2023: Rhodes-Vivour Replies Tinubu… ‘No Healing Without Justice’

The Governorship Candidate of Labour Party in Lagos, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, has said he his party would fight for his mandate through all legal means to birth a better Lagos.

Rhodes-Vivour, who came second at the just concluded election, insisted that there was no governorship election in Lagos.

He posited that the President-Elect, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, calling for healing without justice is impossible.

Addressing newsmen at the party’s campaign office in Lagos, he said Tinubu’s call for healing is not enough because “healing cannot be done without justice.”

Rhodes-Vivour thanked Lagosians “for their courage in making decisions based on hope, and resisting fear. Our message was about empathy, love, good governance that is open and accountable.’’

He continued: “Yesterday, I spent my day visiting victims of Saturday’s state-backed terrorism and violence from Abule-Ado to Surulere, Apapa and Ikeja. I met with young men and women with bullets lodged in their bodies with deep cuts, fractured legs, etc.

“I reach out to you to say I am with you. I feel your pain and we, myself, and the deputy governor, are by your side. We have launched the platform GRV cares 2023 and anyone who has suffered violence should upload their picture, hospital bills and police report and we will help towards offsetting these bills.

“Senator Bola Tinubu called for healing yesterday (Tuesday) but healing cannot happen without justice. The APC unleashed evil on Lagosians diabolically with their fetish rites and curses during the day, and physical violence against Lagosians, yet they want the peace of the graveyard; they want the healing of the dead.

“The thrust of my message isn’t to the evil cult organization of the APC but to indigenous Lagosians, and Lagosians at large. We cannot afford to have an agberocracy or a military type of government that will use violence and diabolical means to create a one-party state. From Ikoyi to Ikeja to Ikorodu, we were all disenfranchised.

They could not campaign on their past records, so they stoked ethnic strife. For the ambition of one man and his cult, the entire credibility that INEC had built over the last four years was ripped into shreds.

For the ambition of one man, we saw our traditional institutions reduced to pawns, tools, oro rites that are done at night and were done during the day.

“This was no election. It was violence on multiple levels, diabolically and physically. On this ambition, they sowed seeds that could potentially lead to outcomes like the Rwandan genocide.

“Lagosians, our enemies are not our neighbours or visitors or fellow Lagosians with diverse tongues. Our common enemy is violence, insecurity, poverty, stagnation, corruption, and underdevelopment. It is the same people responsible for these that have weaponised poverty and ethnicity to distract us from their evil endeavours and diabolical activities. We will never have a free and fair election under a Tinubu presidency.

“They have tried to destroy years of delicately balanced ethnic relations, years of inter-marriage and friendships, years of commerce, and years of building Lagos into the economic juggernaut that it is.

I call on the silent majority, decent and cultured Lagosians, indigenous Lagosians and Lagosians at large to speak out. It is enough of the worst of us defining the rest of us.

On Saturday, we saw their vision for Lagos and agberocracy, and we will fight through all legal channels to birth our Lagos.”