‘The government failed #EndSARS’, says lawyer and activist Moe Odele

It was the culmination of a round of peaceful protests against police brutality, mostly attended by young people.

On 20 October, the police and military shot and killed unarmed protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate and Alausa in Lagos. Four months, endless judiciary panels, empty promises and heavy threats later, neither the state nor the federal government has admitted any wrongdoing, or even acknowledged that state security forces killed innocent citizens.

During the October #EndSARS protests, young people gathered, in person and online, to put their skills, knowledge and expertise to work together to keep each other safe.

Lawyer Modupe ‘Moe’ Odele was one such person. Moe spoke to The Africa Report about her journey to becoming known as the “#EndSARS lawyer”. Below is a transcript with light editing for clarity.

The Africa Report: You describe yourself as a start-up lawyer, investor, creator of digital products, as well as a writer and personal development enthusiast. How did you become so varied in your professional life after training as a lawyer?

Moe Odele: I trained as a lawyer and started my career in Nigeria before moving to the US five years ago. While in Nigeria, I did a lot of pro bono work in the social justice space, particularly to do with human rights.

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The first time I used the internet to raise money for something was in 2013 – for the emergency created by the Boko Haram crisis in the north-east. For the first time, people were becoming conscious of internally displaced people (IDP) in Nigeria. People did not know there were so many displaced people in the north-east. In fact, the first time I tweeted about it, someone even asked me what the term ‘IDP’ meant.

I got involved through a friend of mine from Yola, Adamawa State. He told me that his last visit had left him stunned about how many people had lost their homes due to the crisis.

I was 21/22 at the time, and, without telling my parents, I travelled to Yola with my friend, a journalist, and a couple of human rights activists. We just wanted to go quietly, get pictures, interviews and basically put human faces on what was going on. We shared pictures on social media as we went along, and people started getting interested. We managed to raise about N5m ($13,100) to get a lot of supplies to the north-east.

After that, we still did another blanket drive, the ‘Yola blanket drive’ during harmattan. We managed to get over 3,000 blankets to get to the IDP camps. We also did ‘Santa goes to Yola’ – between 4,000 and 4,500 children for party packs from Lagos delivered to them. People that I knew only from social media came to my house to pack up the packages.

That was the first time I used social media to galvanise that kind of support from Nigeria and the diaspora. Now people come to me and ask me to lend my voice to projects they’re working on.

You started your career in the public service, working in the office of the governor of a state in south-western Nigeria. Can I ask which governor this was?

Right after my national youth service, I worked with the government in the state of Osun. I was there for one and a half years – it was meant to be just one year but my boss liked me and asked me to stay for a few more months.

I worked in the bureau of social services, and my job involved going around measuring the social impact of public projects.

How did you find the experience? Do you prefer public or private sector work? Why?

I don’t have a preference. People always ask if I would ever go into public service full time, and the answer is that I don’t know. Where I am right now in the private sector is where I believe…