Former Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has once again dismissed claims that a massacre occurred at the Lekki Tollgate during the nationwide #EndSARS protests of October 2020, maintaining that while lives were lost during the unrest, no such incident happened at the Lagos protest ground.
Lai Mohammed made the assertion on Monday while appearing on Sunrise Daily, a programme aired on Channels Television.
According to him, the Federal Government under the late President Muhammadu Buhari never denied that casualties were recorded during the #EndSARS demonstrations, but has consistently rejected reports of a mass killing at the Lekki Tollgate.
He explained that several security personnel lost their lives across the country during the protests, noting that 37 police officers and six soldiers were among those killed. He added that the government publicly acknowledged these deaths and provided figures covering different states, including Kano and Abuja.
However, Mohammed stressed that the controversy surrounding Lekki Tollgate was based on misinformation. He said the government’s position remains that no massacre took place at the location, a claim he said brought him into direct disagreement with international media outlet CNN.
According to the former minister, CNN’s reporting on the incident relied on second-hand accounts rather than first-hand presence at the scene. He described the narrative of a Lekki massacre as flawed, arguing that it lacked concrete evidence.
Mohammed further stated that the Lekki Tollgate episode has been wrongly labelled as a massacre despite the absence of physical proof such as identified victims. He described it as a unique claim unlike any other in global history, insisting that no bodies were recovered from the site.
The former minister disclosed that he dedicated an entire chapter of his recently published book, Headlines and Soundbites: Media Moments That Defined an Administration, to the Lekki Tollgate controversy. He said the book was written to address and clarify what he considers widespread misconceptions in the public domain.
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Reiterating his stance, Mohammed challenged anyone with proof of a relative who allegedly died at the Lekki Tollgate on the night of October 20, 2020, to come forward, maintaining that while deaths occurred elsewhere during the protests, the Lekki Tollgate was not the scene of a massacre.
