Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, is currently out of Nigeria on an official assignment and will soon react to the report of the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry on Restitution for Victims of SARS Related Abuses and other matters, the minister’s spokesman, Segun Adeyemi, has said.
Adeyemi stated this on Thursday in a text response sent to our correspondent who inquired about the reaction of the minister on the panel’s findings.
“We are out of the country (Nigeria) on assignment. Expect our response shortly,” he wrote in the text message sent to journalists.
The minister’s spokesman, however, did not disclose the country his principal is in at the moment.
Though “out of the country”, Adeyemi issued a statement on Thursday hailing the United States for removing Nigeria from the list of religious violators.
The office of the minister has, however, kept mum three days after the panel’s report on the Lekki incident of October 20, 2020 leaked to the public.
Mohammed, 69, has been in the eye of the storm since Monday, November 15, 2021, when the Justice Doris Okuwobi-led panel submitted its report to the Lagos State Government, noting that at least nine persons were confirmed dead at the Lekki toll plaza when soldiers stormed the tollgate to disperse EndSARS protesters on October 20, 2020.
The 309-page report stated, “The atrocious maiming and killing of unarmed, helpless and unresisting protesters while sitting on the floor and waving their Nigerian flags and while singing the National Anthem can be equated to a massacre in context.”
Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who received the report on Monday, constituted a Committee to bring forward a White Paper within the next two weeks to be considered by the Lagos State Executive Council.
Many Nigerians have been outraged over the panel’s report which is at variance with the consistent claim by Mohammed that there was no “massacre” at the toll gate, a focal gathering point during last year’s nationwide demonstration against extrajudicial killings and police brutality by operatives of the now-defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad of the Nigeria Police Force.
Mohammed had at various times in press conferences maintained that the Lekki incident was a “massacre without bodies” and had threatened to sue Cable News Network and other international bodies that claimed otherwise.
With the revelation from the Lekki panel report, a Nigerian counsel for CNN, Olumide Babalola, on Monday asked Mohammed to tender an apology to the medium for tagging as fake an investigative report by the American media house but the minister hasn’t responded, personally or by proxy, days after.
A civic advocacy group, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, subsequently called for the minister’s “dismissal, arrest and trial for his egregious falsehood which has now been contradicted by a judicial panel of investigators in Lagos.”
Also, the minority caucus in the House of Representatives on Thursday called for the immediate resignation of Mohammed, or his sacking by President Muhammadu Buhari over his claims on the Lekki incident.
Comments