No Healing Without Justice, Rhodes-Vivour Replies Tinubu

The governorship candidate of Labour Party (LP), Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, yesterday, told the President-elect, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, that healing could not happen without justice. He said that a free and fair election might not be possible under his presidency.

Rhodes-Vivour, who spoke in his office in Victoria Island, Lagos, lamented that the outcome of the governorship and House of Assembly elections last Saturday, March 18, 2023, was far from democracy. He maintained that a lot of people who came out to vote were attacked, maimed and intimidated, while some people lost their lives in the process.

Rhodes-Vivour noted that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in Lagos State could not campaign on their past records, so they stoked ethnic strife, adding that the entire credibility that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had built over the last four years was torn to shreds.

He said that the common enemies of the people were violence, insecurity, poverty, stagnation, corruption and under-development, adding that the same people responsible for these vices weaponised poverty and ethnicity to distract the people from their evil endeavours and diabolical activities.

He said: “Yesterday (Tuesday), I spent my day visiting victims of Saturday’s state-backed terrorism and violence from Abule-Ado to Surulere, Apapa and Ikeja. I met with young men and women with bullets lodged in their bodies with deep cuts and fractured legs, among others. I feel their pains.

“The APC unleashed evil on Lagosians, diabolically with their fetish rites and curses during the day, and physical violence against all Lagosians. Yet, they want the peace of a graveyard, they want the healing of the dead.

“We cannot afford to have an “Agberocracy” or a military type of government that will use violence and diabolical means to create a one-party state from Ikoyi to Ikeja to Ikorodu. We were all disenfranchised.

“For the ambition of one man, we saw our traditional institutions reduced to pawns, tools. Oro rites that are done at night were done during the day, invoking in broad daylight the spell that has been used to keep Lagos abound.

“This was no election, it was violence on multiple levels, diabolically and physically. On this ambition, they sowed seeds that could potentially lead to outcome like the Rwandan genocide.

“They have tried to destroy years of delicately balanced ethnic relations, years of inter-marriage and friendships, years of commerce and years of building Lagos into the economic juggernaut that it is.

“I call on the silent majority, decent and cultured Lagosians, indigenous Lagosians and Lagosians at large to speak out. It is enough of the worst of us defining the rest of us. On Saturday, we saw their vision for Lagos and Agberocracy and we will fight through all legal channels to birth our Lagos.”