Bolanle Raheem: Lai Mohammed’s Curious Silence

Many Nigerian leaders, including President Muhammadu Buhari and several others, have all condemned the gruesome killing of a Lagos-based lawyer, Mrs. Bolanle Raheem, by a trigger-happy police officer, Drambi Vandi.

In line with his zero-tolerance to any act of misconduct by police personnel, the Inspector General of Police (IG), Alkali Baba, had since recommended the suspension of the officer, who has since been charged to court.

However, the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed is one top official of the federal government that has maintained curious silence on the gruesome murder of the innocent woman, who was reportedly pregnant with twins before her untimely death. When aggrieved Nigerians took to the streets in October 2020 to protest the brutality and killing of innocent Nigerians by the disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), Mohammed had shouted to the high heavens, blaming the youths and the social media for the mayhem unleashed on the police by the protesters. Mohammed had insisted that the cause of the #ENDSARS protests was fake news and argued that the social media should be regulated.

 Even when the police top hierarchy and President Muhammed Buhari acknowledged the excesses of the dreaded SARS, disbanded it, and made genuine efforts to reform the police, Mohammed launched nationwide media campaigns against the organisers of the protests, insisting that fake news caused the riots. While nobody should justify the killing of policemen and other security agents by hoodlums that hijacked the protests, many Nigerian leaders, except Mohammed, were sensitive to the thousands of innocents Nigerians sent to their early graves by unscrupulous policemen over the years.

While the minister was busy bandying the figures of number of security agents killed by the protesters, he refused to acknowledge that this number was far less than the number of innocent Nigerian youths allegedly killed by only the dreaded Awkuzu SARS in Anambra State before the protests. He ignored the fact that Nigerians were angry, not because of the fake incident reported in Delta State, which triggered the protests, but because of the killings of innocent Nigerians over the years by policemen.

It was not surprising that the killing of Mrs. Raheem did not evoke the minister’s empathy for him to condemn it publicly. Fortunately, IG Baba and his team at the Force Headquarters have made future protests against the police unnecessary with their unprecedented commitment to end all forms of misconduct among policemen.