Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Independence of the judiciary from executive and legislative encroachment. Specifically captures court-packing, selective prosecution, judicial reshuffles.
Two weeks of youth-led protests October 2020 against the Special Anti- Robbery Squad (SARS), a federal police unit accused of extrajudicial killings and extortion. SARS was nominally disbanded on 11 October 2020. Protests culminated on the evening of 20 October 2020 when Nigerian Army personnel opened fire on protesters at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos; Lagos Judicial Panel of Inquiry (2021) concluded at least 9 deaths and characterised the event as a massacre. The episode is the defining civic-trust rupture of the Buhari civilian era and a direct antecedent of the 2024 #EndBadGovernance mobilisation.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.