Former Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, has restated his position that no massacre took place at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos during the #EndSARS protests.
The renewed defence comes amid lingering controversy over the October 20, 2020 incident, which CNN had reported involved soldiers firing live rounds at demonstrators.
Although CNN alleged the use of live ammunition, the Nigerian Army consistently maintained that its personnel only fired blank bullets to disperse protesters in line with a curfew announced by the government at the time.
During his tenure as minister, Mohammed wrote to Jonathan Hawkins, CNN’s Vice President of Communications, condemning the report as one that “did not just fall short of journalistic standards but reinforces the disinformation that is going around on the issue”.
He accused the network of depending “heavily on manipulated social media videos” and warned that the “inciting report” could inflame tensions across the country.
Speaking on Arise Television’s Prime Time on Wednesday, Mohammed acknowledged that casualties occurred in different parts of the country during the protests, including Abuja, Lagos and Kano.
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But he insisted that CNN’s account of events at the Lekki tollgate was misleading, arguing that the network was not present at the scene and relied solely on second-hand sources.
“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.”
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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.”
