Lagos #EndSARS panel blames computer errors for duplications in report

The Lagos State judicial panel of inquiry into police brutality and the Lekki tollgate shooting of October 20, 2020, is unhappy with the Lagos State Government for faulting its report in its White Paper.

The panel says the errors the state government is latching on to discredit parts of the report were in fact computer glitches.

The panel had submitted that the Lekki shooting, where soldiers and police officers shot into a crowd of unarmed, peaceful protesters, could be termed a "massacre in context."

The Lagos state government disagrees however, saying the submission of the panel that nine persons died, is “irreconcilable” with the testimony of John Obafunwa, a pathologist.

The Lagos state government and its talking heads continue to point at discrepancies in the panel's report and the duplication of the names of casualties.

In a white paper on the report, the Lagos government accepted 11 out of the 32 recommendations of the panel, rejected one and accepted six with modifications.

Responding to the Lagos government’s position in a statement issued by Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, the panel said the state could have reached out to members for clarifications, rather than cherry-pick its report.

“The chairperson, all panel members and indeed the secretariat of the panel were all within the reach of the LASG for clarifications if there was sincerity, other than picking holes in order to evade responsibility on account of computer errors and tabular alignments of cut and paste.

“This was a misnomer from the spreadsheet that ought to have terminated at Page 297 but mistakenly overlapped to Page 298 with the same names and same numbers.

“It was the computer error of the secretariat of the panel which could have been corrected as the secretariat of the panel was domiciled in the ministry of justice at all times.

“In any event, the mere fact of repetition of same names on a table cannot without more, nullify the uncontroverted evidence of death.

“The panel considered several definitions of the word MASSACRE and adopted one of the dictionary meanings of MASSACRE as being ‘the act or instance of killing a number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty’.

“The panel considered that firing live bullets at unarmed, peaceful and unresisting protesters which led to the death of some of them, was cruel and atrocious on the part of the military and the police. The White Paper ignored these explanations and findings by the panel,” the statement reads.

Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State has invited stakeholders and activists to a peace walk in a bid to lower the temperature heightened by the events of October 2020.