LSJ Official Response to the Democracy Day Protests and DSS Mobilisation

On this Democracy Day, while President Bola Tinubu takes the podium at the National Assembly to extol the virtues of Nigeria’s 26-year experiment with civilian rule, thousands of citizens across 20 states are choosing a different pulpit: the streets.

The Nigerian Diaspora Coalition for Change (NDCfC) and our affiliate, the League for Social Justice (LSJ), affirm unequivocally that peaceful protest is not a threat to democracy, it is the lifeblood of it. What we are witnessing today is not sedition. It is not insurrection. It is citizenship.

The Take It Back Movement and other civil society organizations have taken great care to notify law enforcement, organize peacefully, and comply with the law. That this basic act of civic engagement is met with the mobilization of riot squads, intimidation of organizers, and threats of arrest betrays the central irony of Nigeria’s democratic celebration: a government that commemorates June 12 while suppressing the very spirit that made June 12 historic.

We reject the framing of these protests as a “combustible situation.” The only thing that has ignited tension is the state’s habitual overreach, deploying brute force to subdue free speech rather than engaging in sober self-reflection over two years of devastating policy failure. Inflation is suffocating households. Insecurity has become a normalized terror. Millions are unemployed, underfed, and unheard. If democracy is not designed to hear them now, then when?

To the Nigerian security forces, we echo the position of the Nigerian Bar Association and countless human rights bodies: your duty is not to quell protest but to protect it. Section 40 of the 1999 Constitution is unambiguous, the right to peaceful assembly is a guaranteed civic right, not a privilege granted at the whim of state actors. Section 84(4) of the Police Act (as amended) obligates the police to provide security for such gatherings, not harass or endanger them.

We caution the government against treating protesters as insurgents and urge it to redirect its energies toward addressing the very grievances that brought Nigerians to the streets: hunger, joblessness, insecurity, and impunity. If the Tinubu administration cannot face the people on Democracy Day, then it has abdicated its moral right to celebrate it.

LSJ calls on the international community, media organizations, legal observers, and diaspora watchdogs to document today’s demonstrations and hold the Nigerian state accountable should any protester be unlawfully detained, brutalized, or silenced.

This is not a rebellion. It is a reckoning.

And in a true democracy, that should not be feared, but welcomed.

League for Social Justice (LSJ)

Affiliated with the Nigerian Diaspora Coalition for Change

June 12, 2025 | Abuja & Diaspora Offices