A Law and Politics Contextualization of Corporate Activism in Nigeria’s 2020 Anti-Police Brutality Campaign

Corporate activism – the progressive pursuit of social justice causes by corporations – is a growing global phenomenon. There are increasing expectations and, in many cases, demands that corporations pull off their gloves to actively confront sociopolitical issues bedevilling their communities. Emerging scholarship suggests that corporate activism is influenced by various factors, including the ethical, political, and commercial orientations of corporate minds and the relative political and legal landscape within which corporations operate. Adopting a qualitative research mechanism that reflects on open-source information about relevant actors, collected from blogs, Twitter, and news sites, as complemented by a broad variety of secondary sources, this interdisciplinary research explores the theoretical suppositions of corporate activism in the light of corporate intervention in Nigeria’s youth-led nationwide anti-police brutality (#EndSARS) protests of October 2020. The analysis highlights how Nigeria’s legal, political, and socioeconomic dynamics factored into the dimensions of corporate activism in that momentous social justice agitation. As a key finding, the paper observes a relatively greater tendency of tech companies to engage in the Nigerian anti-police brutality movement than firms from other sectors, and attributes this relative involvement to the seemingly greater levels of representation of young tech industry employees as victims of police brutality. This tends to ground a crucial supposition in corporate activism theory: that corporations would more likely engage social issues that affect their business.