The recent discovery of 103 bodies in Lagos State shreds the government’s claims about the number of casualties from the EndSARS protests of 2020.
In October 2020,an unprecedented wave of protests swept across Nigeria. What began as a ripple from one man’s death at the hands of the police in Sapele, Delta State, soon swelled into a tidal wave of protests calling for reforms and even a revolution.
At the vanguard of the protests which hit Lagos and then Abuja with the force of knots were young people, long converted to practice targets in the police game of brutality.
Their demands were simple: that the notorious Special Anti-robbery squad unit of the police force be scrapped and the police which they perceived to be corrupt reformed. There were also calls for the government to straighten its ways.
Coming four years into the administration of Muhammadu Buhari who had given Nigerians very little reason to cheer, the government was rattled.
The protests were especially vociferous in Lagos. It was there that the Nigerian authorities chose to send a clear message.
On October 20, 2020, while protesters gathered at the Lekki Toll Gate, peacefully chanting the Nigerian anthem and waving Nigerian flags, the Lekki Concession Company switched off the lights. That was when a combined team of soldiers and police swooped on the protesters with deadly force.
The outrage over the massacre was global. The piercing report of the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry set up may have put the number of the victims of the massacre at 9, but for a long,Nigerians suspected it was much higher.
Those suspicions now appear to have been confirmed.
With this discovery, the biggest question is whether any the Lagos State Government can be taken seriously on any further representation it makes on the killings that happened under it’s watch in 2020.
As usual,it has resorted to the now familiar game of naming and blaming.First,it said the bodies were not all from the Lekki Toll Gate before blaming the families of the dead for failing to claim their dead.
Since Nigeria returned to the pristine path of democracy in 1999, the country has faced grave challenges with the rule of law, especially in the aspect of accountability and respect for life and democratic institutions.
Until 2020, the lack of accountability was for economic and financial crimes. However, Africa’s most populous country must now also count her dead and account for them because despite a staggering population of 217 million people, more than half of whom live in suffocating poverty, no one can be left behind or out.
An ominous sign is that while non-state actors many of whom have proliferated all over the country remain elusive, state actors who are always in the faces of Nigerians continue to commit crimes against innocent Nigerians and go unpunished.
In a country where impunity reigns supreme, with punishment for crimes only reserved for the poor, it is not surprising.
While the whole country has been turned into a momentary morgue by the discovery of the bodies, the issues which underpinned the protests in 2020 have yet to be as fully and forcefully addressed as would befit a country where the memories of victims matter as much as the lives of those who survived them.
The Lagos State Government has failed to cover itself in glory. It vigorously contested the findings of the Justice Dorothy Okuwobi-led panel of Inquiry. In the build-up to the 2023 governorship election in the state, Sanwo-Olu again sought to trivialize the memories of the EndSARS victims through sophistry. It was a humiliating failure.
It is a question of public trust. The government may have shown courage in empaneling an inquiry, but it has shown little dignity in the way and manner it conducted itself when the panel report was released.
As for Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the question remains whether it was at his word that a combined team of killer soldiers and police men descended on innocent protesters who were only keen to air age-long grievances against a corrupt police force.
Now that the bodies have become public knowledge, the Lagos State government has blamed the victim’s families for abandoning them.
How much more callous can a state government be? A government that neither regards the living nor respect the dead is worse than no government at all.
Damages and compensation may have been doled out in the aftermath of the ENDSARS protests. But beyond peanuts offered to bolt the stable door long after the horse had escaped, there must be accountability in every state where a protester was killed in October 2020.
This accountability must begin from Lagos, the center of the mass atrocities committed against unarmed protesters whose only crime was protesting against corrupt security personnel.
Those who killed protesters, especially at the Lekki Toll Gate must be made to account for their sacrilegious attack on innocent Nigerian lives.
Unless this is done, the actions of parties like the Lagos State Government will continue to mock the dead and goad the living.
Ike Willie-Nwobu
