Let’s continue to stand up to governments and fight attempts to muzzle dissenting voices.
©Osai Ojigho
Amnesty International Nigeria Director
30th March, 2022 –
We’re in this together.” “We’ll build back better.” “There’ll be a global reset.”
In 2021 slick slogans were the mantra, promises were dangled in front of our eyes. Still our governments picked policies and pursued paths that took more of us further away from dignity and human rights. As I write to you today, it transpires that the slogans meant little, the promises were not to be kept. More people were failed, in more places, more often.
While vaccines provided hope for an eventual end to the pandemic, wealthy states, alongside corporate titans put power and profit over people. Instead, they undercut vaccine successes, driving deeper inequality with the marginalized, hit hardest by already crumbling health and economic systems.
Governments continued to suppress independent and critical voices, with some even using the pandemic as a pretext to further shrink civic spaces, redoubling repressive measures, ramping up arrests and harassing individuals; and unduly dispersing peaceful protests – some with fatal consequences. One mustn’t forget our efforts in Nigeria to #EndSARS!
From Mali to Ethiopia and so many other countries around the world – even at home in Nigeria – tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers were forced to leave their homes, most remaining in camps for years, such as those in Kenya and Uganda.
But we must build on the persistent resistance of people’s movements around the world and in our own country.
