Nigeria frees Polish students, lecturer after Kano protest

Six Polish students and a lecturer from Warsaw University have been released in Nigeria following their detention earlier this month at anti-government protests, the Foreign Ministry in Warsaw said on Wednesday.

The ministry’s spokesperson, Pawel Wronski, said their passports, laptops and belongings had been returned, that they were in good health, and that they were staying at the university campus in the northern city of Kano and would return to Poland this week.

“I would like to confirm that the young people are already free, back in Kano, on campus, with passports,” Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in a video posted online, showing him speaking to the representative of the young people’s parents on the phone.

When and why were they arrested?

The seven were in Kano as part of a program to study the Hausa language. They were detained earlier this month during a political protest. Nigeria’s secret service said on August 7 that they had been carrying Russian flags at the demonstration.

Officials in Poland, which has frosty relations with Russia following the Soviet era and other historical grievances, responded skeptically to this, saying it seemed unlikely and that they believed the situation was more likely a misunderstanding.

“Our students were at the wrong time at the wrong place,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Wronski said.

The seven had been held at a Kano hotel while Warsaw was actively seeking their release.

Widespread protests against economic situation and policy in Nigeria

Hundreds of thousands, many of them younger people like students, took to the streets over several days in a series of Nigerian cities this month. This followed months of building pressure, including major strikes that managed to secure a meager rise to the national minimum wage.

They were protesting inflation and other government economic policies from the relatively new President Bola Tinubu.

One of Tinubu’s first steps on taking office last May was to halt government subsidies on petroleum or gasoline — a move he says frees up billions for the government to spend in more productive areas like education and healthcare, but which trade unions argue hurt people on lower incomes and contributed to year-on-year inflation that was just over 34% in June.

Nigeria is a major oil producer and OPEC member.

Activists had originally called for “10 days of rage” around the country. The demonstrations petered out as the government intensified the security service response to them, and after Tinubu issued a public appeal for restraint.

Amnesty International says that at least 22 people died amid the unrest.

What’s the import of the Russian flag allegation?

Nigerian authorities reported several cases of protesters waving Russian flags during the demonstrations.

This claim comes as neighboring Niger as well as nearby Burkina Faso and Mali all suffered military takeovers in recent years, with their juntas rapidly severing ties with Western countries and reaching out to Russia.

Russian flags have become a common sight at demonstrations in support of these military governments.

Kano is in Nigeria’s majority-Muslim north, far closer to the border with Niger than the capital Abuja.

However, public sentiment towards Russia in Poland is notoriously negative. Having been under Moscow’s yoke during the Cold War, Warsaw was one of the former Soviet-run countries to most sharply distance itself from the Russian sphere of influence, subsequently joining both NATO and the EU.

Relations between the two reached a low point following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Russia is one of the very rare issues where Poland’s rival major political parties have more or less identical and rather hostile positions.

A Pew Research survey in 2022, a few months after the invasion of Ukraine, estimated that just 2% of people in Poland held a favorable opinion of Russia, the lowest figure for any of the 53 countries it surveyed.b