#JusticeForOchanya Nigeria’s Soro Soke Generation is Still Speaking Up

HBS | Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung contributes with “Gen Z: Voices of a Global Generation,” accessible at https://www.boell.de/en/gen-z-voices-global-generation, a series of analytical papers that look at contemporary youth political agency across diverse political and geographic contexts. Taken together, these contributions move beyond descriptive accounts of youth protest to interrogate how Gen Z–driven mobilisation is reshaping repertoires of resistance, democratic claims-making, and state–society relations, particularly in contexts marked by institutional fragility, shrinking civic space, and contested legitimacy.

Across the selected papers, youth political engagement emerges not as episodic or symbolic participation, but as a structurally embedded form of political action shaped by digital infrastructures, intergenerational solidarities, and lived experiences of exclusion and precarity. At the same time, the papers collectively highlight a persistent tension between the intensity of mobilisation and the durability of political transformation, raising questions about how far digitally enabled, decentralised movements can translate visibility and disruption into sustained institutional reform.

Development specialist Emitomo Oluwatobiloba Yetunde (Nimisire)’s paper, “#JusticeForOchanya Nigeria’s Soro Soke Generation is Still Speaking Up,” covers intergenerational feminist mobilisation in Nigeria through the #JusticeForOchanya movement. It demonstrates how decentralised digital activism - rooted in cultural translation, emotional resilience, and intergenerational solidarity - can generate sustained public pressure and policy attention, while also exposing the structural limits of legal responsiveness, resource constraints, and activist burnout.