The governorship candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in Lagos State, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour has told President-elect, Bola Tinubu, that there cannot be healing without justice for victims of violence and disenfranchisement in last Saturday’s election in the state.
He made this known against the backdrop of Tinubu’s condemnation of cases of infractions, ethnic slurs and violence that trailed the 2023 general elections, declaring that elections were now over and that the healing process should begin.
In a statement which was obtained by Africa Today News, New York, Rhodes-Vivour alleged the All Progressives Congress (APC) unleashed ‘evil on Lagosians, with their fetish rites and curses during the day, and physical violence, yet want the peace of a graveyard.’
He claimed that the actions of leaders of the APC could lead to genocide like what happened in Rwanda in 1994.
He said he visited victims of Saturday’s ‘state-backed terrorism and violence from Abule Ado to Surulere, Apapa to Ikeja’ and met with young men and women in pain due to bullets lodged in their body or deep cuts which have fractured their legs.
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He alleged the APC had stoked ethnic strife “for the ambition of one man and his cult,” and rubbished the credibility the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) built over the years.
In a direct response to the call by Tinubu for healing, Rhodes-Vivour said: ‘Healing cannot happen without justice.’
“We saw our traditional institutions reduced to pawns, tools. Oro rites that are done at night were done during the day, invoking the spell that Senator Tinubu and his cult have used to keep Lagos bound. 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,” he said.
Africa Today News, New York reports that the party is now set to resume legal battles in the court.