Lekki tollgate massacre, 6 years after
By Kalu Onuma
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Simone Weil, letter to Joë Bousquet, 1942
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace
“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
Steve Biko, I Write What I Like
On 30 April 1977, in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, fourteen women stood in front of the pink palace where the generals governed Argentina and asked a question that no one in that building had any intention of answering. Where are our children? Their sons and daughters had been taken in the night, from homes and workplaces and street corners, by men without uniforms who drove unmarked cars. There were no charges, no courts, no bodies. The officials told the mothers that the young people had never existed, or had run away to Europe, or had been guerrillas who deserved what they got. The junta had banned gatherings, and when the police came to move the women on, a sergeant is said to have told them they could not stand still but were free to keep moving. So they walked. They walked in pairs, in slow circles around the monument at the centre of the square, with white kerchiefs on their heads that had begun as the cloth nappies of the children they had lost. They came back the following week and the one after that. In December of that same year one of their founders, Azucena Villaflor, was herself seized and made to disappear, and for twenty-eight years nobody knew where she lay. In 2005 her remains were identified, and her ashes were laid in the square where she had walked. The women continued to walk through the end of the dictatorship in 1983, through the trials of the generals, through decades of democracy, and they walk still, on Thursdays, in the afternoon. They knew something that governments always forget, which is that a state can silence a protest and outlast a headline, but it cannot outlast a mother who will not stop walking.
I begin with those women because tomorrow, the twentieth of October, six years will have passed since the night at the Lekki toll gate, and Nigeria has not yet produced its Thursday. We have had our anger, which was real and large and young. We have had a judicial panel and a white paper. We have had our hashtags, our documentaries, a single annual flurry of remembrance, and then a quiet that has begun to resemble forgiveness and is something else. What we have not had is the circle: the stubborn, repetitive, patient walking around one wound until the wound is acknowledged. This essay is my attempt at a walk. I do not intend to argue my way to a conclusion so much as to go round the night slowly, from every side, until it yields whatever it holds, and I ask the reader to come along at that pace.
Let me set down what is known, with the discipline of a man who has been told too many times that nothing happened. In the first days of October 2020 young Nigerians took to the streets against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a unit of the police that had made itself the terror of the young, the visible, the male and the well-dressed, and who could be stopped, searched, robbed, beaten and killed with equal ease. The protest began on 8 October. By the eleventh the government had announced the dissolution of the unit, and by the standards of Nigerian protest it should have been a victory and an ending. It was neither, because by then a generation had discovered its own voice. They organised without a leader. They raised money, fed one another, ran ambulances, set up legal desks, and brought their own generators. At the Lekki toll gate in Lagos they sat down, and stayed for days, draped in the green and white of the national flag. On 20 October a curfew was announced at short notice, in the middle of the day. In the evening, according to Amnesty International, soldiers arrived at the toll gate at about a quarter to seven and opened fire on the protesters without warning. Witnesses reported that the lights had gone out first and that the cameras had been removed, and the judicial panel that later examined the matter found that the company operating the toll gate had withheld evidence and tampered with the footage it handed over. The people sitting on the ground, according to those who were there, were singing the national anthem. A young woman, known to the world as DJ Switch, was broadcasting from the scene on her phone, and tens of thousands watched, in Nigeria and beyond, the sound of the shots and the cries and the voice of a young person narrating her own fear. At Alausa, on the mainland, Amnesty recorded further killings that same night. Amnesty’s count was at least twelve dead across the two places.
By the morning the toll gate was in the hands of trucks. The panel later found that vehicles were brought to the site on the morning of 21 October to clean it, and that bodies had been carried away in vans. Meanwhile the state set about telling the story. The governor first said that nobody had died, then conceded that two had. The army first said that it had not been there at all, then admitted that it had been deployed at the request of the Lagos government, and insisted that its men had not fired on the people. The judicial panel of inquiry in Lagos, chaired by a retired judge, Doris Okuwobi, sat for the better part of a year, heard witnesses, and concluded that the army had been deployed without justification and had shot unarmed protesters, that it had refused ambulances access to the wounded, and that what happened could, in context, be described as a massacre. The panel recorded forty-eight casualties, of whom twenty-four had gunshot wounds and fifteen had been assaulted by soldiers and police; it listed those it could confirm as dead, and counted four others as missing and presumed dead. Press accounts of the report give the confirmed dead as nine or eleven, and the arithmetic has been part of the quarrel ever since. In the white paper it issued at the end of November 2021, the Lagos government said there had been “no massacre at Lekki Toll Gate, contextual or otherwise.” It relied on the evidence of a forensic pathologist who maintained that only one person had died of a gunshot wound at the place. Of the panel’s thirty-two recommendations, it accepted some, modified some, and passed fourteen to the federal government, where I have found no evidence that anything has come of them.
I do not recount all this in order to relitigate a number. A number is where we hide. If it was nine, it was a massacre; if it was eleven, it was a massacre; if it was one, it was an execution; and if the state’s cleaning trucks had been given a little longer we might have been left with none, and the argument would have been over. What I want to dwell on is that in the arithmetic of denial the dead are required to prove themselves twice, first by dying and then by being counted. They must supply a body, a name, a photograph, a death certificate and a ballistic report, and if any of these is lost, removed in a van, or washed away at dawn, then they are declared never to have lived. It is an evil logic, and it is also an old one. The Book of Job knew it, when the afflicted man cries out against the earth itself: O earth, cover not thou my blood, and let my cry have no place. Every state that has killed its own has prayed the opposite prayer, that the earth cover the blood and the cry find no place. The cleaning trucks of that October morning were the answer to Job’s cry, and the white paper was its footnote.
I was not at the toll gate. Like most of this country, I met the night through a small screen, and I want to be honest about what happened to me as I watched. I am a father. My daughter is grown now and lives her own life, and I know the particular vigilance that does not end when a child leaves home. I looked at the faces of those young people, in the livestream and later in the photographs, boys with their shirts open to the evening, girls with their hair tied up in cloth, many of them the age my own child was only a few years before. I looked at them as a father looks, which is to say that I could not see them as a political phenomenon. I saw somebody’s child, who had come out from a family where there was an argument at the door about going, or a text that said I am safe, or a mother who had prayed with her over the phone that morning. When the first reports gave way to the video, I watched a young man lying on the ground with the national flag still in his hand. Whatever the rest of the nation made of the night, a part of me was already a mourner in that compound, waiting for a name.
There is a second recollection that I have never been able to leave alone, and it is the reason this meditation is intimate before it is anything else. I was a child in the war, and I know what silence was for. When I was small, in the bush outside my hometown, adults pressed their palms over the mouths of children because a child’s cry could bring soldiers, and the whole grammar of my early life was that of being quiet, not drawing attention, surviving. A people that has learned that lesson in its flesh does not unlearn it easily. We carried it into our adulthood, into our offices and churches and political parties, and we handed it, with love, to our children: do not make trouble, do not be noticed, do not say what you saw. And then, in October 2020, our children did the opposite. They sat on the ground, in the open, under a street light, and sang. They did not hide in the bush. They did not hush. They set their phones to record, and they made their cry public, and they put every one of our careful lessons in the trash. I confess that when I first understood this I felt something close to shame, and under the shame a fierce admiration. They had done what my generation, shaped by the war and the generals, had not dared. They had refused the silence. The soldiers who came that evening had been trained, by two generations of a state that had taught us to be afraid, to expect fear, and they met instead a song.
It is hard to get past the symbolism of the lights, though I have tried, because symbolism is the cheapest of the mind’s currencies and a nation can be bankrupted by it. And yet the symbolism does the work of a prophecy. At the hour of the killing the lights went out. There is a verse in the Gospel of John that every Nigerian child who has attended a church has heard repeated until it has gone almost deaf in the ear: the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. It is a verse about the stubbornness of light, and the failure of darkness to grasp it. On that night the darkness did all it could. It took the power, it took the cameras, it took the bodies, and then it took the sentences out of the official mouth. But it did not comprehend that a girl in the crowd held a phone, and that the phone held a light of another kind, and that ten thousand telephones, held up at once, are an unbearable thing for a state that works by night. The truth that came out of Lekki came out in spite of everything the institutions did, through the pockets of the young, carried out of the dark like a flame in cupped hands.
Let me turn now to the question that the denial has made it impossible to avoid: what does it do to a people to be told that what they saw did not happen? I trained once in psychology, and I know the term the discipline has for a grief that society will not acknowledge, grief that has no recognised place, no ritual, no public language, no permission to be wept openly. It is called disenfranchised grief, and it is the kind that festers. The families of those who fell at Lekki were not given a funeral that the state would recognise as one for a victim. Some were not given a body. Some were told that the person they were looking for had never come to the hospital, or had come and gone, or had been something other than what they had been. In some cases the injured were refused admission, and some hospital owners said they were sent a questionnaire by the state’s health regulator asking who they had treated, as though healing a wounded protester were a form of dissent. A volunteer who ferried the hurt to hospital that night told reporters that he was later attacked and abducted by police for it. This is what the second wound looks like. It is the wound inflicted by the denial, by the insistence that what you witnessed was a delusion, and its clinical name is gaslighting, but its older name is cruelty. A people denied the right to mourn, and then told that there is nothing to mourn, begins in time to doubt itself, and a doubting people is the ideal citizen of a state that has something to hide.
There is, too, the matter of who gave the order, and here we meet a Nigerian specialty, the perfect diffusion of responsibility. The governor said that the forces involved were beyond his direct control. The army said that it had been called in by the state. The federal government, whose army it is, spoke of fake news. The police said the panel would decide, and the panel’s findings went to a white paper, and the white paper sent the hard parts to Abuja, and in Abuja the recommendations sat in a file. At no point, in the whole chain, did anyone stand up and say, I gave the order, or I failed to prevent it, or I am responsible. We have designed a federation in which the killing of citizens can be spread across so many desks that no single desk is guilty. I do not say this out of cynicism. I say it because it is the exact mechanism by which impunity is manufactured: a decision that belongs to everyone belongs to no one, and an atrocity without an author is an atrocity that can be repeated. If, six years on, I cannot name a soldier, an officer or an official who has stood in a dock for that night, and I cannot, then it is not because nobody did it. It is because the system was built so that it would remain impossible to say who.
I am wary, though, of making a villain of the individual soldier, and wary of the opposite error, which is to make him merely an instrument. The young man in uniform who pointed a rifle at a crowd of singing students was somebody’s son, a boy from a village for whom enlistment was one of the few doors out of poverty that his family could afford, trained in obedience, housed in a barracks, and told by somebody he could not name to go to a place he did not choose. That does not excuse him, because the Nuremberg principle, that the order is no defence to the killing of the unarmed, is not a rule for one country only. But it asks of us a more honest reckoning than hatred. The soldier who fires into a crowd carries what the clinicians now call moral injury, the wound to the conscience of a man who has done what he knows he should never have done. Somewhere in this country are men who stood at Lekki that night and must now live with it. A people that wants the truth should be prepared to call them also to account, and also to hear what they have to say.
Geography, too, has something to teach. Lekki is the face that modern Lagos shows to the world: the peninsula of glass and sea-view, the high-rise, the private school, the estate with its own gate and its own generator. The toll gate stands at the threshold of that world, at the point where the mainland pays to enter the island, and the symbolism of the place was not lost on the young who chose it. They were sitting in the road that a private concession charges the public to cross, in the shadow of an enclave whose residents mostly drove past them or watched them from windows. There is a bitter irony in the state’s chosen form of remembrance. Among the panel’s recommendations the Lagos government was willing to accept, according to its white paper, was the designation of 20 October as a toll-free day at the gate, together with a peace park in place of the monument and the renaming that the panel had proposed. A fee-free crossing and a lawn. I try not to be unkind, but a state that cannot bring itself to say that the dead were killed, and that offers a toll-free day in lieu of an apology, has told us exactly what it thinks a life is worth, and exactly what it believes it can get away with.
The world has seen this before, and the history of other countries is instructive, if only because it shows how long the road is and that it can be walked. At Sharpeville, in South Africa, in March 1960, police fired into a crowd protesting the pass laws and killed sixty-nine people, many of them shot in the back as they ran. The government of the day called it a regrettable necessity, and for a generation the story was contested. Today the twenty-first of March is a public holiday in South Africa, called Human Rights Day, and a child there learns the date before she learns most of the rest of her history. At Amritsar, in April 1919, General Dyer ordered his troops to fire on an unarmed crowd in an enclosed garden, and the official British count was 379 dead while Indian estimates put it at about a thousand. The empire defended him for a time, and the garden, the Jallianwala Bagh, is now a shrine to every Indian who ever stood against the British. What those places have in common is not that justice was swift. It was not. It is that somebody refused to stop walking, and the refusal outlasted the state that had hoped to forget. In Nigeria, we have our own earlier names for this: Iva Valley in 1949, where colliery workers on strike were shot at Enugu; Odi in 1999; Zaki Biam in 2001. We have buried each of them in the ground of a convenient forgetting, and then we are surprised that the ground does not stay shut.
Consider also the people who are not in the story at all because the story was never told to include them. In the panel’s records are ninety-six other bodies, autopsied in Lagos in the days and weeks around the protests, most of them unidentified and listed under a label, EndSARS, as though a hashtag were a surname. I cannot read that detail without a catch in the throat. Ninety-six people, someone’s husbands and brothers and sons, handled by the pathologist’s table and entered in the record not by who they were but by what they might have been doing. There is a verse in Matthew, drawn from Jeremiah, about Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are not. It describes a particular kind of grief, the grief of a mother for a child who is absent, whose body has not been given back, whose end is unknown. It is the grief the women of the Plaza de Mayo carried in their white scarves. There are Nigerian women who carry it, in silence, in rooms that I will never enter, and no kerchief has been issued to them and no square set aside for their circling. Their children are listed, if at all, as unidentified.
And the living? Many of those who were at the toll gate are no longer in Nigeria. Some fled, and some who stayed carry what they saw in silence, and a few, like the young woman whose phone broadcast the night to the world, left and became advocates in other places. A year on, when mourners went back to the toll gate to mark the anniversary, witnesses told reporters that police beat and arrested some of them at the very spot where their friends had been shot, which is a thing no one could be expected to forgive. Beyond them was the wider generation, the one that had marched. Some turned their anger into the politics of the 2023 election and poured their energy into a campaign, and some, finding that a protest could be met with bullets and a ballot with the usual arrangements, gave up on the country and joined the exodus we now call by its Yoruba nickname, japa. The state’s lesson for the young was an arithmetic of its own: that it could do what it did and survive, that no court would summon it, and that the people would in time grow tired. The young people’s lesson, whichever door they took, was equally clear, that peace was no protection, and that a song was not a shield. A country that teaches both of these lessons in a single night has, in a single night, mortgaged the loyalty of an entire generation.
Allow me to say something now about the faith and the philosophy I have lived by, because a meditation that withholds the meditator is not honest. I am a Christian, and for a long time I have been a reader of the Stoics, and I have found in the two a long companionship. The Stoic distinction between what is in our power and what is not has steadied me through more than one storm. The soldiers, the governor, the courts, the white paper, these are not in my power. My witness, my words and my refusal to look away are in my power. But I must confess that the Stoic teaching can be turned, by a tired man, into a lullaby. It can become the very anaesthetic I have been describing in this country, a sophisticated reason to do nothing, a way of calling surrender equanimity. Marcus Aurelius, who knew something about power and its abuse, wrote that the impediment to action advances action, and that what stands in the way becomes the way. The man who wrote that was not telling us to accept injustice; he was telling us to treat it as the work. The Christian tradition, for its part, does not permit the shrug either. It is a faith that begins with an execution carried out by a state, and its liturgy is a repeated insistence that the victim be remembered. The lament is a form of prayer. The Psalms are full of people who accuse God of silence. Forgiveness, in that tradition, is not the abolition of memory; it is something one offers to the repentant, and nobody has repented at Lekki. To forgive a thing that has not been admitted is not mercy; it is a kind of collusion.
So what is a meditation for? To remember is itself an act with moral weight, and it is the first act, from which the others follow. The dead of Lekki have names, although the state would prefer us to think otherwise. Some of them are known: Anthony Onome Afamefuna, Olamilekan Ibrahim, Emeka Chibuike, and others whom the record has so far kept anonymous. Let us say these names, and let us say them without the adjective, the hashtag or the argument. Let us picture the man with the flag in his hand. Let us picture the girl who lay awake that night, and the mother whose telephone rang and rang. A nation heals only when what happened to it is told in its own voice, and told in the presence of those it happened to. Until that day, every anniversary is an incomplete funeral.
There is, nevertheless, a practical agenda, and it is not complicated, which is why it has been so easy to delay. The names of the dead and the missing should be established by an independent process that is not answerable to the army or the state government and then published, in full, and kept on a monument at the site, which means the monument the Lagos government rejected should be built. The recommendations of the panel that were sent to Abuja should be taken out of the file and answered, one by one, in public. The soldiers and officers who were at the toll gate, and those who gave the orders, should be identified, and if the evidence supports it, tried in a civilian court that is open to the public, and the same for the policemen who came afterwards. The injured should be compensated and the families of the dead should receive reparations, with an apology that uses the word massacre or explains, in court, why not. The medical staff and volunteers who stood between the wounded and the darkness should be honoured, as the panel itself asked. And the law should be changed so that the use of the army against peaceful citizens inside this country becomes, as it is in sturdier democracies, a last and rare resort and not a reflex. None of this brings anyone back. All of it, together, tells the next generation that a life in Nigeria is a life, and that the one who takes it will answer.
For the rest of us, there is a smaller agenda, and it is within the reach of every reader. We can refuse to let the date pass. We can go, tomorrow evening, to wherever we are, and light a candle, or switch on a lamp in a window, or simply be still for as long as it takes to say the names. We can say to a young person in our own house that we are sorry for the country we have given them, and that they were right to sing. We can write to the people who govern and tell them that we have not forgotten and shall not. We can teach our children the date as the South Africans teach theirs. And we can insist, in a hundred ordinary conversations, at the table and the market and the church, that the word for what happened at Lekki is not a matter of opinion. The women of the Plaza de Mayo did not wait for a government’s permission to mourn. They walked.
Tomorrow evening, when the light fades over the lagoon and the traffic builds toward the toll gate as it does every evening, there will be a place on that road where, six years ago, a group of young people sat down and sang the anthem of a country that had not yet learned to love them. Let someone, somewhere in the crowd of cars, wind down a window and listen. The darkness did not comprehend them then, and it does not comprehend them now. Let us be a country that does. Let the circle begin, and let the lights come on, and let us walk until somebody in the palace answers the only question that has ever mattered, which is the same one the mothers of Buenos Aires asked and which the mothers of Lagos are still waiting to be allowed to ask: where are our children?
