Former Information Minister Lai Mohammed has reignited controversy over the 2020 #EndSARS protests, insisting on his long-held position that no massacre occurred at the Lekki tollgate, despite years of public outrage and global scrutiny.
CNN had alleged that soldiers fired live bullets at protesters on October 20, 2020, but the Nigerian Army maintains it deployed only blank ammunition to enforce the curfew. Mohammed, who led the government’s media response at the time, fiercely challenged the report, accusing CNN of pushing “manipulated social media videos” and circulating an “inciting report” capable of destabilising the country.
Speaking on Arise Television’s Prime Time, the former minister once again dismissed the tollgate massacre narrative, saying CNN was not even at the scene.
“You mentioned the issue of CNN. And honestly, that pushback, I still stand by it,” he 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.”
Mohammed insisted that five years on, no family has come forward to declare a loved one missing from the Lekki protest, a point he used to reinforce his argument.
“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,” he said.
“#EndSARS was unfortunate, it was tragic, but that there was a massacre at the tollgate is fake news.”
The ex-minister also revealed that the crisis nearly tore his family apart, with relatives begging him to resign at the height of the protests due to online and offline harassment.
“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… 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.”
Mohammed, who is currently promoting his new book Headlines and Soundbites — Media Moments That Defined an Administration, also described Twitter’s suspension in 2021 as one of the toughest decisions he made.
“One of the most difficult decisions I took was suspending Twitter’s operation in Nigeria… Twitter became the platform of choice for all those who wanted to destabilise the country,” he said.
He rejected claims that the suspension was revenge for Twitter deleting one of President Muhammadu Buhari’s tweets.
“I went to President Buhari and told him we needed to suspend Twitter’s operations. He asked me why and specifically said, ‘Is it because they deleted my tweet?’ I said no, sir,” Mohammed added.
