Mohammed Shosanya
Human right activist and lawyer, Tope Temokun has implored President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to ignore the claim by the Police that all EndSARS detainees had been released or prosecuted accordingly.
He advised President Tinubu to direct the Controller-General of Nigerian Correctional Service and the Minister of Interior to compile the names of EndSARS detainees for release in heed to the call of Senator Shehu Sanni.
Senator Sanni had advised President Tinubu to pardon those who are still incarcerated over EndSARS protest in 2020.
In a statement on Monday,Temokun called President Tinubu not to takes seriously the quick response of the Police that no EndSARS detainee is still in the custody.
He described Senator Sanni’s message to the President as “a thoughtful and introspective call on the President to genuine service and his thought on that is more patriotic and correlates more with record and reality than the reaction of outright denial by the Police that there is no EndSARS protester in custody again across the country.”
He said: “I call on the President to heed the patriotic, introspective and humanity-driven statement of Senator Shehu Sanni and call on the Controller-General of Nigerian Correctional Service and the Minister of Interior to go to the records and publicize the particulars in terms of number of inmates in their custody in connection with EndSARS across Nigeria as at October 2020 and those who have regained their freedom either by bail, discharge, acquittal or pardon.
“The revelation might shock us all. Maybe for President Tinubu, that is where the healing process for this bleeding country you wish to govern will start.”
He noted that “Police lack the genuine record and data, as a primary source of information, to hastily respond to Shehu Sanni’s patriotic call, with denial and with such vague phrase that they have been processed according to law. How? What is this supposed to mean?
“The governments of various states and the Nigerian Correctional Service are in the best and first position to respond from their records.
“The reaction by the police that all individuals arrested have been processed according to law and none remains in custody, citing the facts that Governor Sanwo-Olu pardoned about 100 suspects in Lagos suffers from fallacy of hasty generalization.
“EndSARS protesters were arrested across the states of the country and apart from Lagos, which other state officially pardoned those arrested in connection with the October 2020 EndSARS protest?
“Then what is the number of the total protesters arrested in Lagos and other states? What is the number of protesters charged to court? What is the number of protesters successfully prosecuted or pardoned or discharged?
“What is the percentage of those arrested in Lagos and outside Lagos had legal representations and how many of those legal representations, billed or pro bono, followed those cases to logical conclusions? .
“I expect the government to come up with data and statistics on these. That is when the Police could now officially make a conclusive statement on the matter.
“Just the way we always have many arrested persons, particularly larger number of the citizens who have nobody to look for them or stand in for them, languish in remands across the country, without arraignment or trial, the same way many EndSARS protesters who had no legal representation after their arrest and since their arrest would also have been forgotten in various remand centres across the country.”
Temokun cited the case of an EndSARS detainee, Kemisola Ogun niyi who was arrested on October 22, 2020 in Akure by the Police when she went out to “get some drugs for her sick mother, Mrs. Eniola Felicia Ogunniyi, who had been bedridden for two weeks.”
He explained that Kemisola was remanded in Surulere correctional centre in Ondo town on November 24, 2020. “She was in prison till the 16th day of June, 2021 when she delivered a baby boy in prison which threw her case up for global attention to her ordeal.
“I represented Kemisola in court. On the 22nd of June 2021, she was granted bail by the High Court of Ondo State sitting in Akure after nine months of her arrest and remand since October 22, 2020 and after seven days she gave birth in prison.
“How many people knew that the case against the EndSARS detainee, Kemisola, was not dropped and was prosecuted in court by the Ondo State Government ever since till the 25th day of July, 2023, that the government withdrew the charge against the young girl on the grounds that it had become impossible for the prosecution to locate the vital witnesses needed for her prosecution following which the court struck out the vharge.”
