I had been distraught with deep sadness over what I thought was the unwarranted, self-denigrating, and counter-productive celebration of Russian flags by #EndBadGovernance protesters in the far North until someone called my attention to the fact that it is actually the flag of the Nigerian Armed Forces that protesters display—or intend to display— in their processions.
This makes sense because the protesters always chant “(mulkin) soja muke so,” which translates as “we want military rule,” as they wave the flags. It’s instructive that they never mention Russia. Why would they fly the flag of a country and not mention its name but instead sing the praises of the military?
The Nigerian Armed Forces flag has three colored stripes: red on the top, blue in the middle, and white on the bottom.
Since presidents are also commanders-in-chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces, they routinely fly the Nigerian military flag, along with the Nigerian national flag, when they deliver formal public addresses, as these photos of Muhammadu Buhari and Bola Ahmed Tinubu show.
The Russian flag’s tricolor scheme is similar to but slightly different from the Nigerian Armed Force’s flag. It is white on the top, blue in the middle, and red on the bottom. Red and white are transposed but the blue in the middle is common to both flags.
A grasping but illiterate tailor eager to cash in on the sudden popularity of the Nigerian Armed Force’s flag mixed up the positions of the colors and ended up unintentionally mass-producing Russian flags. I think he has been apprehended.
It’s also possible that this unintentional error birthed a new reality that meshed with Russia’s support for the military regimes in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso.
But it’s important to acknowledge that the flags symbolize a yearning for a return to military dictatorship, not the start of Russian colonialism.
The nostalgia for military rule isn’t limited to these northern protesters, unfortunately. In the aftermath of the 2023 election, for example, calls for a military coup trended on Twitter for days.
In moments of severe existential strife people tend to develop a kind of cognitive bias called rosy retrospection, which is the propensity for people to recall past times more romantically than they actually were as they recede into distant memories.
Military rule was horrific. Those of us who came of age during military absolutist monocracies will never support a return to military rule.
