Lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s former Minister of Information, has reiterated his long-held position that no massacre occurred at Lekki Toll Gate during the 2020 EndSARS protests, dismissing the pervasive narrative as “fake news” amplified by social media. Speaking on ARISE News on Wednesday, during the launch of his book Headlines and Soundbites: Media Moments That Defined an Administration, Mohammed described the claim as one of the most persistent and challenging falsehoods his office confronted.
“EndSARS was unfortunate, it was tragic, but that there was a massacre at the tollgate is fake news,” Mohammed stated. To support his argument, he pointed to the absence, five years later, of families publicly reporting missing persons linked directly to the October 20 incident. “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, nobody has come to tell us that my son or my ward went to the tollgate and didn’t come back,” he asserted.
Mohammed also took aim at international media coverage, specifically criticizing CNN. “CNN was not at the tollgate. CNN relied on second-hand thought and information,” he claimed. While acknowledging that fatalities occurred during the broader EndSARS protests in cities like Abuja, Lagos, and Kano, he steadfastly denied any instance of mass killing at the Lekki Toll Gate plaza.
During the interview, Mohammed further defended the government’s 2021 ban on Twitter, framing unregulated social media as a critical national security risk that accelerated the spread of damaging falsehoods. His book chronicles his tenure’s battle against misinformation, spanning from COVID-19 rumors to the protest narratives that defined the period.
Five years after the shootings, the Lekki Toll Gate debate continues to polarize the nation. While no federal investigation has officially overturned the state panel’s findings, Mohammed’s renewed comments underscore a fundamental and unresolved divide. For the former minister, the lack of formal missing-person reports equates to the non-existence of a massacre, reducing the event to a tragic protest scenario subsequently distorted by fake news. For many others, the collective memory of that night, backed by visual evidence and judicial inquiry, tells a profoundly different story one where accountability remains in wait.
