SaharaReporters in August 2022 reported that Dare was arrested by personnel of the Nigeria Police Force from Sabo Police Station in Lagos during the #EndSARS protest in October 2020 on his way back from a studio where he went for his routine video music recording with his course mate.
Over two years after the nationwide #EndSARS protest in October 2020, a young Nigerian college student, Dare Williams and his course mate, Bethel Chukwuocha, arrested for participating in the protest in Lagos State are still detained at the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison in Lagos.
SaharaReporters in August 2022 reported that Dare was arrested by personnel of the Nigeria Police Force from Sabo Police Station in Lagos during the #EndSARS protest in October 2020 on his way back from a studio where he went for his routine video music recording with his course mate.
Dare, a student of Federal College of Education, Lagos, believes that his arrest was connected to his active participation in the #EndSARS protest where he said that he actively participated in and shared many videos of the protest on his Twitter page and a WhatsApp TV he created with about 20,000 contacts including police officers.
Dare, who was arrested alongside his course mate, Bethel Chukwuocha, said the policemen who arrested them knew him because they were the ones who had been seeing him pass by the station with his dogs.
According to him, when they were taken to the station, the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) berated him for joining the protest calling for an end to police brutality and SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad).
The DPO, according to him, threatened “To show me what the police are capable of doing. That he will send us to where we don't like.”
From participation in the #EndSARS protest, Dare and Bethel said they were accused of carjacking “and I was surprised”.
He said that they were not given an opportunity to write a statement, rather, the police gave a statement on their behalf, of which they were never allowed to know the exact content.
“They didn't allow us to see our statement. They wrote it for us. We didn't write our statement ourselves. We didn't know what was inside our statement.”
Dare said that when the journalists at the Ikeja Police Headquarters asked what they did, the DPO allegedly said they were trying to carjack a vehicle, and did not allow them to talk.
In an update on the matter, Dare told SaharaReporters that rather than conclude judgment on their case, they have only been getting court adjournment with no seriousness, saying on November 2, 2022 when he appeared in court, the prosecutor failed to present the witness he claimed to have, nor did the police appeared in court.
With the police absence from the court and the prosecutor’s failure to present his witness, “the court adjourned the case to December 14, 2022.
“Meanwhile, before we went to court on December 14th, somebody introduced a lawyer to my lawyer for them to work hand-in-hand but my lawyer refused and said he wants to handle the case alone as he does not want to partner. But on December 14th when we got to the court, he (my lawyer) saw the new lawyer, who when they called up our case, the new lawyer said he was standing a brief for my lawyer because he was potentially sick.
“They called us back to the dock and said they should give us an adjourned date because they cannot continue with the case without my lawyer. But a few minutes after the court session, my lawyer showed up and said he was stuck in traffic.
“Meanwhile, he said he stays in Ibadan and normally, he comes to court in Lagos as early as 5am or 6am but in this case, he said that he got to Lagos on Tuesday, lodged in a hotel and on his way from the hotel to the court, he got stuck in traffic. Honestly, I was not myself.
“So, I just noticed that the game is between the lawyer and the prosecutor because that was the second time such a scenario occurred. The first time it happened was when we were given adjourned date and the judge told the prosecutor to bring all his witnesses to the court but on that day when they called up our case and called us to the dock, the judge asked for my lawyer and I said I had not seen him that day, and the prosecutor was happy that my lawyer was not around.
“As usual, he was unable to present any witness and we were just given an adjourned date for June 1, 2022. That repeated in December, and this is perhaps because the lawyer was given to me by the judge. If I had gotten the lawyer myself, I don’t think I would be going through all I’m passing through now. I’m just tired of the whole process,” he lamented.