Nigeria’s secret police on Wednesday detained a youth leader organising a protest over a government proposal to remove fuel subsidies, which would result in higher pump prices, his organisation said.
The head of the National Youth Council of Nigeria, Wale Ajani, was asked to report to secret police in the capital Abuja on Wednesday.
He showed up as planned at 11:30 am and still had not been released as of 7:00 pm, said Olayemi Success, a programme officer with the organisation.
“We sent our lawyer there,” he said. “They told our lawyer that they are investigating him, that they have a report on him that the opposition is using him against the government.”
A spokeswoman for the secret police, known as the Department of State Services, could not be reached.
Success said “their calculation is if they arrest him, the Nigerian youth will back out from the protest, but they are very wrong.”
Ajani’s group had been planning a one-day protest and hunger strike for Friday over government plans to remove the subsidy in Africa’s largest oil producer and most populous nation.
The subsidy is designed in part to hold pump prices at 65 naira per litre ($0.40, 0.30 euros).
Many Nigerians, most of whom earn less than $2 per day, view it as the only benefit they receive from their country’s oil wealth, much of which has been squandered through corruption and mismanagement.
Government officials and many economists argue that the billions of dollars being spent on the subsidy each year goes to a corrupt few, and that money saved could be used for infrastructure development or other important programmes.
Nov102011