Lekki Toll Gate: Six Years On, Why Nigerians Must Vote Out APC in 2027 -By Jeff Okoroafor

Six years ago tonight, the lights went out at the Lekki Toll Gate. Not by accident. Not by a power grid failure. The floodlights were switched off, the CCTV cameras were dismantled, and then the soldiers arrived. They came for young Nigerians who had spent two weeks sleeping on bare concrete, sweeping the ground every evening, organizing their own ambulances, and waving the green-white-green flag while singing the national anthem. They came for people who wanted nothing more than to be treated as human beings by the police.

The Nigerian Army and police opened fire. Amnesty International’s investigation confirmed that at least 12 peaceful protesters were killed that night at Lekki and Alausa. The Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry, set up by the government itself, listened to eyewitnesses, reviewed video footage, and reached a verdict that should haunt every Nigerian who claims to love democracy: what happened at that toll gate was a massacre. Soldiers shot, injured, and killed unarmed, helpless, and defenceless protesters without provocation or justification. The panel found no hoodlums, no cultists, no weapons—only young people with tents, food packs, and a desperate hope for a better country.

And what did the ruling All Progressives Congress do? What did the man who is now President of Nigeria do?

Bola Ahmed Tinubu, then the national leader of the APC—the political godfather of Lagos, the man whose machine installed the governor who called in the soldiers—denied everything. He said he was not the “Commander in Chief” and had no power to order the killings. He claimed he had no business interest in the toll gate. He said the massacre had “complicated matters” for him. Complicated matters. For him. As if the blood of dead Nigerians was an inconvenience to his political career.

The APC government has spent six years protecting the perpetrators. No soldier has been convicted. No commander has been held accountable. The judicial panel’s report was submitted and then ignored. Families still do not know the full truth. Some victims were quietly buried in mass graves while the government insisted the bodies were “unclaimed” and unrelated to the massacre. The message from the ruling party was unmistakable: your children’s lives are expendable. Your grief is an inconvenience. Your demand for justice is a nuisance.

These are the “democrats” who wear agbadas and speak fluent English at international forums while presiding over impunity at home. These are the “progressives” who send soldiers to shoot the very citizens they claim to serve. The APC did not just kill protesters at Lekki Toll Gate. It killed the idea that a Nigerian government could ever be trusted to protect peaceful dissent. It killed the hope of a generation that believed, for one brief moment, that their voices mattered.

But here is the truth that the APC cannot bury: the young people at Lekki Toll Gate were right. They were not asking for handouts. They were not burning buildings. They were asking for an end to police brutality. They were asking for a Nigeria where a young person could walk down the street without being extorted, harassed, or shot by the very people paid to protect them. And for that, they were met with bullets in the dark.

Six years later, the same party remains in power. The same man who benefited from that political machine now sits in Aso Rock. The same system that shielded the killers at Lekki is the system that will shield them again. If we do nothing, if we vote the same way, if we allow the same party to return in 2027, we are telling the world that the massacre of our own children does not matter.

It is time to vote them out. Not with anger alone, but with a clear-eyed determination to choose something better. Nigeria does not need another strongman. It does not need another political godfather. It needs a leader who understands that the primary duty of government is not to protect the powerful but to protect the vulnerable. It needs a leader who has demonstrated, in office and out of it, that competence and compassion are not mutually exclusive.

Peter Obi is that leader.

His record as governor of Anambra State is not a fairy tale—it is a documented fact. He prioritized education, healthcare, infrastructure, and human development. He maintained fiscal discipline, reduced waste, and treated public office as a responsibility rather than an opportunity for personal enrichment. He has spent his public life insisting that Nigeria’s problem is not a lack of resources but a lack of leadership rooted in empathy and accountability. He has said, again and again, that we must choose leaders based on competence, character, capacity, and compassion—not tribe, not religion, not the tired machinery of political godfatherism.

Peter Obi is not a messiah. No single person can undo six decades of rot in four years. But he represents something the APC has proven it does not possess: a genuine belief that the lives of ordinary Nigerians matter. He has the competence to manage resources wisely, the capacity to build a team of capable Nigerians, and the empathy to remember that the people who died at Lekki Toll Gate were not statistics. They were somebody’s son. Somebody’s daughter. Somebody’s brother. Somebody’s friend.

On January 16, 2027, Nigerians will go to the polls. The choice could not be starker. On one side stands a party that ordered the lights turned off and the cameras removed. On the other stands a man who has spent his life arguing that leadership without empathy is not leadership at all.

Vote out the APC. Vote out the party that massacred peaceful protesters and then spent six years pretending it did not happen. Vote for Peter Obi. Vote for a Nigeria where the next generation does not have to sleep on the concrete at a toll gate to be heard. Vote for a Nigeria where the answer to peaceful protest is not a bullet in the dark.

The dead at Lekki Toll Gate cannot vote. But you can. Honor them with your ballot. Honor them by choosing a government that will never, ever turn its guns on its own children again.

Jeff Okoroafor is a social accountability advocate and a political commentator focused on governance, accountability, and social justice in West Africa.