The first and only time I saw Segun Awosanya, commonly called Segalink, was in May 2019. He had come to speak at the Lagos State University, at a TEDx Talks programme. The man I saw that day varied little from the figure in his photographs online, his sartorial choices wholly LinkedIn-esque. He was as short, maybe even shorter, his eyes framed with glasses that imparted the gentleness of an academic, his over-pampered afro kissed in the front by a stylish whiplash of white. This was Segalink at the peak of his powers, his reputation as Rescuer of the Illegally Jailed unsullied by controversy. When his turn came to speak, everyone previously not paying attention gave him their eyes and ears.
Attired in a suit, he strolled to the stage with his shoulders raised regally high. If he’d raised them any higher, they would have touched his head. The content of his speech escapes recall. The ensuing ovation, however, requires no mnemonic. Born in the right century, Segalink’s gift of oratory would have won him the seat next to Marcus Cicero in the Roman Senate. Accessible and free of pomp, his spoken language runs the opposite direction of his tweets. Till date his tweets read like something composed by a sentient thesaurus with no ear for English prose rhythms. It’s not as barbarous as those remarks by which Honourable Patrick Obahiagbon achieved a certain infamy. But it’s as tone-deaf and as rife with abstract nouns.
Reports of Awosanya’s charitable deeds meant that when we looked at him, his afro was indistinguishable from a halo. He was widely loved and respected; he was the man who helped retrieve your cousin from jail when SARS officers pinched him on the charge that he “looked” like a cyber-scammer. Three years, one global pandemic and one nationwide protest later, the man once hailed as a saint is now one of Twitter’s most despised figures, and rightfully so. A line from one of the Dark Knight films proves apt: You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Awosanya didn’t have to die. He only had to keep his mouth shut.
It all began in October 2020, when certain young Nigerians set their feet upon asphalt to ask, first, that the infamous Special Anti-robbery Squad (SARS) be disbanded; later they set forth demands concerning civil welfare. The Nigerian government’s response was pig-headed hostility. Armed police officers threw teargas canisters at protesters like discus. At Lekki Toll Gate where the state-enforced violence reached high fever, the End SARS protest drew its last breath as Nigerian soldiers tore through it with a chaos of bullets. It is an unforgivable crime against humanity that will survive decades in the collective Nigerian memory. To be remembered in equal disgust are those whose words helped to demonise the youth-centric movement. Of this lot, Awosanya’s voice was the most eloquent.
In several tweets he described the protests as an insurrection. Given his stature as a social activist, his opinion about the protests weighed a metric ton, to his many Twitter followers at least. He initially didn’t condemn the protests, even hailing one of its leading picketers, Rinu Oduala, for starting “the organic protests”. Later he worked up a grouse for the social advocacy group Feminist Coalition (FemCo), whom he repeatedly accused of “hijacking” the protests to enrich themselves and promote feminism and rights of the LGBTQ+ community. His accusations were relentless. He was as relentlessly stingy with proof and rationale.
Even if it were the case that FemCo cared only about their purse and had ulterior concerns, wouldn’t obsessing over it be missing the big picture while stating the obvious? The obvious being that protests of such grandiose scale attract all sorts of people, each impelled by his or her own unique motivations. Why, for instance, did DJ Cuppy join the protest? Because she worried she may fall victim to SARS? Because she truly cared about the people? Because she didn’t want to be seen as conveniently apolitical? The correct answer: It did not matter. Whatever her intentions, what mattered was the added legitimacy her participation imparted to the protests. When Marcus Crassus funded and led the campaign to quell Spartacus’s rebellion, his reasons were as selfish as they were for the good of the Roman Republic. He was padding his political clout, a stratagem which at the end of the war earned him a place in Rome’s First Triumvirate. His intentions weren’t fully public-spirited. But his money and military leadership kept the Roman public safe. FemCo helped do some good, particularly in giving the protests some form of organisation. Why did Awosanya not focus on that?
FemCo were one of the de facto leaders of the decentralised End SARS protests. Backed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, they received nearly 150 million naira in Bitcoin donations, all in the name of the End SARS campaign. All that cash got Awosanya talking:
“Staging coordinated attacks on prominent reform advocates and then using a credible advocacy’s campaign to raise funds through an unregistered NGO, threatening the integrity of our nation and gunning for youth insurrection in the name of End SARS.”
Reading that, you realise how much of a hyperbolic place Awosanya’s imagination is. What “coordinated attacks”? Somehow, “raising funds through an unregistered NGO”—not Boko Haram or even that special class of people who dip bread into tea—is “threatening the integrity of our nation”. Though FemCo became one of the recognisable faces of the End SARS protests, only a few youths would tell you they camped on streets on FemCo’s orders or for any feminist ideology. Most were driven to protest because survival demanded it—SARS had become the angel of death.
Only once, in an ill-advised series of tweets, did FemCo say they wanted the protests to also consider the rights of gay Nigerians. But as previously mentioned, the End SARS protests had no leaders in the true sense of the word. Nobody, not Rinu Oduala or FemCo, had the authority to dictate the protest’s theme. Awosanya knew this, but he also knew he had no substantial argument. So he settled for homophobia, hoping to weaponise it against his feminist foes. Sadly for him it was a raucous period in Nigerian Internet history, so not many paid his nay-saying much mind. It’s telling that of all the End SARS de facto champions—Aisha Yesufu, Mr Macaroni, Rinu Oduala—Awosanya chose to brandish his pickaxe at those who had come by a generous stream of money and the bragging rights of a Twitter verification.
If you say envy drove Awosanya’s actions, as many have said, you’d probably be right. He was among the first set of End SARS protesters in 2017, and has often said the End SARS campaign was pioneered by Social Intervention Advocacy Foundation, a social rights group he founded. Yes, he was among those who organised the 2017 protests, but the 2020 version was by no means his doing. For that we have the musicians Falz and Runtown to thank, the two leading the first protests in Lagos. You get the sense that Awosanya grew green as FemCo lapped up all the praise. If he could, he would copyright the End SARS hashtag, converting a country’s clamour into his private possession. An activist can be allowed some flaws. None of it should be a surfeit of ego or narcissism.
You can spy his bloated self-importance in how he deploys language, and in how often he has stoked, through deliberate ambiguity and omission, the myth that he is a practising lawyer. He uses hundred-dollar words to communicate ideas worth a pence. Isn’t hiding behind a dictionary the routine of one who feels he has to compensate for a lack of sorts? Like a Napoleon complex, but of the sort realised by verbal excess. Though not a lawyer, he doesn’t correct the mislabeling when Reuben Abati introduces him as one during an Arise TV interview in February 2020. In the same year when a Twitter user asked if he studied Law and Management in university, he said yes to both. In fact, he studied Estate Management and only sat through some Law courses. That’s not the same thing as having studied Law, as anyone who’s been to a university knows—English Literature students take some French and History courses while in school, but it would be disingenuous if they told you they studied either French or History. Rarely telling an outright lie, Awosanya relies on shrewd innuendos. If the truth ever got out, he could easily deny explicitly calling himself a lawyer and all would be right. Realtors don’t enjoy the prestige that lawyers do, a fact Awosanya knows and which likely compels his cross-dressing: When no one is looking, he slips on a barrister’s wig and does a wiggle.
We know his conscience has room for the occasional deceit, and nowhere is this clearer than in his writing style. It was Georges Buffon who said, “style is the man himself”. A man with nothing to hide, especially one not working in the field of literature where some indirectness is a virtue, tells you the truth in a simple, matter-of-fact way. Liars, meanwhile, tend to be long-winded and vague. As Orwell pointed out in his essay “Politics and the English Language”, this impreciseness of speech is often within the territory of unscrupulous politicians, whose aim is to obscure the true nature of things. Rather than tell you they have killed an entire village of people, they’d render the information in the most abstract and euphemistic way until it fails to provoke the right mental imagery, telling you they have “taken care of some undesirable elements”. The genocide of Jews is not called that; it’s called “The Final Solution”. Humbert Humbert phrases it neatly: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”.
Awosanya writes in that insincere roundabout way. He uses words in ways suggesting he either knows what he wishes to say but chooses to be vague, or that the meaning he wishes to communicate is obscure even to himself. It may also be that the meaning is sharp in his mind and he intends to express it clearly but, for a lack of linguistic skill or an innate dishonesty, ends up choosing the wrong words and the wrong word order. When not throwing unbacked accusations at FemCo—he once said they have an “old score” to settle with Lekki Concession Company, but never says why—he is fabricating the most discursive analogies. As a member of the nine-man panel set up to investigate the Lekki Shooting of 20 October 2020, Awosanya voted that the Lekki toll gate should be reopened for business. He justified his decision thus:
“Society may have frustrated any rationality in doing good or taking responsibility for the sake of the collective. We’re our own problems and we’ve refused to take responsibility but point fingers… How many scientists do you find staying perpetually by the microscope without leaving to work on his findings? Recall that people work in the establishment too? We all use that road. Imagine locking the whole road under claims of an ongoing investigation without the need to visit.”
The excerpt’s condescending tone aside, the scientist analogy is as relevant to the case as a fistful of rocks is to a game of chess. Again he lies by way of exaggeration, when he says not reopening the Lekki toll gate meant “locking the whole road”. Neither human nor vehicle was barred passage through the Lekki toll gate. The inquiry panel’s concern was deliberating if to allow Lekki Concession Company resume toll collection at the Lekki toll gate.
Perhaps Awosanya talks like a politician because he is one himself. It says on his Wikipedia page—if it’s to be believed—that he “consults for several firms, government and non-governmental organizations.” Given he works with the government, as he claims, isn’t it reasonable to say he opposed the End SARS protests because he wished to not upset his employers? There was also the dilemma of not wanting to upset his Twitter followers, many of whom, given his previous End SARS campaign, expected him to join the protests. Perhaps he devised a way of playing both sides: By drumming up superstitious claims that the protests had been “hijacked”, he spared himself of having to go against the government and had a plausible excuse to put to his social media followers.
His allegiances seem to be in this order: His purse and self-importance, the government, and the people. Which is not necessarily a bad thing if he didn’t often pretend it was anything else. To know Awosanya is on the government’s side, you only need to look at how the nine-man panel voted regarding the reopening of the Lekki toll gate. Four of the nine members voted against it, all of them members of civil society—Ebun Olu-Adegboruwa, Patience Udoh, Rinu Oduala and Temitope Majekodumi. The remaining five who voted in favour of the motion, with the exception of Awosanya and to a degree Lucas Koyejo of National Human Rights Commission, all have explicit links to the government—Rtd. Justice Doris Okuwobi worked in the Ministry of Justice; Oluwatoyin Odusanya currently works there; Taiwo Lakanu was formerly the Deputy Inspector General of Police.
When systems fail, heroes arise as our last-standing moral ballasts. The End SARS protests, itself a reaction to systemic collapse, gave rise to certain urban heroes: Rinu, Yesufu, then there was the fellow who, risking severe head injury and death, climbed onto great heights, waving a giant End SARS flag in triumph and solidarity. Afraid scrutiny may reveal them to be insincere, we prefer to not look too closely at our heroes. We refrain from humanising them, preferring them as abstractions, and preferring to think of them as being too inhuman to be susceptible to human corruption. If we find them to be corrigible, what hope is there? Yet, heroes shouldn’t be beyond our scepticism. If for nothing else, to avoid falling for the occasional scams and reciting these scams as the truth, as Reuben Abati unwittingly did on national television. At any rate, it’s not too late to look closely at Segalink and see him for what he is: A work of fiction.