A former Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has again rejected claims that a “massacre” occurred at the Lekki Toll Gate during the 2020 EndSARS protests, insisting the narrative was fuelled by misinformation and unverified social media reports.
Speaking on Wednesday during an interview on ARISE News to discuss his new book, Headlines and Soundbites: Media Moments That Defined an Administration, Lai said one of the most challenging moments of his tenure was managing the spread of fake news, particularly during the EndSARS crisis.
“EndSARS was unfortunate, it was tragic, but that there was a massacre at the tollgate is fake news,” he said. He argued that in the five years since the incident, no family has publicly reported a missing relative linked to the Lekki protest.
“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 added.
Mohammed also criticised CNN’s coverage, saying the international outlet relied on “second-hand information” and that he stands by the administration’s pushback at the time. “Nobody ever said nobody died during EndSARS… But what we were saying is that CNN was not at the tollgate,” he stated.
He defended the Buhari administration’s stance that unregulated social media had become a national security threat, arguing that misinformation frequently distorted public understanding. He also reaffirmed that the 2021 suspension of Twitter was a difficult but necessary action to curb harmful content.
The Lekki Toll Gate shooting of October 20, 2020, remains one of the most contested moments in Nigeria’s recent history. Protesters had gathered peacefully to demand an end to police brutality when security forces reportedly opened fire, sparking national and international outrage.
While official investigations and eyewitness accounts differ on the scale of casualties, the incident continues to shape debates around human rights, state accountability, and media transparency in Nigeria.
