Labour Party (LP) governorship candidate in Lagos State, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, yesterday, told President-elect, Bola Tinubu, that there cannot be healing without justice to victims of violence and disenfranchisement in last Saturday’s election in the state.
He spoke 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 healing process should begin.
Rhodes-Vivour in a statement, 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 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.
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.