Profiles in Courage: Three Nigerian Women Edition

In the name of love, our Mothers have borne the Ark of our Covenant with a Benevolent and Merciful God from a time out of mind …

Where: Three Nigerian men lied, with regard to the EndSARS protests by the Nigerian youth at Lekki Tollgate on October 20, 2020, and its brutal dispersal by soldiers:

• His Excellency, Governor of Lagos State, Jide Sanwo-Olu, told the media, after the fact, that he did not invite the Nigerian Army.

Then, he offered that no one died at the protests and its brutal dispersal; and as an afterthought, he added, only one person died.

• Brig. General Ahmed Taiwo told the judicial panel of inquiry that soldiers were there by invitation and acted only by the strictest universal rules of engagement, and that soldiers never used live ammunition to disperse the protests.

• The minister of information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, repeatedly and vehemently denied — as Joseph Goebbels repeatedly and vehemently denied atrocities during the truncated one-thousand-year rule of the Nazis in Germany — that violence was used to disperse the protests at Lekki Tollgate on October 20, 2020 …

Whereas: Three Nigerian women spoke the truth:

• Obianuju Catherine Udeh, a.k.a DJ Switch, recorded the protests and its brutal dispersal on her phone and shared it in real time.

• Stephanie Busari, a reporter, took it from there and broadcast it to the world. Her reporting was denied by the information minister but was never refuted.

• The Honourable Justice Doris Tomilayo Okuwobi-led judicial panel of Inquiry on Restitution for Victims of SARS-related Abuses and Other Matters, concluded that what transpired on the night of October 20, 2020, qualified as a massacre.

Her panel found that the Nigerian Army was invited by His Excellency; that the soldiers responded and fired live ammunition to disperse the non-violent youth protests; and that 11 persons died, four were unaccounted for, and scores were injured.

Women have been our moral compass for ages but at the crossroads in our people’s search for an oasis in Dystopia, the pillars of truth were once again secured by three women of exceptional courage who live by their conscience:

“Come Abraham, I have found three righteous women for your visitors”.