On June 12, 2026, thousands of workers, students, teachers and ordinary citizens turned Democracy Day into a day of mass anger against insecurity, hunger and government neglect. Coordinated demonstrations under the #EndBadGovernance and Take-It-Back banners hit Abuja, Lagos, Ibadan, Akwa Ibom, Kano, Kaduna, Edo, Bauchi, Port Harcourt and other states behind a single demand: ‘No Democracy Without Security’.
The protest could not have come at a more bitter moment. Since May 15, dozens of pupils, teachers and residents abducted from schools in Oyo and Borno states remain in captivity, Socialist Labour has already laid out in full in our call for their immediate rescue. Over a month later, they are still in the bush. Protesters’ placards carried it plainly: “Free All Captives Now.”
This is the measure of a government that places more value on its 2027 re-election machinery than on the lives of working people’s children. Safety of life and property is supposed to be the first duty of any state. Under Tinubu, it has become an afterthought dressed up in budget figures.
But insecurity was not the only grievance on the streets. Nigeria’s official minimum wage of N70,000 a month is now worth barely $42 among the lowest wage floors in the world, while food inflation climbed back above 16 percent in April, the first rise in nearly a year, reversing months of modest relief. The Nigeria Labour Congress has already rejected the governors’ offer of N100,000 as a new minimum, insisting it does not begin to cover what a family needs to eat, transport itself and survive each month. It is this daily arithmetic of hunger that pushed protesters to march under banners reading “Reverse All Anti-People Policies,” “Demand a Living Wage and Jobs” and “End Hunger.”
The state’s answer to peaceful dissent was tear gas. In Abuja, police fired canisters at marchers heading towards Eagle Square, no such repression was recorded in Lagos or other cities. There, instead, the government deployed a different weapon: paid crowds, bussed in to counter-protest under slogans like “Let Tinubu Work.” That the regime could find people desperate enough to rent out their voices for a few thousand naira is not a sign of genuine support, it is proof of the very hunger and joblessness the protest was against. A population with secure wages and real prospects does not need to be paid to defend its rulers.
June 12 showed that the appetite for struggle is alive. The task now is to turn scattered anger into sustained organisation, linking the fight for security to the fight for a living wage, jobs and a workers’ government that treats human life, not elections, as its first priority.
Download our full Socialist Bulletin for JuLY 2026 with the link below:
https://socialistlabour.com.ng/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/SL-bulletin-JULY-2026.pdf