Former Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, has reiterated his position that no massacre took place at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos during the #EndSARS protests.
The comments come amid ongoing debate over the events of October 20, 2020, when CNN reported that soldiers allegedly fired live ammunition at protesters.
The Nigerian Army has consistently denied this, stating that only blank rounds were used to enforce a government-imposed curfew.
While serving as minister, Mohammed wrote to Jonathan Hawkins, CNN’s Vice President of Communications, criticising the network’s report for “falling short of journalistic standards” and reinforcing what he described as disinformation.
He also accused CNN of relying “heavily on manipulated social media videos” and warned that the report had the potential to escalate tensions nationwide.
In an interview on Arise Television’s Prime Time on Wednesday, Mohammed acknowledged that fatalities occurred in parts of the country, including Abuja, Lagos, and Kano, during the protests.
However, he maintained that CNN’s coverage of the Lekki tollgate incident was inaccurate, noting that the network was not present on the ground and based its report on second-hand information.
“You mentioned the issue of CNN. And honestly, that pushback, I still stand by it,” Mohammed said.
“Nobody ever said nobody died during the #EndSARS. People died even in Abuja. They died in Lagos. They died in Kano. But what we were saying is that CNN was not at the tollgate. CNN relied on second-hand thought and information.”
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The former minister claimed that five years after the incident, no family have come forward to report the loss of their loved ones from the tollgate, labelling the “massacre” narrative as “fake news”.
“If a man has a goat and the goat does not come home one night, he will go out and look for that goat. Now, five years on today, nobody has come to tell us that my son or my ward went to the tollgate and didn’t come back,” Mohammed added.
“#EndSARS was unfortunate, it was tragic, but that there was a massacre at the tollgate is fake news.”
Mohammed revealed that at the height of the protests, his family held a meeting where they urged him to step down from his position.
He said they had come under severe pressure both online and offline, facing harassment, threats, and even risks to their businesses, which led them to question whether his continued service was worth it.
According to him, he had to sit them down and explain that resigning was not a simple option, noting that he had access to information and context they did not fully understand.
“During the #EndSARS, one of the toughest moments in my life was when my family met. They had a meeting and they asked me to resign. They were bullied online,” he said.
“They were bullied offline. Their businesses… they’d had enough. They said, look, wait a minute. We are not benefiting from this thing.
“So why are you exposing us? And I had to sit them down and tell them it’s not as easy as that. There are things I know. There are things that I see that you cannot see.”
