How my car was Vandalized by #EndSARS Protesters-Lawyer

A Legal practitioner whose wife has just put to birth has narrated how some #EndSARS protesters on Monday vandalized  his personal car which he parked inside the High Court premises, in Benin City on Monday.

The lawyer, Mr Solomon Aibangbe in an interview said that there was nothing inside or on the body of the car which he has been driving about the town, that could have warranted the damage.

He said the incident was so painful that he shed tears not only for the youths but for Nigeria as a country, due to what he called, ‘poor governance’.

In his words, “On Monday, I had a matter that was slated for hearing at the State High court so I left home very early in the morning, after I dropped my wife and new born baby at the hospital for immunization. I went to the court to get a date because I know that with the protests my client would not be able to make it to the court.

“I parked my car at the Criminal Division of the High Court located close to the Sapele Road prisons. There were other cars parked like mine, so I went into the court to see the Registrar.

“Thereafter I came out to enter my car and ran into the #EndSARS protesters armed with a 2 by 4 piece of wood and they hitting and shattering the front windshield of my car. Others were also smashing the side windows and the rear windshield as I was watching.

“There was nothing I could because while that was going on, there was massive shooting at the Prison premises due to the prison escape. When the tide died down, I came out to meet my car seriously damaged and tears fell from my eyes.

I wept because we are all Nigerians and if we are trying to fight injustice we cannot be inflicting pain on innocent people. We are all feeling the pains of Police brutality and poor governance. It is not enough for people to take the laws into third hands to inflict pains on others.

” In fact while I was driving the battered car home, I ran into several barricades by the protesters who stopped me. At one road block they asked to reverse and go back to where I was coming from. In another, the youths pleaded with me to come back after the crisis so they could help fix the damaged glasses.

“Somewhere also, because of my NBA (Nigerian Bar Association) sticker, they accused me of being a lawyer who sends youths to jail. They spoke in pidgin and I told them that it is not lawyers but the courts that send people to jail. I told them that some of us lawyers have even handled cases pro bono for the youths.

” The reason they stopped me was that I was in suit and well dressed and they got angry and I kept begging my way through all their checkpoints before I finally got home and parked the car and covered it to prevent rains doing more damage “.

The legal practitioner says , “I don’t know where I am going to get money to fix it because since Covid-19 we have not been going to courts. We just resumed and I just went out to find my daily bread when this happened”.