Let the poor breathe! Poverty and anti-government protests in Nigeria

Despite the rising incidence of poverty in Nigeria and the increasing frequency of anti-government protests driven by citizens’ inability to meet their basic food needs, there remains a notable gap in research exploring the link between poverty and protest participation in Nigeria. Drawing on the human needs theory and survey data from Afrobarometer, this study investigates how poverty—both at the individual and communal levels—relates to Nigerians’ willingness to participate in anti-government protests. Individual-level poverty is assessed using an index capturing the frequency with which respondents and their household members lacked access to necessities such as food, water, cooking fuel, medicine, and income over the past year. Communal wealth is measured by the mean annual nighttime light intensity within a 30 km radius of respondents’ dwellings. Regression analysis reveals that higher scores on the lived poverty index increase the likelihood of Nigerians having protested in the previous year. They also increase their willingness to participate in future protests, and reduce their likelihood of choosing not to protest. Likewise, greater nighttime light intensity decreases individuals’ likelihood of having been involved in past protests, reduces their willingness to participate in future protests, and increases their likelihood of opting not to protest. These results are robust across different operationalizations of protest and to the use of individual survey data covering 36 African countries.