Social Protests and State Character Transformation in Nigeria: A Quasi-Experimental Assessment

Abstract Social protests have remained a critical aspect of the laws of motion of the Nigerian political economy even since pre-colonial times. However, despite their historical organization to induce structural changes in the Nigerian conjuncture, social protests appeared to have done very little in reconfiguring the fundamental character of the Nigerian state. Accordingly, this paper adopted the Social Movement Impact Theory in evaluating the intriguing nexus between social protests and state character transformation in Nigeria. After analyzing available secondary data on social protests in the country from a period spanning the Aba Women’s Riots of 1929 to the EndSARS protests of 2020, it discovered that the state’s historical reluctance to address protest demands in their entirety elicited an endless cycle of protestations on basically similar issues, with attendant human suffering, death and destruction of property. It further discovered that while social protests effaced certain aspects of state policy at superficial levels, the fundamental character of the Nigerian state vehemently remained the same. Consequently, it validated the null hypothesis that the preponderance of social protests in Nigeria has not fundamentally transformed the character of the Nigerian state. The Ex-post Facto Quasi Experimental Research Design was adopted for the study while its “pre-test-post-test” component represented as O1XO2 was used in its multi group form the to analyze each pre and post protest environment in a qualitative- descriptive manner to ascertain whether any of the selected major protests under study caused a radical transformation of the character of the Nigerian state. Data collection was qualitative. Keywords: Nigeria, Political Economy, Social Protests, State Character, Transformation.