Reopening Lekki Toll Gate: You Are Callous and Wicked, Group Tells Sanwolu

By Uche Mbah

Omo Eko Pataki, a pan-Yoruba group that are indigenous to Lagos, has lashed the State Government over their plan to reopen Lekki Tollgate, describing it as “callous, wicked, vicious and downright evil in the most darkling visage.”

The Lagos State Government succumbed to pressures from Lekki Concession Commission , and fixed April 1 for the reopening of Lekki Toll Gate, which was shut following the fallout of #EndSARS protest in October 20, 2020, after LCC claims they are reeling under N24. 52 billion.

The Government says they will begin with Ikoyi toll axis first.

The Commissioner for Information, Gbenga Omotoso, during an interview on a National Television, had confirmed the Lagos State position, saying LCC is owing both local and international creditors.

But the Omo Eko Pataki, represented by the General Secretary, Prince Uthman Shodipe-Dosunmu, said in a statement: “At a time of great economic crisis when many Lagosians are crushed by various circadian burdens of survival, when many households are diminished by the harsh, bruising realities of an indifferent power, when access to the most basic illustrations of existence is increasingly hard and unreachable, when homes have become penurious hovels, when hunger parades the Lagosian landscapes like stubborn, immovable sentry- Governor Sanwo-Olu in his illogic has decided to add to the Lagosian hellish burden.

“Sanwo-Olu’s attempt to bring back the the Toll gates almost two years after innocent young men and women were mowed down by the agents of the power is callous, wicked, vicious, downright evil in the most darkling visage.

“Pray, are this people ever halted in any conscionable contemplative soberness ? Are they ever restrained by the logic of natural humaneness? Do they feel ? Do they care ? Are they ever contemplative of the finitude of power and the transient essence of the human core ?

“Lagosians are already with a thousand crucibles. The unemployment roll is swelling everyday. The pangs of hunger are visible in the ceaseless parade of the homeless, the urchins, the beggars and the thousands on the wrong side of fate.

“Every day, thousands are stranded at various locations stripped of transportation fares. They wait in the sun . They wait in the rain. They trek endlessly to the roads that lead no where in search of refuge as transporters and food sellers equally triple their costs.

“And yet , with all these challenges, with all these swamping miseries, with the bodies of the young protesters of the Endsars still crying for justice, Sanwo-Olu still wants to reintroduce the very combustible material that almost brought Lagos to its ruins ? I ask, is this man governing at all or being led to an irredeemable bouleversement?”