By our reporter| The Presidency on Thursday while rejecting the reports of Amnesty International (AI) on the #EndSARS protests and the ensuing crisis, said the organisation has a reputation for stretching the truth.
Presidential spokesman, Femi Adesina, who stated this while appearing on Channels Television daily programme ‘Sunrise Daily’, said the notion that the incident at the Lekki Toll Gate on Tuesday, October 20, 2020, fuelled the crisis was a misleading narrative.
According to Adesina, policemen and civilians alike were already being killed and police stations burnt, as well as the looting and destruction of private and public property before the Lekki incident.
He, therefore disagreed that the looting was a fallout of the alleged Lekki shootings, as amnesty international would want everybody to believe.
Adesina said, “You are not quite correct.
“You are falling for the narrative of Amnesty International.
“And Amnesty is wrong. Anarchy had broken loose before even Lekki.
“The prisons in Benin and Oko had been broken open before Lekki.
“Orile police station had been burnt before Lekki.
“Many policemen had been burnt before Lekki.
“So, you cannot say it was Lekki that precipitated all those things.
Look at the timelines. You will discover that it had happened before Lekki.
“So, you are falling for the gambit of Amnesty International.
“Amnesty International does not have all the facts, they don’t run this country.
“They shouldn’t know beyond what they have been told.
“They shouldn’t know more than you and I should know as media people, as watchers of developments.”
Asked if it was the President’s thinking that AI’s report was wrong, Adesina said AI had been known to always make unsubstantiated reports about Nigeria.
“Many times, the military has come out to dispute facts brought out by Amnesty,” he said.
Adesina also said that the breakdown of law and order came with the #EndSARS protests and provided an opportunity for looting to take place.
He said attributing the looting to poverty was like justifying armed robbery, noting that not everyone involved in the act is hungry and poor.
He said: “Criminality is criminality. Would it justify armed robbery because the man was poor? Would you justify armed robbery because the man didn’t have money?
“Just as you cannot justify armed robbery because a man was poor and took a gun to rob another person, you can’t also justify the lootings going on because it is pure criminality. My view is that it is not everybody that is hungry that engaged in that looting. This is the truth, it is greed and pure criminality.
“Criminality will always be criminality and anarchy promotes criminality. What has happened in the past two or three weeks led to what is happening now. If there was cohesion and tranquility in society, this would not have happened. Therefore, it is corollary to the near anarchic situation that came on the country because of the protest.
“If you did not have people burning police stations, killing policemen, burning private and public property, you won’t have this kind of looting. That means those same people will be in society and will find ways to eke out a living but because the situation was created for near-anarchy that is why you have this.
“So, I don’t agree that it is all about poverty. Yes in any country, you will have people that are poor, hungry…that is one of the reasons you have government to ensure that the number of the poor reduces progressively.
“So this crowd of people you see going to loot are not necessarily hungry or angry; they are taking advantage of the collapse of law and order that came as a result of the protest.”
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