A leaked Lagos State Government memo on the secret mass
burial of 103 victims of the October 2020 EndSARS protest is one of the many
surprises to come, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, has said.
The senior lawyer stated this on Channels Television’s Law
Weekly, a pre-recorded programme which airs every Saturday at 03:30pm with
focus on the legal profession.
Adegboruwa was a member of the Justice Doris Okuwobi-led
Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry on Restitution for Victims of SARS
Related Abuses and other matters.
“The leaked memo from the Ministry of Health of Lagos State
is one of the many surprises that people will still see in the course of time
so long as the government has not come to terms with the reality of the events
of October 20th, 2020,” the senior lawyer said.
Adegboruwa said there is nobody in Nigeria who would say he
or she is not aware that there were fatalities on the night of October 20, 2020
when soldiers stormed the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos, a focal centre where youths
converged on to protest police brutality and extrajudicial killings.
“May be the challenge would be the quantum or the number of
such fatalities,” the human rights lawyer said. “But to blanketly assert that
there was no death or there was no blood spilt in any way at all as a result in
particular of gunshots by members of the Nigerian Army is to do a disservice to
the souls of those people who are affected.”
Last week, about three years after the controversial
incident that attracted global outrage and rebuke by human rights groups
including Amnesty International, a leaked memo addressed to the Lagos State
Ministry of Health indicating that the state government approved N61,285,000
for the mass burial of 103 persons identified as 2020 EndSARS victims sparked
outrage.
The memo dated July 19, 2023, captured steps for the
processing of funds after approval by Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu.
The Lagos State Ministry of Health subsequently confirmed
the letter in a statement last Sunday but insisted that the bodies were not
from the Lekki toll gate but were picked by the Lagos State Environmental
Health Unit (SEHMU) from areas such as Fagba, Ketu, Ikorodu, Orile, Ajegunle,
Abule-Egba, Ikeja, Ojota, Ekoro, Ogba, Isolo and Ajah.
See a copy of the leaked memo below:
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