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Former Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has again dismissed claims of a massacre at the Lekki Tollgate during the October 2020 #EndSARS protests, describing the narrative as fake news.
Mohammed who served under the Buhari administration, said this while speaking on ARISE TV on Wednesday night, December 10.
Reacting to the controversy surrounding the October 20, 2020, Lekki Tollgate incident, the former minister said his disagreement with international media reports, particularly CNN’s coverage, was based on what he described as a lack of firsthand verification.
“Nobody ever said nobody died during #EndSARS. People died in Abuja, they died in Lagos, they died in Kano. But what we said was that CNN was not at the toll gate. CNN relied on secondhand and third-hand information.
If a man has a goat and the goat does not come home one night, he will go out to look for that goat. Five years on, nobody has come forward to say, ‘My son went to the toll gate and didn’t return.”
According to him, while the protests were “unfortunate and tragic,” branding the Lekki incident a massacre was misleading.
“Massacre is fake news. Thirty-seven policemen were killed, six soldiers were k!lled. This is what I kept saying.”
Mohammed also used the interview to revisit the controversial suspension of Twitter operations in Nigeria in 2021, a decision that attracted widespread criticism locally and internationally. He maintained that the move was not triggered by the deletion of President Buhari’s tweet, as widely believed, but by broader security concerns.
“Honestly, that was not the reason. I went to President Buhari and told him, ‘Sir, we need to suspend the services of Twitter.’ He asked me why. He even asked if it was because they deleted his tweet. I said no, and I gave him instances and examples.”
He further argued that Twitter had become the platform of choice for those who were destabilising the country.
Watch a video of him speaking below
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