When the protector becomes the perpetrator: State coercion and moral shocks in Nigeria’s #EndSARS and Kenya’s #RejectFinanceBill movements

How do state-orchestrated tensions during protests reshape the emotional, longitudinal, and legitimate characters of youth movements in Africa? What moral shocks do such intense moments generate, and how are democratic credentials subsequently affected? The profound theoretical insights in the social movement scholarship on political violence, protest policing, and resistance provide clear pathways for examining the radical repertoires that mediate and sustain intense protest moments.

They continue to guide investigations into how movement-state encounters escalate or reduce tensions. However, many debates in these areas are grounded in Western perspectives and realities. Therefore, it is important to place them within Africa’s ongoing contentious realities, particularly given recent signs and manifestations of democratic retreat across the continent. This will enable new understandings of how youth movements can indeed save democracy in today’s Africa. To this end, this study compares state-orchestrated violence in Nigeria (specifically, the #LekkiMassacre, 2020) and Kenya (the security crackdowns during the #rejectfinancebill protests, 2024). These are two episodes from Africa involving agitations led by young people, state coercion and moral shocks amid intense political contestation. In both cases, state repression aimed to reassert control and demobilise exasperated publics, yet divergent outcomes ensued.

Using a combination of in-depth interviews and retrospective digital ethnography, this study reveals that while the #LekkiMassacre created a moral stigma that delegitimised the state but fragmented the movement, the Kenyan crackdowns sustained collective rage that eventually compelled government retreat. This comparative approach illustrates how state-orchestrated tensions and the moral shocks they generate in African democracies foreground the demobilisation of publics behind democratic aspirations.