By Ola Kay
The Lagos State Government says the failure to resume operations at the Lekki Tollgate three years after the famed EndSARS protests, including fixing of the Ikoyi Link Bridge is due mainly to the massive damage of facilities which required substantial resources to put back in place.
The state Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Gbenga Omotosho stated this while addressing journalists on Tuesday. He stated that what happened over three years ago, during the October 2020 EndSARS protest was “as a kind of war visited on Lagos.”
Reacting to the state of Lekki Tollgate till today, the commissioner lamented that facilities destroyed then were among the things that the state government took pride, including the Lagos High Court,
“..which is iconic, the seat of government; the DNA laboratory, the first of its kind in West Africa, then hundreds of buses, including the media houses – they set fire to TVC, The Nation. It was a season of madness.”
He stressed that the Tollgate was one of the victims of what happened then, which will require time and financial resources to reinstall.
“So for the state government to return to that kind of business overnight, it will take time because they need to reinstall the equipment to make people know it’s in service.
“They need to maintain the bridge. They need to do periodic checks on the bridge. So I think getting this equipment is a question of money, personnel, installation and all of that. Some day, it (those things) will return to the Lekki-Ikoyi Link Bridge,” the commissioner said.
Recall that the EndSARS saga led to the mass protest that started in early October 2020, following the Nigerian Labour Congress calling off its scheduled nationwide strike. During the incident, thousands of Nigerian youths from different pars of the country took to the streets to demand the proscription of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad of the Nigeria Police Force, notorious for extra-judicial conducts.
The controversial shooting at the Lekki Tollgate on the night of October 20, 2020, led to loss of lives and destruction of facilities in some instances. In the wake of the confusion, some groups demanded that destruction at the Tollgate should not be fixed until justice is done, even in the face of denials that many lives were lost to the incident.
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