The much anticipated White Paper by the Lagos State government was released last Wednesday, November 30, as promised by the Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Sanwo-Olu. Not many had expected, at least not me, anything else. Not with the show of shame by the Federal Government through the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, even before the due date of the release. This is a nation, especially under the present dispensation of the President Muhammadu Buhari, where denial and conceitedness are the hallmark of government functionaries.
A government that is living a lie, populated by blackmailers, who bullied and undermined the government of Goodluck Jonathan, yet they still insist in their arrogance of being right. What do they take Nigerians for? Brainless and foolish people who are permanently suffering from amnesia? How do you send soldiers to go and shoot at harmless citizens and still go on air on a daily basis trying to justify such unmitigated disaster? Where else does that happen other than a despotic leadership? Everybody in this government is trying to shove down our throat such an unpalatable, unacceptable and uncivilised approach to governance. Where a simple apology and acceptance of guilt would suffice, they simply want to cow everybody into submission.
There can only be one explanation why days before the release of the Lagos White Paper, the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, arranged a press conference and tore not just the panel’s report but also sought to question the integrity of the panelists. He sought every excuse and did not spare any derogatory words to impugn the character and intentions of the members.
In all of this, he did not tell us how it was right or justified for the Federal Government to send soldiers to shoot whether in the air or at protesters in a supposed democracy? He did not deem it fit to apologise to the nation for the Federal Government, through the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, who had lied that there were no Nigerian soldiers at the Lekki toll gate. He did not see anything wrong in soldiers shooting at Nigerian youths who were only clutching the national flag and chanting the national anthem. He did not see anything wrong with the soldiers, after first denying that they were not at the venue, lying again that no live rounds were fired at the venue.
Alhaji Mohammed did not see anything wrong with the hurried cleaning of the scene of the incident before the investigation started. He did not see anything wrong with the Lekki Concession Company tampering with the CCTV footage of the incident at the Toll gate. He did not see anything wrong with the Military Hospital, Awolowo Road Ikoyi, denying members of the panel investigating cases of police brutality access to its morgue when they went visiting in October 2020, after even initially denying them access to the premises and were locked out for about 30 minutes. But when eventually allowed in, nothing much was achieved as they were denied access to the morgue.
The Federal Government also did not see anything wrong with the Nigerian Army on three occasions when the hearing started, failing to honour the summons issued to its officers by the panel. And even when they eventually did they failed to present the officers involved in the shootings.
After Mohammed, came the Minister of State for Labour and Productivity, Mr. Festus Keyamo. For Keyamo, what mattered most were the constitution and the legality of the panel. He, in the usual arrogance that defines this regime, took his listeners around legal legalese and the escapist allusion to the fate of the unfortunate policemen who were killed during the protests, as though the Federal Government had ever cared a hoot about the wellbeing of policemen in the country. If they have ever bothered about the state of the policemen and the extra-judicial killings they have been accused of, what did the government do to address the issue? When the police were killing young men for wearing dreadlocks and harassing youths with computers, how did the Federal Government address the problem? Between then and now, what have they done or plan to do to give facelifts to the squalors called police barracks and poor pay of the police?
Kayemo conveniently chose to lie that at the point the soldiers were sent to Lekki, policemen were endangered and were being killed. That was telling a barefaced lie with a straight face. The protesters were non-violent until the government and their foot-soldiers attacked them. It was common sense that the policemen needed to disguise themselves at a time like that knowing that they were the main subject of the youths’ protests, but policemen were not killed and police stations and public properties wantonly destroyed until after the egregious Lekki shootings. He said that because the police had been overpowered that was why the Federal Government unleashed the soldiers. Another lie; no drunken group of youths would approach truckloads of fully armed policemen. The soldiers were deployed because under this government, protests of any kind would never be tolerated. They have been crushing such attempts with all the might they can muster.
Again, is it not an irony that a government that used protests as a tool to unseat the government of Jonathan, is now throwing soldiers at harmless youths for protesting against inhuman treatment against them? This hypocrisy is okay before Keyamo, a self-acclaimed human rights crusader and his garrulous colleague, Mohammed.
Keyamo and Mohammed both belong to a government that has stopped at nothing to muzzle freedom of speech and free press, yet they exploited, especially the latter, in scandalising Jonathan’s government on their way to the throne; used these same media in massively churning out their propaganda and acts of sabotage against the previous government. Again, for them these are attributes of noblemen so to speak against them remain sacrilegious.
Keyamo excitedly told his listeners that they had virtually pummeled Twitter and other social media platforms into submission. The very same social media they used to blackmail the previous government. But, I dare ask, were the so-called gains they exerted from Twitter impossible to attain without banning its operations in the country? Is their bruised ego worth more than the lives of lots of Nigerians whose means of livelihood they have truncated, and for which they do not owe any apology?
Of course, after expressing the position of the Federal Government, it was a given that Governor Sanwo-Olu had no choice but to cling to the Federal Government plot. It would be fool-hardly of any one to expect that the governor would have done otherwise.
Speaking to Lagosians on the White Paper, the governor simply disparaged the document and similarly dismissed the claims of the number of deaths. Where he did not dismiss the submission outright he escaped under the cover of relaying the submission and recommendations of the panel to the Federal Government; a federal government whose position on the matter was known and in the public space days before the White Paper was made public. Why set up a panel, when you cannot as much as call for the trial of any policeman or soldier for misdemeanor, according to Keyamo?
Governor Sanwo-Olu, in his bid to give the dog a bad name to hang it also painstakingly pinpointed typographic errors in the recommendation as though they detracted from the subject matter. The governor also thought inviting the aggrieved protesters for a walk was an offer they would jump at without a whimper. He was wrong. He should have done the right thing first; at least admit that the reaction of the government could have been handled better. APC, as opposition in 2012, occupied Ojota for days, not even a boys’ scout was sent to disperse them. No teargas was fired at them; they had their way because they were expressing their constitutionally-guaranteed right of freedom of nonviolent protest. So, what has changed?
The efforts of the federal and Lagos state governments were not different from that of the Jews in the Bible who were shopping for excuses to nail an innocent man. The report had to die and so whatever was needed to ensure that it died they desperately hung to and shopped for. What they failed to realise is that they have simply kicked the can further down the road; they would inevitably confront it in the future. An acceptance of error in the approach to what is a civil matter that borders on the human rights of Nigerians to express their misgivings in peaceful protest, would not be too much to begin with. Then an invitation for a march would make sense and not the reverse.
