There is strength in numbers, digitally and or physically. Maybe Jack Dorsey and his friends never knew their conceived text-based application was going to be a revolutionary tool in a country’s growth, maybe they did. No matter, nearly a million tweets a day have been sent in the past week, all in support of the #ENDSARS protest. From memes, to informative details, warnings about where SARS officials operate, crowdfunding, and even lifesaving events… all on Twitter.
Twitter started off humbly as the theatre for savage replies and ‘trailer jams’ in its early days on Nigerian soil. In its adolescence it became the home of memes accompanied with doses of reality compared to other apps like Instagram were users claim to be the app for ‘display’. I personally, can’t count how many times I’ve seen someone tweet, “I’ll never leave this app…” and you can easily see why. Twitter is a complete smorgasbord of opinionated chaos, and for some reason, Nigerians love it.
Now a full-blown adult, and in its prime, Twitter is the hub for the #EndSARS initiative. The app has hosted the rise of a Nigerian revolution through peaceful protests which merely started as a hash tag and now, will definitely be recorded as a tool used in this historical battle between the Youths and the Government.
Dubbed the ‘Lazy Nigerian Youths’ by the President, Muhamadu Buhari in April 2018, avid social media users have embraced the term, attributing the phrase to a more positive connotation of Technological advancement over the older generation.
And with twitter, you can more or less watch the Protests unfold, while constantly supporting by retweeting, liking and mentioning to spread the proetest. Heck, there are even petitions to sign, accompanying the hashtag.
The peculiar thing about twitter is the fact that it’s a platform where anyone anywhere can say anything about anything. Trust me, exchanges easily go awry. But over the past week, everyone has pushed the same narrative, #endsars. In fact, you are digitally lynched if you are not a part of the movement. Twitter is often perceived as hostile, but the past few days, the engagements on the app have shown more patriotic acts than some of us even knew we had. I have in fact shed a few tears this week from what I’ve seen.
And now that Jack Dorsey has not only joined the cause to #EndSARS but also asked that people donate to the Bitcoin account, the glass ceilings of crowdfunding, bricks of Nigerian youth leading and doubts of Nigerians using tech to practically contribute to development have come completely undone. While the youth wait on the walls of SARS to follow suit, protesters have divided themselves in two. Don’t ask me who supervised this. They say while those on the streets chant aluta continua, victoria acerta, the Twitter (online) protesters’ duty is to retweet #EndSARS aggressively. Such inexplicable display of unity, oneness of vision and unbreakable resolve in the call to #EndSARS and it is beautiful to see.