: Dele Farotimi Released From Ekiti Prison
On December 3, Dele Farotimi, a human rights lawyer, was abducted from his Lagos office by police officers attached to the Ekiti State Police Command. He was subsequently transported to Ekiti where he spent three weeks in a police cell.
After the human rights published a book titled Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System in July, Afe Babalola, a senior lawyer in the Nigerian legal circle, accused him of defamation and subsequently wrote a petition to the Ekiti State Police Command.
Farotimi was eventually released on December 24 after meeting bail conditions included a N30 million bond, two sureties, one of whom must be a property owner and the submission of his international passport.
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STAMPEDES THAT LED TO MANY DEATHS
In 2024, at least 84 Nigerian lives were lost at events that were originally meant to help the poor and put smiles, temporary or not, on people’s faces.
In December alone, about 70 Nigerians died in stampedes that happened during food and gift distribution events in Oyo, Anambra and the Federal Capital Territory.
Prior to that period, no fewer than 17 Nigerians had also died in Lagos, Nasarawa and Bauchi while scampering for food and other gifts at almsgiving and intervention exercises that were originally designed to help alleviate poverty and put smiles on peoples faces.
The post Protest Suppression, Abductions, Stampedes… 2024 Events That Negatively Impacted Nigerians appeared first on Foundation For Investigative Journalism.