I recall how I expressed reservations about many of the protests that happened under President Buhari, not because protest itself is illegitimate, but because in a fragile polity every street action can provide fertile ground for anarchy, chaos and the very insecurity we claim to be protesting against. I was vindicated by how many of them eventually went wrong.
While peaceful protest is lawful, the word peaceful is often more imaginary than real. A protest can be conceived as peaceful, intended as peaceful and even started as peaceful, but total control never depends on the organizers alone. The crowd has its own psychology. That is why the right to protest, as the courts have consistently held, is not absolute when weighed against the right of others to protection and national security.
The EndSARS protest remains a stark reminder. What began as a principled demand against police brutality ended in loss of lives, burning of court houses, police stations and businesses. More recently, the death of 37 miners in Minna, Niger State, ignited a justified anger that quickly turned counterproductive.
Youths in Minna attacked government properties, including commercial buses of the Niger State Transport Authority (NSTA). Those buses do not belong to the governor and his family are unlikely to ever use them; it is ordinary people who patronize them. The protest led to a curfew that added hardship on petty traders, okada riders and market women who need free movement to eat and earn a living.
How does destroying the little assets government has reduce the poverty we complain about? It is always easier to destroy than to build. The Arab Spring, which consumed many countries, started with positive motives but escalated because prevention was ignored in favour of symptomatic treatment. Conflict, as Lewis Coser warned, has its own escalation ladder.
Yet there is a more insidious problem with the incitement that so-and-so must go. It is built on compulsion, threat and coercion that does not recognize the right of others or the legitimacy of process. It is not different in tone from calling for a coup, and it inevitably suggests its twin, that so-and-so must win, depending on who is shouting. Both are against civility and democratic conduct. Does it mean election is no longer necessary and that the grievance of one group is so legitimate that it overrides dissent?
The truth is that relative peace remains our biggest treasure. We should not allow it to slip away in a moment of negative emotions and wilderness. There is no candidate without supporters, and saying that so-and-so must go will inspire resistance from those supporters and only produce anarchy.
I did not support volatile protests under Buhari and I will not support it now under Tinubu, because it is not about Buhari, Tinubu or anyone. It is about emotional intelligence which teaches self-preservation as the first law of nature. If you believe your target is your enemy, you must be careful about the pit you dig, because you may not escape its threat.
That brings us to what happened on September 25, 2026, at West End Roundabout in Maiduguri, where police picked up five men wearing T-shirts with the inscription Tinubu Must Go.The police accused them of conspiracy to print the shirts with intent to cause breach of public peace and charged them under Sections 60, 78, 79 and 392 of the Borno State Penal Code for criminal conspiracy, incitement, conduct capable of disrupting public peace and thuggery. They were arraigned before Chief Magistrate Court I, pleaded not guilty, and were remanded with bail ruling fixed for October 6 and trial for October 26.
The story immediately split into two conflicting narratives. The Borno police spokesman, ASP Nahum Kenneth Daso, said the arrest was not about politics. According to him, during routine patrol the men were involved in conduct capable of causing disturbance and were found with fifteen wraps of dried leaves suspected to be Indian hemp, one hundred tablets suspected to be D5, a shisha pot, scissors and two T-shirts. The case, he said, was charged to allow the court to decide.
On the other side, Amnesty International condemned the arrest as a clampdown on freedom of expression, the Borno chairman of ADC, Kolo Bukar, said four of those arrested were his members and that the police account was false, and Atiku Abubakar, now ADC presidential candidate, demanded their immediate release, saying Tinubu Must Go is a demand for political change, not a weapon, and recalling that Tinubu himself led the 2012 fuel subsidy protests against Jonathan.
Some online reports even alleged the arrest followed a directive from Governor Zulum to the Commissioner of Police after Zulum returned from the US and launched APC mobilization for Tinubu, a claim police has not confirmed.
For those who support the arrest, the argument is that must go is not a campaign but incitement, especially in Borno, a state that has fought Boko Haram for fifteen years where any mobilization around West End could snowball, that the law punishes manner and intent not opinion, and that ADC is weaponizing a criminal case by reducing it to T-shirts when drugs were found.
For those against, the argument is that Sections 39 and 40 of the 1999 Constitution protect political expression, that if Jonathan Must Go in 2014 and Buhari Must Go in 2021 were tolerated, selective enforcement now is political, that adding drugs and scissors looks like a classic add-on charge to justify detention, and that the chilling effect is real. If five boys can be remanded for a shirt in Maiduguri, what happens to voters in 2027?
The legality and the legitimacy must be separated. Legally, must go in a democracy is not treason. Nigerian courts have repeatedly held that advocating that a leader must go through the ballot is protected speech. Arresting purely for a slogan therefore violates democratic culture and contradicts the moral history of the ruling party itself which rose through protest.
But there is also a profound political communication problem with both must go and must win, and this is where Robert Entman’s framing theory is useful. To frame a contest as must go is to delegitimize the opponent’s right to even contest. To frame it as must win at all cost or no vacancy in Aso Rock is to delegitimize the challenger’s right to compete. Both remove choice from democracy.
Democracy is not you must go or you must win, it is you may be voted out or you may win if voters choose you. Henri Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory helps us understand the affective polarization that follows. When you chant must go, you are no longer attacking policy, you are attacking personhood, and supporters interpret criticism as an attack on group honour. That is how a song in Gombe moved from politics to religion and provoked hostile resistance.
There is also what scholars call the incitement ladder. Must go is provocative because it is ambiguous. Does it mean must go through the ballot in 2027 or must go now through the street? In a fragile state, security agencies always interpret it with the worst-case lens and invoke public peace laws, as Borno police did.
Research in political psychology shows imperative slogans activate anger and disgust circuits more than hope, triggering fear in incumbents and triumphalism in opposition, emotions that make post-election reconciliation harder.
That is why the healthiest democratic formulation is neither Tinubu must go nor Tinubu must win as an unquestionable command. It is let Nigerians decide freely, peacefully and lawfully. That principle protects the person wearing Tinubu Must Go and the person wearing Tinubu Must Win while leaving the final decision where the constitution puts it, with the electorate.
If must go is considered legitimate political expression, then logically the opposing expression, must win, should also be permitted, provided both remain within the law. A democracy cannot reasonably say you are free to advocate removal of my preferred candidate but I am entitled to use state power to suppress you, nor should the opposite side say because opponents have the right to protest, we have the right to prevent them from expressing support for the incumbent. The principle has to apply even when the message is unpleasant. That is one of the difficult tests of freedom of expression.
The deeper danger is the normalization of political intolerance. Today it could be Tinubu must go, tomorrow Governor X must go, next Senator Y must go, and eventually ordinary criticism begins to be treated as a security problem. But the reverse danger is equally real. If every inflammatory slogan is automatically described as freedom of expression regardless of accompanying conduct, political actors could deliberately provoke confrontations and then claim constitutional protection.
A mature democracy therefore needs both principles simultaneously, maximum room for peaceful disagreement and firm enforcement against genuinely unlawful conduct, neither destroying the other. We should be cautious about describing this incident simply as government repression or legitimate police action.
The right to oppose a sitting president and advocate his electoral defeat is essential, but whether these particular five men committed the offences they are charged with is a separate factual question that should be determined from evidence, not from their slogan or our political loyalties.
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Bagudu Mohammed is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
