On Saturday, January 10, 2026, residents of Ekpoma in Edo State protested a surge in kidnappings. Students of Ambrose Alli University joined, adding numbers, energy, and urgency. The situation escalated quickly: at least 52 people, majority of them students, were arrested, arraigned, and remanded at the Ubiaja Correctional Centre. Days of pressure from rights groups, political figures, and student bodies finally prompted Governor Monday Okpebholo to approve their release.
The National Association of Nigerian Students weighed in, calling the arrests “ridiculous, unacceptable, and deeply disturbing.” Students were exercising their constitutional rights, they said, and should not face intimidation or trauma. Yet, there was a time when even the thought of such arrests would have sparked nationwide student protests, campus closures, and solidarity actions. NANS itself once unsettled governments.
In the mid-1980s, it was considered one of Nigeria’s few radical organisations worthy of international attention for its anti-imperialist stance. Then, students believed in ideas, in society as it could be, and in their power to shape it. Somewhere along the way, that confidence eroded. What has changed is not the existence of repression but how students once met it. In 1991, after a May 27 protest at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), school authorities expelled 60 of its students in one stroke, branding their actions misconduct and a violation of their matriculation oaths. The demands that triggered the crackdown were not cautious or symbolic: students asked for state bursaries, the reinstatement of expelled colleagues, and an end to the routine closure of schools after unrest.
Among those targeted was Bamidele Aturu, a law student already known nationally for rejecting a government award on ideological grounds, even at the cost of going to court to retrieve his certificate. Detained and absent from campus on the day of the protest, he was nonetheless found guilty, a measure of how abusive state power could be. Yet neither arrests nor expulsions reduced student activism to silence. The students sued, won their case, and forced the university to back down, even as unionism was banned, results were withheld, and penalties imposed. Repression was severe, but students remained organised, defiant, and politically consequential—capable of absorbing punishment without surrendering the belief that collective action could still bend authority.
The roots of Nigerian student politics run deep. By 1956, students organised nationally as the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS) under Emmanuel Obe, linking campus activism to Nigeria’s struggle for self-determination. When NUNS was banned, NANS emerged in 1980, inheriting its predecessor’s structure and purpose: defending students’ welfare, rights, and education. It opposed military regimes, organised nationwide protests, and forged alliances with labour unions and pro-democracy movements. Obafemi Awolowo University, then the University of Ife, emerged as a hub of activism. Students protested fee hikes, administrative decisions, and policies, often coordinating actions across campuses and even states.
Some acts were brazen, like the 1993 hijacking of Nigeria Airways Flight 470 by teenagers demanding an Abiola presidency, but they reflected the seriousness with which students once engaged national politics. Even earlier protests, such as the 1978 “Ali Must Go” uprising over a 50 kobo meal hike, became defining moments in student resistance.
Arrests were an expected consequence of the protest, and students organised accordingly. Anticipating detention and harassment, activists built legal support networks, working closely with sympathetic lawyers known as the “Friends of NANS.” Among them were prominent figures such as Femi Falana, SAN, and Alao Aka-Bashorun, former president of the Nigerian Bar Association. Their involvement inevitably drew the ire of the state. In 1991, the Minister of Education, Chief Alex Akinyele, accused these “external forces” of fuelling student unrest nationwide. Falana and Aka-Bashorun responded publicly, insisting that they neither sponsored nor manipulated student actions; students sought them out, they said, as clients in need of legal protection, encouraged to pursue justice through the courts rather than the streets. They made no apology for their closeness to student activists. That confidence, however, proved difficult to sustain.
By the late 1990s, the cumulative weight of arrests, expulsions, and state indifference began to blunt momentum, and the culture of coordinated resistance that once absorbed repression gradually gave way to hesitation, fragmentation, and the quiet withdrawal of planned protests before they could fully take shape. In 1997, OAU witnessed what later became known as the Bloody Invasion, when police forces were deployed against students protesting a proposed increase in school fees, following an earlier incursion in 1995. By the end of the operation, three students were dead and at least 37 others had been detained at the State Intelligence and Surveillance Bureau.
In the years that followed, the terrain of student politics shifted. As Nigeria moved further into the 2000s, NANS increasingly drifted into the orbit of the political class. Internal divisions hardened into factionalisation, producing rival congresses and multiple claimants to leadership. Public posturing began to replace mobilisation. Student leaders endorsed politicians, conferred awards, and organised support groups that often bore little connection to undergraduate realities. Allegations of patronage became harder to dismiss, including more recent claims that political actors sought to purchase loyalty within NANS. What had once been a mass movement rooted in confrontation and sacrifice was steadily recast as a site of negotiation, access, and influence.
Alongside these internal fractures, universities doubled down on treating student activism as a threat. Protests were banned. Surveillance intensified. Police were invited onto campuses, often with lethal effect. Expulsions, suspensions, and linking compliance to grades or admission became standard tools. ABU, UNN, UNIBEN, and UNIPORT all have histories of harsh crackdowns: expulsions of dozens of students, rustications, killings during protests, and the arrest of union leaders who dared to organise.
Even protests over tuition policies like UNIPORT’s 2016 “no tuition, no exam” dispute or UNILAG’s 2024 fee protests were met with police action and administrative sanctions. These measures, combined with the legal framework for public order, created a chilling effect across campuses, teaching students that resistance came at a steep personal cost. NANS now often manages perception rather than dissent. Planned protests are announced, then withdrawn. Students remain largely silent during fee hikes, insecurity, or prolonged ASUU strikes. The extent of their ambition shaped by caution, fatigue, and fear.
The Ekpoma protest reminds us that resistance persists. The students who protested did so knowingly, and the harsh response emphasised the state’s expectation that student dissent should be an anomaly.
An entire generation has been taught that political engagement carries personal risk and few tangible rewards. This goes beyond student politics and is reflected at the national level — 2020’s ENDSARS movement and the Buhari administration’s response stands as the most recent reflection of this fact. Violently quelled protests, little to no regard by the government and a largely unchanged policing landscape remain the only testaments to a movement that engaged the entire country and captured global attention.
With NANS, what was once a collective, ideologically grounded movement has been reduced in many eyes to a political tool. Students now calculate participation carefully, weighing survival over solidarity. The psychological cost, loss of confidence, deferred action, and political cynicism, echo across campuses from Lagos to the north-east.
Universities once incubated the next generation of principled leaders, teaching negotiation, organisation, and resistance. Without these lessons, civic culture weakens. A country without active student resistance risks normalising repression and tolerating power unchallenged, eroding the very foundations of democratic engagement.
The February 2023 elections saw a notable increase in student awareness and political activity; according to voter registration data from the INEC, more than half of the new voters are young people aged 18-34 years. Of the 9.4 million newly registered voters, 7.28 million or 76 per cent are young people. In terms of occupation, the data showed that 40 per cent of new voters identified as students. Thus, while the future of student participation in Nigerian politics remains uncertain, recent years have shown that the capacity for resistance endures — waiting for the next generation bold enough to harness it.
It is tempting to say the days of fearless student politics are gone. Fear is rational. Repression is deliberate. But history shows silence is rarely permanent. The students in Ekpoma protested. That act lingers as a reminder of what student activism once meant, and what it could be again. The question remains: is it a spark or an exception? Can Nigerian students reclaim the political agency that once made them impossible to ignore, or has the system succeeded in neutralising them?
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