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November 15, 2021, #EndSARS Lagos State judicial panel report has generated a lot of groundswells. After the 309-page reportage ascertained, through leaked reports

Sir: November 15, 2021, #EndSARS Lagos State judicial panel report has generated a lot of groundswells. After the 309-page reportage ascertained, through leaked reports, that protesters were killed, injured, or assaulted by soldiers and police on October 20, 2020, Lekki Tollgate crackdown, Lai Mohammed, on a negative note, disputed the submission, saying that, for one, “the report threw away the testimony of ballistic experts who testified before it” and, for another, “deemed as credible the evidence of the Forensic Pathologist, Prof. John Obafuwa.”

What’s even more noteworthy is that – kudos to Justice Doris Okuwobi – the Lagos State #EndSARS judicial-panel report corroborates, on a positive note, a huge proportion of Nigerians’ belief – if you like fact – that, of a truth, some people were pooled in blood, while others were villainously maimed. I remember, then, Lai Mohammed literally and emphatically arguing that the ‘massacre’ was “bodiless” and “bloodless.”

I was imbued with the imbroglio, namely that whether or not the media or Information minister is responsible and accountable to give solid, reliable, unadulterated information to the public. There seems to be some upper hand controlling and checking the news production of the Nigerian media, particularly when Lai Mohammed said their functionaries should be under his own plenipotentiaries, and with the proceedings of “experts in legitimation.”

It is appalling that there’s no single line of synergy by which Nigerian officials – indeed on crucial matters – could wholeheartedly arrive at nothing but the truth. Political reprobates and renegades, they are, who have been baptised to boldly and unreservedly err from the truth, earnestly defending the fate, shying away from and frowning upon the truth. It is surely shameful having international media investigate the #EndSARS ‘massacre,’ that we can’t resolve, independently and unanimously, a common Nigerian matter, of its own people, of its own leaders.

The #EndSARS report is ‘greenwashed’ by some – like reiterating Babajide Sanwo-Olu! – “forces beyond our control.” And, furthermore, the “necessary illusions” were born out of the preternatural and supernatural sampling technique to pleasantly portray what we, the guttersnipes, gingerly yearned to hear.

What shall we do now that Lai Mohammed has, as it were, come out to say, NO, there was no ‘body’ and ‘blood’ during the ‘massacre,’ particularly repudiating, to him, the preposterous proclamation of the state’s panel? It is rather a manifestation, certainly attestation, that the “participants,” committed to “manufacturing consent,” would deviously subvert the obvious.

But, of course, the masses have not been deluded by the illusions created by impostors and progressophobics. The loopholes the minister pointed out in the Judicial Panel of Inquiry of Restitution for Victims of SARS-Related Abuses and Other Matters are inversely proportional to the lacuna – arguing that the “massacre-in-context” report is euphemistically fraught with “so many errors, inconsistencies, discrepancies, speculations, innuendoes, omissions, and conclusions that are not supported by evidence.”

Segun Ige is a freelance journalist in Lagos.

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