On Tuesday, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu suspended his senior special assistant on print media, Mr. Wale Ajetunmobi. According to a statement on the state’s official account on X, the suspension was for “the misrepresentation of facts” on his personal account on X “on a past incident”.
“The Governor wishes to state categorically that his administration frowns at any form of extra judicial punishment and will not be a part of any such action,” the statement said. “That is not who we are. That is not our way.”
Although the statement did not mention what “past incident” Mr. Ajetunmobi had misrepresented, Premium Times had reported how, on November 23, the suspended aide had claimed, on X, that perpetrators of the arson on Television Continental during the #EndSARS protests had been “hunted and executed.”
“The full story of people who burnt down TVC in 2020 will be told one day, with gory clips and images. One thing to note: majority of them have been hunted down and executed,” Mr. Ajetunmobi said in a now deleted post. “One of them, a young boy trading in cooking gas around Ketu, was found with AK-47 at the site. Even his neighbours were shocked. But the full gist is better saved for later.”
When someone on X implied that what he had described was extrajudicial killing, Mr. Ajetunmobi tried to dispel the insinuation. “Lol… you want to create a narrative in your head,” he said. “What is extrajudicial killing here? Some of the people were chased by soldiers and exchange of fire occurred. Then arsonists were overpowered and killed in the process. Others ran away. Is that an extra-judicial killing to you?”
According to Premium Times, when Governor Sanwo-Olu was informed of the posts, he was furious.
The #EndSARS protest is obviously a sensitive issue for the Sanwo-Olu administration. Despite overwhelming evidence that state agents participated in extrajudicial killings during the protests, the administration has sought to frame the protests as an attack on society and state institutions.
A judicial panel set up by the state government, in a leaked report, confirmed that the state government invited the Nigerian Army to intervene in the state and deploy troops to the Lekki Toll Gate on October 20, 2020. “At the Lekki Toll Gate, officers of the Nigerian Army shot, injured and killed unarmed helpless and defenseless protesters, without provocation or justification, while they were waving the Nigerian Flag and singing the National Anthem and the manner of assault and killing could in context be described as a massacre,” the report said. Investigative journalists such as Fisayo Soyombo have corroborated the facts of these extrajudicial killings in their work.
But the Sanwo-Olu administration has not only rejected the findings of its own judicial panel, it has also not taken responsibility for its part in the violence that followed the #EndSARS protests. Instead, Mr. Sanwo-Olu has focused his rhetoric on the “elements with devilish intentions” who “unleashed an unprecedented war on our state.”
While the Sanwo-Olu government continues to comply with parts of the judicial panel’s recommendations, it has not done the most important thing in this matter – which is to acknowledge the state government’s failure to protect unarmed, innocent citizens during the protests. The “elements with devilish intentions” is only one side of the story; and the Governor knows this. His sacking of Mr. Ajetunmobi, who most likely spoke out of a full belly, is simply a sorry attempt to distract from the hard facts of the #EndSARS protests. The Governor should build up some courage and confront the entire truth in all its ugliness.