Former Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has dismissed claims that a “massacre” occurred at the Lekki Toll Gate during the 2020 EndSARS protests, insisting the narrative was driven by fake news and unverified social media reports.

 

Speaking on National Television during a discussion about his new book, Mohammed said misinformation particularly during the EndSARS period was one of the biggest challenges he faced while in office.

“EndSARS was unfortunate, it was tragic, but that there was a massacre at the tollgate is fake news,” he said.

 

The former minister argued that no family has come forward in the past five years to report a missing relative linked specifically to the Lekki Toll Gate protest.

 

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“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.

 

Mohammed also revisited his criticism of CNN’s coverage of the incident, claiming the network relied on “second-hand information.”

“Nobody ever said nobody died during 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,” he said.

 

According to Mohammed, the Buhari administration considered unregulated social media a major national threat during the protests, arguing that viral misinformation often overshadowed verified facts.

 

“One of the jobs of a communicator, one of the biggest challenges, is how do you prevent fake news and misinformation from overshadowing the real facts?” he asked.

 

He also defended the 2021 suspension of Twitter in Nigeria, describing it as a difficult but necessary step to curb the spread of harmful content.

 

The Lekki Toll Gate shooting on A, became one of the most controversial moments of the EndSARS movement, a nationwide protest against police brutality.

 

Source: Punch