Former Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has reiterated his dismissal of 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 reports amplified on social media.
Speaking on ARISE News on Wednesday to promote his new book, Headlines and Soundbites: Media Moments That Defined an Administration, Mohammed stated that battling misinformation was one of the biggest challenges of his tenure.
“EndSARS was unfortunate, it was tragic, but that there was a massacre at the tollgate is fake news,” he insisted.
Mohammed argued that the lack of verifiable missing persons reports disproves the massacre claim: “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 also defended the Buhari administration’s criticism of CNN’s reporting on the incident, claiming the network relied on “second-hand information.” While acknowledging that people died during the broader EndSARS protests in several cities,he maintained that the security forces did not carry out a massacre at the toll gate itself.
The former Minister concluded by defending the 2021 suspension of Twitter, describing the move as a difficult but necessary step taken because the administration viewed unregulated social media as a national threat frequently fueling misinformation.
