The Nigeria Police Force, on Tuesday, laid siege to the New Afrika Shrine after Seun Kuti announced he would hold a mass meeting tagged: #EndSARS: Lessons and Tasks.

Shortly after the musician made the announcement, the Nigeria Police Force sent him a letter warning him to shelve his plans.

The letter read in part, “You are hereby warned to suspend such gathering as any infraction that may emerge from this gathering will be tag a deliberate action to sabotage the transition and restoration of the peace in Lagos State by the Lagos State Government and the Nigeria Police Force.”

While reacting to the decision of the police to lay siege to the New Afrika Shrine, Seun Kuti in an exclusive interview with The Punch said, “The police are stupid to have held siege at the New Afrika Shrine; that is the only explanation I have. I was not at the New Afrika Shrine. I had said that I was not going to the Shrine, I was not at the Shrine, yet they laid siege at the Shrine. That is a sign that they are stupid. I am sorry to say.

“The letter they sent to me had no legal standing. It had no constitutional backing. That is what came to my mind when I saw the letter the police sent to me at first. If the Shrine was mine, I would not have paid attention to the letter. I would have wiped my arse with it and still do my event but the Shrine is not mine.”

The afrobeat singer stressed that the meeting he later held at the Kalakuta Republic was not to foment trouble. “The Nigerian government has always been anti-dialogical, you can find Nigerian politicians travel thousands of miles to discuss with foreigners on different economic, political or social interests that concern white people in relations to what is in Africa but they will never go to 20 kilometres to have a town hall meeting with their own people and dialogue with us. This is simply because they do not have that dialogical instinct with their own people.

“It is for that reason that we had a mass meeting with the Nigerian people. We wanted it to be a meeting whereby the Nigerian people would be able to air their opinion in order to launch this massive movement that we want to use to actualize the hopes and aspirations of the Nigerian people. The government, who I guess are afraid of their own shadow, decided to proscribe the event,” he said.

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