More than a year after the #EndSARS protest culminated in the infamous Black Tuesday, a Lagos panel of inquiry has officially confirmed what we knew all along. On Monday, the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry on Restitution for Victims of SARS Related Abuses and Other Matters (Lagos #EndSARS Panel) reported that what took place at the Lekki tollgate on October 20, 2020 night was indeed a “massacre.” In a 309-page report compiled after a year of inquiry, the Justice Doris Okuwobi-led panel indicted security agents in the untoward events where unarmed protesters were “shot at, assaulted and battered,” leading to both “injuries and deaths.”
We will never know the actual number of the victims, but we can at least exhale. The assault on poor Nigerians who just wanted better for themselves and their country has been, to some extent, formally acknowledged. Imagine the trauma of having to confront the perpetual deniers of the killings that night if there had been no formal inquest.
Since that night, we have not only had to deal with the agony of ‘Black Tuesday’, but we have also had to infuriatingly battle the people who insisted that nothing happened at the tollgate. Chief of the tribe of deniers has, of course, been Dis-Information Minister Lai Mohammed, who serially swore that it was all a scam. Nigeria has had its share of Joseph Goebbels, but none of them is like Lai Mohammed. The man not only lacks awareness of his crassness, but he is also importunately unashamed of his excesses. No depth is ever low enough that he would be incommoded from lowering the bar of perfidy even further.
Until last month, on the anniversary of Black Tuesday, Mohammed still doubled down on his denials by asking both CNN and Amnesty International to apologise for misleading Nigerians over a “phantom” massacre. The ultimate gaslighter that he is, Mohammed acted so defiantly while claiming that nobody was killed that night. When CNN produced a report that showed that the Nigerian Army fired live bullets at protesters, Mohammed went bonkers. Anyone who does not know his priors as a father of lies would be tempted to think he stood on sure grounds of truth and integrity when he brazenly threatened sanctions against CNN.
His foot soldiers too, littered all over the space, echoed him by claiming that nobody died that night because those who had alleged a massacre had neither dead bodies nor names of the deceased to present as “hard” evidence. Even after several Nigerian publications had documented the killings, compiled victims’ names, and even interviewed their families, they were still unsatisfied and demanded even more evidence. It would be a mistake to imagine that feeding their eyes with the perverse sight of bodies riddled with bullets would have satisfied these doubting Thomases. These are not people looking for a body of evidence; they just want to argue.
None of these is to dispute the necessity of raising questions and demanding objective evidence. As a society, we definitely need an attitude of healthy cynicism. Besides, the human tendency towards denialism is universal. Some phenomena can impress the mind so intensely that the only way to process its force is to deny its very possibility. We saw that all through last year. The novelty of a world-changing event like the COVID 19 pandemic bred not only fear and uncertainty but also scepticism. Out there in the world, there are still people who deny the Holocaust ever happened despite the amount of historical documentation available. Nothing – not even the detailed evidence survivors supplied – has been enough to convince them that some humans went through such horror. In 2014, when the Chibok schoolgirls’ abduction happened, some people also insisted it was a scam. Blinded by their partisan instincts, those ones too remained unconvinced even presented with the names and photos of those young women abducted in their school. No evidence, no matter how objective or painstakingly collated, will ever be enough to change the minds of those who choose not to believe.
What is different in the case of Black Tuesday is that every single contender knew that those killings could very well have happened. Unlike a pandemic or Holocaust or even the Chibok abduction that was unthinkable when it happened, the brutality of Nigerian security agents is habitual.
We were in this country six years ago when the same soldiers mowed down Shiites in Kaduna. And what was their offense? The Shiites were holding a religious ceremony and obstructed the convoy of then Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Yusuf Buratai. The unspeakable horror of their cruelty was officially confirmed when, in 2016, a panel of inquiry set up by the state government indicted the army. Those soldiers not only killed 347 people in the most brutal circumstances, but they also mass-buried them in a grave somewhere. If they could do that to a set of people including harmless women and children, what makes the protesters at Lekki so special that Nigerian soldiers would not attack them with live bullets?
Nothing has confirmed the truth of the extreme cruelty of Nigerian security forces—the whole point of the #EndSARS protests—than Black Tuesday. Those still searching for “evidence” of what truly happened know within themselves that they are not taking such a stand in the service of a higher ideal. They just want to deflect from the painful reality that Nigerian lives do not matter. They know within their hearts that such violence was probable but chose to tramp through the path of outright denial. Their partisan interests have seared their sense of fellow feeling.
The point of their denial was never about substantiating the report of the incident with hard evidence. It was about waiving accountability. To confront hard truths would be to concede the rottenness in the polity, and so they deflect from issues. That is why someone like Lai Mohammed would double down on his denials of what happened at Lekki only to highlight the number of security agents also killed during the protests. We know him well enough to know that he did not bring up the deaths of those security agents because he cared about their fate. He just found it convenient to weaponise. If they truly cared about those soldiers and the police officers killed by the mob, they would have evaluated the circumstances of their deaths and instituted reforms to restore the relationship of security agents with the public. Instead, by promoting the deaths of the state agents over that of the Nigerian youths that protested police brutality, Mohammed pretends the government officials are the unfortunate causalities of #EndSARS. In a classic art of misdirection, he wants us to see state officials who carry deadly weapons as imperilled by their unarmed victims. That is how you know that when they talk about “evidence,” what we are dealing with is mere bad faith.
There is a good reason these same set of people did not raise similar standards of verification when, recently in France, Nigeria’s President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), claimed he had improved the lives of Nigerians. If they were consistent in their attitude, they would have asked for evidence that Nigeria was on the right path to progress and has improved as Buhari claimed. There have passed up many opportunities for them to demand “evidence” of the truth claims of our leaders, only to set up a tent around the events of Black Tuesday. These “evidencers” typify the extent people will go to deny reality. Their partisan instincts are so acute they will pick out a dog and insist it is a monkey. It is that abject lack of moral and mental character that makes them a frightening species.
Now that a panel of inquiry set up by the government has investigated and affirmed that, once again, the Nigerian Army officials summoned to the Lekki tollgate that night left sorrow, tears, and blood in their wake, what else? Will they play more games or finally set themselves on the path of redemption?
Credit: Abimbola Adelakun, Punch