How Can Nigeria Fix the Legacy of Colonial Violence? #EndSARS

"The favoured approach to understanding colonial rule, particularly in Africa, is through the prism of political governance - how colonial authority was imposed through local authorities. In essence, the Nigerian people and their land were imagined not as people with rights to exist and function as a community, or even nations. They were imagined as corporate money-making entities whose bodies were enslaved and lands plundered. This system created a problem of unification in the "post-British" era. The fact that companies drove the colonial process, had a number of other consequences. Among them was that it made organised violence and the commodification of people and their socio-political systems, possible. The #EndSARS protests, gaining momentum in Nigeria, may be a step in the direction of social change, led by young people concerned about the structural and direct violence of the corporate state in Nigeria", writes Benjamin Maiangwa for The Conversation Africa.