Former Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has again dismissed claims that a massacre occurred at the Lekki Tollgate during the October 2020 #EndSARS protests, insisting that widespread descriptions of the incident as a mass killing are “fake news.”
Speaking on ARISE Television on Wednesday night, December 10, the former minister reiterated his long-standing position that both local and international reports—especially CNN’s coverage—were not based on firsthand investigation.
Mohammed, who served under former President Muhammadu Buhari, maintained that no family has stepped forward in the last five years to report a missing relative linked to the Lekki Tollgate shootings of October 20, 2020.
“Nobody ever said nobody died during #EndSARS. People died in Abuja, Lagos, and Kano. But what we said was that CNN was not at the toll gate. CNN relied on second-hand and third-hand information,” he insisted.
“If a man has a goat and the goat does not come home one night, he will go out to look for that goat. Five years on, nobody has come forward to say, ‘My son went to the toll gate and didn’t return.’”
Mohammed described the #EndSARS protests as “unfortunate and tragic,” but argued that the narrative of a massacre was deliberately amplified without verifiable evidence.
“Massacre is fake news. Thirty-seven policemen were killed, six soldiers were killed. This is what I kept saying,” he added.
The former minister also addressed the controversial suspension of Twitter operations in Nigeria in 2021, a move that drew global criticism and was widely believed to have been triggered by Twitter’s deletion of a tweet by then-President Buhari.
Mohammed, however, insisted that the decision was not influenced by the deleted tweet but by broader national security concerns.
“Honestly, that was not the reason. I went to President Buhari and told him, ‘Sir, we need to suspend the services of Twitter.’ He asked me why, even asked if it was because they deleted his tweet. I said no, and I gave him instances and examples,” he said.
According to him, Twitter had become a tool for groups threatening national stability, and the government moved to curb what it viewed as an emerging security risk.
A video of the former minister’s interview was aired during the programme.
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