For three long years, 103 corpses lay unclaimed in a Nigerian morgue. Heaven only knows what state the remains of the poor souls were in by the time the authorities decided they ought to be buried.
Their grieving families can only hope that they were afforded more respect in death than they were in life. They died in disputed circumstances during a particularly violent period on the lawless streets of Lagos in an episode that says much about the rapidly deteriorating state of their country.
Extra-judicial killings are nothing new in President Bola Ahmed Tinibu's Nigeria, a nation in the grip of a historic crisis. Almost every day brings some fresh horror, whether it is the senseless beating of innocent students during protests over tuition fees, the casual gunning down of citizens who refuse to pay bribes, or the murder of those who simply find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time in a land that seems to be riddled with trigger happy cops.
A population suffering from Tinubu's disastrous policies has grown wearily used to such outrages. However, what happened in a place called Lekki Tollgate on 20th October 2020 was on a different scale. In the bitterest of ironies, a public protest against police brutality triggered an extra unique display of........