WAS I the only one in Nigeria and especially in Lagos State who noticed there was no ‘memorial’ ceremony this year in commemoration of the famous(or should one say infamous) Lekki Toll Gate Massacre of 20 October, 2020, that was supposed to have held last month, precisely on October 20?
Unlike three years ago when organisers of the massacre were all fired up and ready to re enact the 2020 event, not even did anybody remember that about 78 young Nigerians were ‘killed’ in cold blood by the Nigeria military during the #ENDSARS riots, sorry, protests, at the Lagos arm held at the Lekki Toll Gate, Victoria Island, Lagos. There was no conversation on Social Media this year and the die-hard advocates of the ‘massacre’ did not plan anything. Well, that was perhaps why Omoyele Sowore, the man who appears to have taken protests as a permanent vocation, decided to cash in on the open window to stage his #FreeNnamdiKanu protests in Lagos and Abuja. That was a smart move. If the Lekki toll gate massacre was still on fire, Sowore would not have put his own protest on the same date.
Let it be on record that some of us never believed a massacre took place on October 20, 2020. This position was at the risk of being labelled ‘haters of Nigeria progress’, ‘insensitive and wicked parents with no drop of sympathy for human lives’, for some political and ethnic reasons…I take all labels in good faith but that does not change the facts on the ground that a massacre happened that early evening.
If Nigeria was a serious country, the petit Disc Jockey, DJ Switch, who lit the fire that nearly consumed the entire country, with that evil lie, should be doing time in prison as you read this piece, five years after. But she turned into an overnight ‘superhero’ after she claimed she helped the soldiers deployed to disperse the crowd at the toll gate after a curfew was declared by the Lagos government, carry 78 bodies of young protesters into the army van! The body count consequently whittled down to 48, then 12 and as at the last time the massacre was discussed publicly, it was eight bodies. From 78 people to eight, that was a remarkable reduction in number after DJ Switch’s tweet on X(then Twitter) put Nigeria in the eyes of the storm worldwide.
Instead of joining millions of Nigerians to buy into the massacre tales by moonlight, some of us decided to jettison fleeting emotions and rationally interrogate the issue. 78 bodies? A pint size girl like D J Switch cannot lift the dead body of an adult male or female, just one, and here we were, she was claiming she helped to carry several bodies and in the midst of the graphically described incident, with soldiers firing live rounds, she was calm enough to count the bodies and arrived at 78! She still had her phone intact with her and she went online to make that very incendiary tweet that set the entire country ablaze. D J Switch must have had some form of military training, perhaps with the U S marines, and that was why she could have that kind of composure to do what she claimed she did on that unfortunate night. A well trained soldier will take cover on hearing the sound of a gun shot, but not a DJ Switch. If you had witnessed or watched an ‘ordinary’ riot where anti riots policemen are dispersing an unruly crowd with rubber bullets, stun grenades, water cannons and teargas, you will understand that the rioters don’t stand, they are always on the run. But not a D J Switch. She stood up to over 20 soldiers firing live rounds and even helped them load the bodies of the dead into their vans, 78 in number! She is not an ordinary DJ, she is a superwoman!
Nigeria burned for days after that Lekki toll gate incident. For different reasons, many believed that cheap lie by DJ Switch. Yes, it was a cheap lie and if she has any thread of conscience in her body, she should come out and apologise to Nigerians and the world over that dangerous lie. Even when some of us tried to jolt people back to reality that if truly there was a massacre, the identity of the massacred should not be a mystery, we were told the families of the slain were afraid of coming to the public to declare their loved ones missing at the Lekki toll gate because they were scared of the Nigeria military’s vengeful actions against them! Really? That became the answer as to why the identity of the 78 people D J Switch helped soldiers to carry into their vans became a mystery even as laughable as the spin was(perhaps still is).
I grew up in the village. Every other night, I witnessed women and men go from street to street announcing their missing domestic animals even as small as chickens. You feel the grave concern in their voices as they go about looking for the animal that has gone past its time of coming back home to roost. That is an animal o. So, tell me, what will scare a real parent(s) from climbing the highest mountain to scream if their son or daughter who told them they were going to Lekki toll gate to join the protest did not return and may never return because some soldiers came and killed 78 or 12 or even eight of them? In this era of the internet where you can scream to the world from even under your bed in your small rusty village, a parent would be afraid of military authorities and leave the matter of his child’s mysterious disappearance to ‘God’ just like that!
Former Information Minister in that government, Alhaji Lai Mohamed was visibly furious in one of his many press conferences addressing the massacre issue when he challenged any parent who believed he lost a child at Lekki toll gate to come out adding that any parent who refused to come out is not a REAL parent. Of course, the mob brushed Lai Mohamed’s words aside. They did that to him in all his eight years in government and even changed his first name to ‘Liar’. So, most times on Social Media, he was referred to as ‘Liar’ Mohamed. The import of his message was lost because it came from ‘Liar’ Mohamed.
The Lagos state government did not sit down and rest. The heat was on the Governor, Mr. Babajide Sanwo Olu. Preliminary investigations showed that two people died that night at the Lekki toll gate and they did not die from gunshot wounds by the military. Hospital records showed they died from blunt force trauma as a result of the stampede when the soldiers appeared and were firing live rounds. Nobody believed Sanwo Olu. The spin changed from ‘why did the soldiers fire live rounds’? Yes, why did the soldiers fire live rounds at unarmed protesters? Unofficial Military authorities sources said it was standard practice to disperse crowds in some cases and these shots are fired professionally to avoid casualties. Whoosai! The red eyed mob will not take that.
Sanwo Olu went further to inaugurate a panel of inquiry on the #ENDSARS riots with special focus on the Lekki toll gate massacre. Again, no parent(s) showed up to say he lost a child at the toll gate that night. I think that was when the official number of deaths by DJ Switch came down to eight, from 78. And in that eight, two names or so were written twice. For weeks, even among the names brought to the panel by the advocates of the massacre, no relatives or friends of the deceased showed up. Guess they were still afraid of the actions of the military.
There were deaths recorded across Lagos on the night of 20 October, 2020. The angry blood baying mob was busy looting, burning and killing policemen and in return, the police were also taking their pound of flesh. But all attempts to link what happened across Lagos to a Lekki toll gate massacre have failed baldly.
The BBC special report on the incident punctured more holes in the massacre claim. And since then, the #ENDSARS mob has never liked the BBC. We should be thanking God that the incident did not happen now, it would have been heaped among other ‘evidence’ on American president, Donald Trump’s desk as part of the phantom Christian GENOCIDE currently going on in Nigeria.
One has this feeling that deep in the minds of the people who weaved the spin, they have now realised that no massacre took place. The struggle to publicly admit they were misled is the issue at the moment. So, like a typical Nigerian, he should double down and stick to his earlier stand. The Lekki toll gate massacre should go down in history as a massacre that had no identifiable victims. And when you point this out to the proponents of that bizarre incident, the familiar retort is ‘may what happened at Lekki toll gate happen to you or your family member’. What a cheap emotional blackmail!
And why are some of us happy that the Lekki toll gate massacre narrative has been laid to rest in peace permanently? Some celebrities and wannabe celebrities who wanted to use it as springboard to fame and or shore up their waning popularity may have achieved their aims. A particular skit maker, for two years, after the ‘massacre’, took it like a 9-5 job. While one would say he had achieved some degree of fame before the incident, the ‘massacre’ indeed sprang him further up the ladder and he instantly became the hero of the present young generation of Nigerians that claim to want regime change via social media and not through electoral processes. He was credited to have said that he read it up somewhere that consistent protests for a month was all the United Nations needed to come and oust the government of late president Muhammadu Buhari. As ridiculous and idiotic that social media statement was, it was swallowed and regurgitated in reposts on X by majority of this generation that know nothing more than sitting and sleeping on X spewing and swallowing trash. Intelligence is now measured by how long you can stay on social media posting and commenting on trashy stuff. They call it ‘dragging’ and ‘cruise’. And so, even when the then presidency of Buhari invited them for a negotiation after disbanding the dreaded and corrupt Special Anti Robbery Squad, SARS, it’s activities which sparked the protest tagged #ENDSARS, they refused because at that point, #ENDSARS had metamorphosed into #ENDBUHARIGOVERMENT. This is not forgetting that they were also relying on the strength of the statement made by that skit maker that said a month’s ceaseless protest was a direct invitation to the UN to come and remove a democratically elected president in Africa!
It is important to state at this point that if the organisers of the #ENDSARS did not deviate from the set course of ending SARS, by now the much touted police reforms that has been a sing song for decades, would have happened by now.
The protest failed and even though SARS was disbanded, the present crop of the Nigeria Police Force are more brazen and corrupt than SARS. In fact, SARS has metamorphosed into several outfits in the force, more brazen, more daring and more corrupt. By the way, were they all not former members of SARS abi government go heaven go bring new set of policemen come? There is a unit in the police force that is tormenting Lagosians at the moment. It goes by the name IG Special Squad. The unit has its operational base around 2nd Rainbow in the FESTAC area of the city. Like SARS, the IG Special Squad operatives go about in unmarked commercial buses otherwise called ‘Korope’. Aside the black jackets with an undistinguished insignia, they look everything like armed robbers and if the devil wants to punish you, just be unlucky to be at a Lounge to watch a Chelsea Vs Arsenal game the day they will visit in what they call ‘raiding’. Four younger friends were unlucky to be at a snooker bar on Eric Moore, Surulere, Lagos around 9pm that ‘un’ fateful day earlier this year, when the IG squad paid an unscheduled visit. Over 30 of them, young men and women, were hounded into several buses to their 2nd Rainbow base. “Bros, before anything, our phones had been taken before we were squeezed into the buses. When we got there, we were made to sit on the floor and a sack of what the police said was Indian Hemp was brought out and placed in our front. We were photographed with the sack and videotaped too. I have never smoked ‘igbo'(hemp) all my life, I don’t sell either. Later, one officer came and said if we don’t want to be paraded at police Headquarters and shown on TV as drug dealers, we should pay 50,000 each. We were four that went together, we had to ask for our phones, pooled resources together and transferred the 200, 000 to a POS account they gave us. All this took over five hours. We were released around 5am the next day,” one of the four narrated to me.
Now, ponder on this, 50,000 naira times 30 people, do your maths. And that was just one raid. Several raids took place that night and other nights. So, when you see policemen building mansions and driving expensive cars, you should know the source of their ‘wealth’.
If the #ENDSARS protest was not bungled, the rot in the police force would by now have been reduced to a minimal level. But no, the youths wanted something else. And they got a Lekki toll gate massacre.
The good news here is, the Lekki toll gate massacre is now resting in peace.
Akpovi-Esade is a journalist and media lobbyist
