Nigerian activist claims fuel protests scuppered by police

A Nigerian youth leader said armed policemen on Friday aborted his group’s planned protest in Abuja over a government proposal to remove fuel subsidies, which would result in higher pump prices.

“We got to the venue of the protest and we found it already cordoned off by armed policemen ... They later brought in their dogs and chased us out of the place,” the head of the National Youth Council of Nigeria, Wale Ajani, said.

“They said they got information that there was a bomb threat and our presence at the venue constituted a security risk,” he said.

An August suicide bomb attack claimed by the Islamist sect Boko Haram on UN headquarters in Abuja killed 24 people.

The police spokesperson in Abuja, Moshood Jimoh, denied his men deliberately took action to stop the group’s one-day sit-in protest.

“We did not stop the protest.

We are just on operation stop-and-search to prevent crimes in Abuja. We started that last week. We never targeted any group specifically today,” Jimoh said.

An AFP reporter said that he saw at least two police armoured personnel carriers and an unusual massive deployment of policemen around the venue of the planned protest.

Ajani said that the secret police, known as the Department of State Services, on Wednesday detained him for several hours during which he was urged to cancel the protest against scrapping the subsidy.

Many Nigerians, most of whom earn less than $2 per day, view it as the only benefit they receive from their country’s oil wealth, much of which has been squandered through corruption and mismanagement.

Government officials and many economists argue that the billions of dollars being spent on the subsidy each year go to a corrupt few, and that money saved could be used for infrastructure development or other important programmes.—AFP