Anarchism in Nigeria

According to the Nigerian anarchist Sam Mbah, these stateless people groups included the Igbo, Birom, Angas, Idoma, Ekoi, Ibibio, Ijaw, Urhobo and Tiv.

With the achievement of the country's independence, the Nigerian labor movement largely lost its revolutionary syndicalist tendencies, with many trade unions taking on reformist and class collaborationist lines.

During this period, left-leaning factions within Western and Eastern regional governments established a program of farm settlements, based on the Kibbutz system, with the intention of recreating the pre-colonial communal way of life.

These self-managing settlements were made up of farmers and their families living on collectives, where the means of production were held in common and the produce yielded was distributed equally among the inhabitants, while agricultural surplus was exchanged by cooperatives.

Due to Ojukwu carrying out the instructions of a Consultative Assembly and the voluntary construction of the Biafran Armed Forces, Stephen P. Halbrook compared him to the Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary Nestor Makhno,[23] although this libertarian characterization is disputed.

This second military junta was also short-lived, as it was itself overthrown by the Armed Forces Ruling Council in the 1985 Nigerian coup d'état, led by Ibrahim Babangida, who resumed the implementation of austerity policies under a structural adjustment program by the IMF.

[29] Meanwhile, the Awareness League (AL) was established as a study group at the University of Nigeria, bringing together a broad coalition of Marxists, Trotskyists, human rights activists and leftists.

[32] During the 1993 Nigerian presidential election, the Awareness League were among the progressive groups that supported the social democratic candidate Moshood Abiola, believing that "the installation of a left-of-center government was a minimum condition for the propagation and pursuit of anarcho-syndicalist struggle and ideals.

In the wake of democratization, many community groups and leftists organizations were now left without the common enemy of military rule, leading some - including the Awareness League - to begin fragmenting.

During the End SARS protests of 2020, which called for the abolition of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, protestors set fire to police stations, government buildings and banks, while also releasing prisoners.

[42] President Muhammadu Buhari reacted to the movement by warning young Nigerians of anarchists that were allegedly attempting to hijack the protests[43] and stated that the federal government "would not tolerate anarchy in the country".