The process of enemy construction from acts of protests resonates with the Copenhagen School of security studies’ notion of securitization. According to the Copenhagen School, all countries—liberal-democratic but also non-democracies—engage in the social construction of ‘enemies’ as threats and espouse the need to take urgent, often extraordinary, measures to deal with such threats. In the securitization process, there is an urgency attached to state action to deal with a matter that threatens its existence; a quickness and priority of action without which the state might find it too late to act and the room for its survival would have been lost. Usually, in the face of an imminent threat to survival—often due to but not limited to foreign powers—the government’s securitization of issues resonates with the population who endorse the government’s extraordinary measures for the security of a referent object that must survive. 

To make resonance possible, the government deploys the tool of strategic communication. This process entails enemy identification, name-calling, framing issues, making references to similar old or new threats, deploying fear and rumour-mongering, and outright propaganda to make securitization the viable option with regards to a threat, which in this instance would be protest; and the referent object could be what protest-as-a-threat endangers that also legitimizes the use of force against it and by extension protesters. When a state successfully securitizes a (perceived) threat, it activates this use of force, partly to deal with the threat and partly to enhance the defence and security of the referent object, even if the threat is only in the securitizing actor’s imagination. 

The peculiarity of securitization in Africa, however, is that while other liberal-democratic countries try to securitize by engaging the parliament and/or the larger population as its audience depending on the issue at hand, African rulers—rather than leaders as in autocratic regimes—often securitize within a kitchen cabinet. They rarely take the interests of the population into account while securitizing issues. This is not surprising because the population plays marginal or no role at all in the emergence of rulers in many African countries, including the ones laying claim to the practice of democracy and periodic elections. 

The net profiters of a successful securitization process are, therefore, the government officials and state security agencies who have the mandate to retain power and control society. Importantly, a successful act of securitization becomes a way of showing that the state is effective and strong. It becomes a tool for forcing and rationalizing the regime’s legitimacy where this legitimacy is either lacking or being questioned. Furthermore, it is the opportunity for state managers to (re)allocate state resources without adequate and proper scrutiny; be allowed unchecked state control and surveillance of society and population; possess unhindered and unfettered access to more political power, resources; and ultimately free rein in the manipulation and control of the population. In Africa where corruption is rife, securitization can thus become a tool for official sleaze. 

It is important to note the fact that the human condition is deteriorating at an alarming rate in many African countries. This has made dissenting protests in the midst of helplessness attractive to many people in Africa. In Ghana, the unbearable prices of essential commodities—especially food—triggered a series of protests in September 2023. The Kenyan government’s decision to increase taxes on commodities led to weeks of massive protests that lasted from June to July 2024. In August 2024, hikes in the price of food, fuel and basic facilities led to the #EndBadGovernance protests in Nigeria. All of these and other protests across Africa are peacefully organized. Despite the harsh economic conditions that the people face, they are confronted with the excessive lifestyle of their rulers who not only allocate jaw-dropping salaries and allowances to themselves but also enjoy ostentatious luxuries beyond the reaches of average politicians in other climes. African rulers are failing badly in meeting their most basic obligations and responsibilities to their population, and for the people the act of protest is used to question the continuity of the government’s inanities and insanity. 

However, these protests annoy state officials, and their response is the securitization of protests. After he withdrew the obnoxious tax-hike bill, President William Ruto accused the US philanthropic organization Ford Foundation of funding the protests in Kenya. He decried the protesters as being in the pockets of the Ford Foundation and causing ‘mayhem and violence’. Even though the accusations were misleading, they also explain the severity with which Kenyan security agencies cracked down on protesters. Owing to the state’s reaction, over 50 people were killed, while 59 people were abducted or missing, and more than 600 protesters were arbitrarily arrested and detained. Describing the protest in Ghana as ‘unlawful assembly’, the Ghanaian police physically assaulted the protesters, arresting and detaining not less than 50 people. In Nigeria, this securitization holds. More than 100 protesters were rounded up at the protest grounds or traced to their places of residence and picked up for what the government described as treasonable offences.