Elements of an Effective Protest
Is it possible for a protest to stick to one goal? Should it even try?
Table of Contents
1) Introduction — What’s the Ask?
2) Civil Rights Movement: When Dr. King “went too far”
3) Arab Spring: When the Ask is HUUUGE!
4) BLM: When a huge demand can only be satisfied by an even bigger one
5) Hong Kong protests: When an Ask isn’t really the Ask
6) The #EndSARS protests: When an Ask is ready for leaders
7) Conclusion
Introduction — What’s the Ask?
On what would otherwise be a drab Sunday afternoon, a Project Manager, a Publicist, and a Writer fell into a discussion around the nature of protests.
Their professions are significant here because that was the lens through which one of the more interesting observations was made. One of them, I’m guessing it was the PM, insisted protests would achieve more if a scope, timeline, and ratio of financial & human cost to the desired outcome were considered from the outset. Our PR guru’s contribution was intermittent Tourette-like outbursts; “Stay on brand!” to buttress the PM’s point.
Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t much of a conclusion but 2020, in all its telenovela glory, is as good as any to indulge in such musings, what with so much material to draw from: The anti-lockdown protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, all the counter-protests (which we’ll just lump into a group with diminished IQ), the Hong Kong protests and the very recent #EndSARS protests.
On October 20th, 2020, two days after our little debate, soldiers fired upon a gathering of unarmed #EndSARS protesters in Lagos, Nigeria. Reports differ on the number of casualties but die, some did and injured others were. At first, the army denied there even was a shooting but when enough evidence emerged (after all we live in the age of mobile phones and social media, duh), then began the debate around the number of victims. That’s like arguing with a toddler that rampaged through the kitchen how many eggs they smashed. It’s not really the point.
Everybody condemned the actions of the army; it had gone too far. Nigeria has enjoyed its latest run at democracy for just over twenty years but even during the military years, shooting into mass gatherings wasn’t a thing. However, some argued, in very hushed tones, that while what the government did was despicable, perhaps the protesters had also gone too far. After all, the government had moved relatively swiftly to disband the offending police unit as soon as it realised the #EndSARS protests weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. This is a bullshit argument for reasons that I’ll outline later but this assertion did make me think about the nature of protests and the demands that accompany them.
What is the *Ask?
Can we realistically expect it to be simple and remain static throughout the movement? And at what point does a people’s protest go too far?
- *Just to be clear, “Ask” in this context, is defined as “demand” or “goal” as used in the corporate world. Not ask as if one is begging for a bowl of porridge.
Civil Rights Movement: When Dr. King “went too far”
A few years ago, I was at dinner with some American friends when I naively wondered aloud: Why did the Civil Rights Movement stop? The answer, it turns out depends on who you ask. It ranged from: ‘It never stopped — just morphed’ (Afro guy, with fist in the air). To a more helpful: ‘Once segregation in places such as schools and lunch counters was abolished, it fizzled out’. To the more plausible riposte: ‘The movement died with the assassination of Dr King’.
So, which is it?
In April 1968. Martin Luther King turned his attention to the biggest Ask of all. In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Dr. King wrote about expanding the movement from civil rights to human rights and addressing the fundamental issue of economic justice. He advocated fair income and affordable housing.
We’ll call this Ask #3, which according to one school of thought, was what led to Dr King’s assassination. The other two “Asks”, that of 1963 (the march on Washington against racial segregation) and 1965 (the Selma-to-Montgomery march against Black voter suppression) were in simplistic terms a demand to be treated like a human being. While to a racist, this is a big concession to make, after all, you’re demanding he change his carefully constructed in-bred worldview. This third demand — the third Ask — will actually cost him money. This is a no-no. Nothing aligns racists and apathetic fence-sitters like “messing with the money”.
This isn’t the imaginings of a bored writer. This is a direct plug into the mindset of a racist and a racist system. The United Kingdom, for example, had to compensate slavers after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act by taking out one of the biggest loans in its history. This loan was only recently paid off in 2015. Which would imply that generations of blacks and immigrants in that country also paid the slavers via taxes. Ridiculous but true.
That same April, in 1968, with the wind of national shame and mourning over Dr King’s death, President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act providing equal housing opportunity regardless of race.
Arab Spring: When the Ask is HUUUGE!
In Sidi Bouzid, a city about two hundred miles outside of Tunis, Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old market trader was pushed to his limits by an insensitive government official who not only fined but called the police on him. The police seized his produce and in a round-robin of demands and humiliating treatment pushed this young man to commit self-immolation in front of the government offices.
The series of largely peaceful protests increasingly became violent as police forces tried to suppress them causing them to snow-ball into what we now know as the Arab Spring as it spread across North Africa and into the middle east.
That single act of self-immolation embodied the youth’s sense of hopelessness and frustration at a Tunisian system considered corrupt at every level and led to a protest that had one Ask: a change in governance and subsequent improvement in employment prospects.
The pedantic among you could argue that actually counts as two demands. This article may not really be for you. The point is, asking for a change in government and ergo honest governance is a huge Ask and there wasn’t a leader to build it around like the Civil Rights movement which left it prone to being hijacked as the list mushroomed with each country the movement spread to. Wiser despots stepped down, others were called to justice and in some cases killed, others dug in leading to all-out war pushing the geopolitical landscape of some countries into a dark moribund situation as found in Syria years later.
Tunisia appears to be enjoying the fruits of its Arab Spring though. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who had ruled Tunisia since 1987 stepped down and observers say its economy is doing better under a more stable and fairer government.
#BlackLivesMatter: When a huge demand can only be satisfied by an even bigger one
The Black Lives Matter movement was birthed by three women; Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors in 2013 after Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted but it didn’t gain the international attention we’re all familiar with until the following year when Michael Brown jr. in Ferguson, Missouri was shot by a police officer and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, New York was choked to death. These two murders led to protests, some of it violent.
The originators of the movement didn’t build it around themselves. So, unlike the Civil Rights Movement, it is decentralized. There is no head to cut off to grind it to a halt. However, a decentralized protest comes with its own challenges. Such movements are prone to being hijacked by anyone with an axe to grind as evidenced by some of the placards on display during #blm marches. Some of them, let’s just say, were not “on brand”. There were LGBTQ+ rights placards, feminist activists pitched in, placards hoisted in the air by people stating “All Lives Matter” and I’ve even seen a solo placard with “All Pets matter”. Guessing that’s an animal-rights activist that missed the memo.
The other challenge that decentralized protests face is that they can peter out quite quickly. By 2015, the #BlackLivesMatter protests slowed down significantly but the hashtag survived and hobbled along in the following years stoked in places by more footage of brutal shootings.
In 2016, Colin Kaepernick along with other players took a knee at an NFL game during the national anthem as a protest against the killings. This pissed off the perennially-tanned, president Donald Trump, who at the time of writing this is struggling to come to terms with his loss at a bid for a second term in the White House. Kaepernick and the other sportsmen who ‘kneeled weren’t officially aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement but they became irrevocably linked since they share the same Ask.
In May this year, a policeman in Minneapolis was videoed kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for 7 minutes and 46 seconds. With an already divisive president and frankly — I’d argue — a senile racist at the helm, things could only escalate. The USA burned like it hadn’t done since the 60s. The world joined in. Some in solidarity, others because they were battling their own racial issues as #BlackLivesMatter spread across the globe.
In the UK, protesters began defacing and tearing down statues of very British icons that have been linked to slavery. Historical figures woven into the tapestry of the nation’s history and pride, that invested in or directly traded slaves long before they built hospitals or colleges in their names. Men like Edward Colston, Cecil Rhodes, Robert Clayton, Thomas Guy and Henry Dundas whose effigy in Edinburgh, I’m pretty sure, would’ve also been pulled down if it didn’t stand on a column 50ft above the ground. Instead, the public has had to settle for a plaque that states his role in delaying the abolition of the slave trade in the British colonies. This was a new generation declaring racial intolerance of any kind was no longer acceptable and being a quiet fence-sitter wasn’t good enough either. It was still ‘on brand’ but #blm went from an already big demand (how do you reform police departments across a continent-straddling country such as the USA?) to let’s kill racism off once and for all. As noble as that aspiration is, I’d argue that increase in scope, reduced the potency of the Black Lives Matter movement rather than strengthen it but I suppose we’ll have to see how it plays out.
Hong Kong protests: When an Ask isn’t really the Ask
Beijing passed an Extradition law meant to ensure people found guilty of certain crimes would be extradited from Hong Kong to the mainland for prosecution. Many in Hong Kong considered the bill to be an egregious violation of the “one country, two systems” autonomy that they were meant to enjoy till at least 2047.
In essence, the central Chinese power was prematurely attempting to exercise more control over this part of their kingdom that enjoyed a level of liberalism that few had in mainland China. The protests became increasingly violent as it became clear the people wouldn’t be cowered and later in 2019, the Chinese government repealed the Extradition bill.
Capitulation notwithstanding, protesters’ demonstrations continued. Now people wanted to protect Hong Kong’s freedoms in perpetuity. What many concluded from mainland China’s actions is that the freedoms that Hong Kongers enjoyed was going to be eradicated completely as soon as the opportunity presented itself. A year later, protesters are still clashing with police as the Ask is now much bigger than just the Extradition bill. Is there a solution? What does victory to the protesters look like?
The #EndSARS protests: When an Ask is ready for leaders
The #EndSARS movement began with the shooting of a young man by an officer from the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) unit. A police unit that is so repugnant that though established in 1992, the universe would conspire to have it share the same acronym with a disease that would threaten a global pandemic a decade later. The SARS police unit has been accused of killing, raping, molesting, and constantly extorting money from innocent or mildly guilty citizens they were set up to protect. The youth were also disproportionately targeted by the SARS unit. In a country that’s no stranger to riots, the youth opted for a different approach. They opted for peaceful protests taking a leaf from the Black Live Matter protests a few months earlier. They were organised and used social media effectively.
The #EndSARS movement was born and much like the ongoing #BlackLivesMatter protest which is slowing down in the USA, the protests started off as an anti-police brutality campaign. They were very clear on what changes they wanted. Politicians soon understood that they were dealing with a different kind of beast. One armed by the power of social media. They couldn’t harass or escape without a mobile phone camera stuck in their faces. They couldn’t say something stupid without it being live-streamed, retweeted, ‘grammed or meme’d as the ludicrousness of many politicians became clearer. So, politicians were forced to engage.
So far so good.
Some, not all politicians, mind you. Glaringly, the first of the ill-considered actions/non-actions that have since dotted the landscape of this protest was the president’s silence.
The Lagos state governor addressed a crowd of young protesters and promised to take their grievances to the President at Aso Rock, his official residence.
So far so good.
The government’s first concession to the movement’s demand was to disband the SARS police unit.
So far so good.
But leaders both at the state- and federal level hadn’t engaged quickly enough. And to make matters worse had harassed some pockets of the movement and arrested others. This led to the “#5 of 5”. A list of 5 demands that protesters decided they wanted met.
Does this count as a shift in the agenda of the #EndSARS movement? Slightly, but it was “on brand”. #EndSARS was literally about dismantling the SARS unit but now there were prisoners of the movement. Also, as the protests stretched into days, more horror stories of victims at the hand of SARS over the years came to light. People wanted an inquiry. It wasn’t enough to let the member of this unit disappear into the night.
What is also interesting was that many of the protesters actually acknowledged that the police themselves were victims of a corrupt system. When one arms a police force that’s underpaid, paid irregularly and often has appalling accommodation, what else would you expect from them?
Then in what can only be described as a “slap to the face” the Inspector General of Police announced they were going to replace SARS with a new police unit called SWAT (Special Weapon Tactical Team).
Not so good.
I was on the phone to my nephew from Lagos when I first heard this. I’d thought it was a punchline to a joke but he was serious. SARS had essentially morphed into SWAT. The #EndSARS protests morphed just as quickly. It was clear how so little older politicians understood and more importantly respected the youth. EndSARS protesters began pointing out how disengaged and inept many of the politicians are. Figures started circulating about the remuneration and benefits that Governors and especially Senators received. Nigerian Senators are reportedly some of the highest-paid politicians in the world. Some protesters started to call for new governance.
Everyone knows the protesters are right. The problem is, anyone with a mild grasp of Nigerian politics also knows the government isn’t going to fix all these issues in one go. Too many and too huge Asks so to speak. In the midst of these protests, you even had separatists make an appearance. People that haven’t let go of the idea that the only way that Nigeria will ever progress is to break it up. Again, a headless movement in danger of being hijacked.
Should the country head in the direction of the Arab Spring? The leaders didn’t come out all too well in that situation. No one has any sympathy for them but in many cases, neither did the country and ergo its citizens.
Conclusion — so what makes an effective movement?
Depends on whether you want reform or revolution. The choice will often be taken out of your hands. Bad leaders often feel indignant at the inconvenience protesters cause and respond in two ways — usually in predictable order. First, come the shallow platitudes; a throwaway gesture to appease the disgruntled masses. Dictatorships rarely bother with this charade. Dissatisfied or outright insulted by these meaningless gestures, it becomes clear that the real problem is much, much bigger. Protesters then demand more. Usually, something that threatens the very existence of many of the people in power. Doing that leads to a violent pushback and before long we’re on the precipice of all-out revolution. This well-trodden path has given rise to the often-quoted aphorism; power is taken, never given.
As ‘romantic’ as balls out revolutionary war always seems, I’m not a big fan of that as a first option, not least of all because I’m just not a fan of the sight of blood. Most would-be revolutions are squashed even before they take off. And when they survive, they drag on for years at great costs with a dissatisfying end. A revolution can be easily (and disingenuously) tagged with other pseudonyms like anarchy, usurpation, coup, etc and that historical label may stick in the likely event the incumbent emerges victorious.
A reform that comes with a singular Ask doesn’t mean you’re begging for change. You are attempting to deal with pain points without falling into an all-out war. You may decide on this approach if, for example, you decide your existence requires several tweaks and you rather like the idea of going back to your regular day job after the protests subside. This is playing the long game and may take a while to see all your desired changes. If you opt for this approach, then to get the best results, consider the following:
1. Your movement needs faces. Not one face. Not many. Just a handful. Arbitrarily, three to five seems to be a good number. Leaders serve as mouthpieces, inspire people and most importantly keep the protests on track by maintaining the vision and discipline. Leaders can also be bribed, maimed or killed.
Leaderless movements, as mentioned earlier, are more prone to splintering, being hijacked by other causes (dilution), descending into chaos or simply petering out.
2. Employ social media heavily. Social Media is your “unseen leader”. As Lao Tzu said, “A leader is best when people barely know he exists.”
This is key for when inevitably the movement’s leadership come under attack. Don’t rely on traditional news outlets. Use all the tools out there. From Facebook, Instagram and even Telegram to GoFundMe or some other money-raising app. Social Media shows that the movement is bigger than the faces/leaders of the protests.
3. Keep it non-violent. The looting, pillaging that will almost assuredly ensue must not come from the core proponents of change.
4. Have a clear list of demands. Nothing more than five and resist the urge to expand it. This is an opportunity to absorb other demands or budding movements into your cause as long as there’s a big enough overlap.
5. Show up with realistic solutions. It’s not enough to highlight the problem(s). Offer solutions. Ensure they include concrete changes. For example, to the law, demanding an inquiry committee be formed for an investigation into past crimes, etc.
6. Franchise it. After you’ve got a solid hold on your demands, empower the people to run with the movement in far-flung places. Just like with any successful franchise if the movement is going off track in some outpost, the core leadership can bring them back in line with the core tenets of the movement. Leaders can achieve this in person or via social media, for example. Or at the very least, distance themselves from rogue elements.
All this allows decentralization with some of the benefits of the leader-model.
Having made the arguments for civil disobedience, if there is no marginally tolerable existence to return to. If your oppressor is metaphorically kneeling on your neck and isn’t showing signs of relenting, then you might as well order the full-fat revolution option with a side-order of guillotines, pillorying… that sort of thing. But before you commit yourself and very likely the next generation to all-out war, remember even the grand-daddy of revolutions, the French revolution, started with a simple demand for bread.
