Popular Nigerian Disc Jockey, DJ Switch, has shared her heart wrenching experience at the Lekki Toll Shooting during the #EndSARS protests in Lagos, Nigeria.
The entertainer who has been involved in the #EndSARS peaceful protest until it was called off took to her official Instagram page to recount her experience as well as urge Nigerian leaders not to undermine the sensibilities of the citizens in downplaying the lekki toll shooting incident.
Recall, that on Tuesday 20 October, 2020, a displeasing and memorable incident happened in Lagos where peaceful unarmed protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate were injured and killed by officers of the Nigerian Army.
DJ Switch who was among the peaceful protesters have been commended for her bravery and heroic act by streaming live the horrible incident on her Instagram page. Sharing her experience, she said she and other survivors took the bodies of victims to the soldiers which they took away and she regrets doing that.
Giving more details of her experience on the video shared on Instagram, DJ Switch said
“Yes, there were soldiers there. Another thing people are not talking about is that the Police were also there. The SARS people we are talking about also came about 45 minutes after the soldiers left. We were tear-gassed; the tear gas felt like Cotonou pepper mixed with acid.
We would run and come back and the only thing we fought with was our flags. We would sit on the floor; raise our hands up singing the national anthem. That was all we had. They put off the lights, even if there was no power supply on a good day, in that axis, there is always light at the Toll Gate. It was pitch-black.
…A boy jumped on me and kept shouting, ‘cover her, cover her.’ I did not even understand why he did that. They shot that boy while he was on my back.
In the video, she alleged that she counted 15 dead people and that the claims of 78 people dying are completely false. However, she showed some bullets picked by protesters as proof.
DJ Switch also appealed to people using her name to open false social media pages and accounts for followership and monetary gains in sharing untrue stories on social media to desist from it and that she will continue to peacefully speak about bad governance and leadership in the country.
Nigerians commend DJ Switch for coverage of the Lekki Toll Shooting
In another development, Nigerians have hailed DJ Switch for her uncommon bravery in not just covering the Lekki toll gate shooting incident but still being able to come out and share her experience with the world.
Some people who have praised her for the display of bravery, patriotism and care for some of the injured victims at the scene of the incident have also recommended she goes for a mental health session to help mitigate the trauma she may be going through after her ordeal.
See some of the comments below as shared on Twitter platform;
Journalist Disagrees With DJ SWITCH’s Account of the Shooting
Reacting to DJ Switch’s version of the Lekki tollgate shooting, BBC journalist Gbolahan Macjob said DJ Switch must be tried and prosecuted once the facts come out to show no one died.
According to him, we shall soon see how the dead bodies of the massacre were removed as she claimed and why their families are yet to demand their whereabouts.
Adding that when DJ Switch is being prosecuted, she won’t get asylum regardless of her CNN interview because she has manipulated the people with her lies and lies kill faster than war.
Filmmaker Contradicts Claims
Movie director, Ideh Chukwuma Innocent popularly known as Onesoul, has stated that he did not see any dead bodies at the Lekki shooting scene on Tuesday, October 20th, contradicting the accounts by DJ Switch.
Onesoul who also claimed to be present at the Lekki toll plaza at the time of shooting, noted that it’s wrong to term the incident “massacre” as he did not witness any death.
The scriptwriter told Premium times that he took to the risk to rescue injured protesters from the scene.
In his words,
“I have been hearing people say “Lekki massacre, Lekki massacre.”
I have to be honest with you if you Google the term “massacre,” massacre is a situation where a group of people were being killed by rebels or the military and going by that particular point, I would have been able to tell you that I saw a lot of dead bodies, this is how they killed them, there were a lot of dead bodies and so it was a massacre.
But from the time I came, I didn’t see any dead bodies but I can certainly tell you that there was a shooting, an unauthorised shooting. I will call it a raid, I will call it assault. I am going to term it assault and raid.
That is what I would use. It was an assault and I may be wrong but because I didn’t see those bodies, and I have not seen a family member that has come to cry and say one two or three persons have died.
If DJ Switch had seen that, she’s in the best position to say that because she was there. I cannot say she’s wrong. I was out of that circle. I was a few meters away. They were at the toll gate and I was a few meters away from them. I wasn’t there, I was at Lekki Phase 1.
I can’t tell you what the military’s approach on their arrival was. So, I wouldn’t be able to tell you that they shot one, two, three, four, or five people. But I can certainly tell you that I took a lot of gunshot victims to the hospital.
If I took about 13 people to the hospital myself, minus the ones that the governor confirmed that were injured, he said about thirty, that is forty-something, DJ Switch might not be wrong. I took 13 to the hospital.
So, if DJ Switch said she saw 15 dead people, by her own records, because she was there so she can speak on that part. I can’t speak on that.”
Despite the contradictions about the incident, Forensic analysis by DfrLab has shown that videos uploaded online by some of the victims and witnesses of the #LekkiMassacre were genuine.
