The story of Segun Okeowo, whose protest against a 50-kobo hostel fee hike led to the deaths of multiple students

In April 1978, Segun Okeowo was a 29-year-old University of Lagos student and president of the National Union of Nigerian Students. He was about to lead one of the biggest confrontations between students and a military government in Nigeria's history, and it started over 50 kobo.

The Nigerian Universities Commission had raised hostel and meal fees for students. The increase was small in naira terms, but students across the country saw it as one more sign of a government out of touch with their reality. 

NUNS, under Okeowo's leadership, called for a nationwide boycott of lectures beginning Monday, 17 April 1978. Students at the University of Lagos, University of Ibadan, University of Ife, University of Benin, University of Calabar, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, University of Nigeria Nsukka, Bayero University Kano and others joined in. The first day passed without incident.

On Tuesday, 18 April, UNILAG students planned a peaceful march to deliver a letter of protest to General Olusegun Obasanjo at Dodan Barracks. When they got to the main gate, they found it blocked by armed police officers. 

What followed was a clash between unarmed students and police, first at the gate, then in the surrounding streets, then in Yaba itself. People outside the university were caught up in it too. State broadcasters did not report what happened that day.

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By Wednesday, 19 April, newspapers had picked up the story of what happened at UNILAG. Once students on other campuses read it, the boycott turned into open unrest nationwide. Okeowo, still coordinating from Lagos, was now leading a movement that had grown far beyond a fee complaint.

On Thursday, 20 April, the situation reached Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. This time it was soldiers, not police, who moved onto the campus. They were not responding to any actual uprising there. Witnesses at the time said the soldiers were trying to prevent one before it started. By the time the shooting stopped, five ABU students were dead.

Two attacks in two cities within 48 hours turned the protest into something bigger than Okeowo or NUNS had planned. What had started as a lecture boycott became a nationwide uprising, spreading beyond students to the wider public in university towns. 

People began chanting "Ali Must Go," aimed at the Federal Commissioner for Education, Colonel Ahmadu Ali. Ali denied responsibility for the fee increase and said the decision came from the Supreme Military Council, not his ministry. Years earlier, before he became a soldier and a government minister, Ali had himself been a NUNS leader.

The military government shut down universities across the country and imposed curfews. NUNS was banned. Okeowo was expelled from the University of Lagos. He was later arrested and held in detention over his role in the protests.

The fee increase was never reversed. Okeowo eventually returned to a quiet life as an educationist, away from public attention, until his death in January 2014.

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But "Ali Must Go" showed that Nigerian students could organise across the entire country at once and force a military government to pay attention, even if it didn't get everything it demanded. 

Historians studying Nigeria's protest movements have pointed to it as an early example of the kind of coordinated, nationwide youth action that resurfaced decades later during the #EndSARS protests in 2020.