Lai Mohammed, ex-minister of information, has insisted that there was no massacre at the Lekki tollgate in Lagos during the #EndSARS protests.
In a report on the October 20, 2020 incident, CNN had alleged that soldiers used live bullets on the protesters.
However, the army had repeatedly denied deploying live ammunition, saying it fired blank bullets in a bid to disperse the protesters after the government had announced a curfew.
At the time, Mohammed, who was minister of information, wrote to Jonathan Hawkins, VP communications at CNN, to say the report “did not just fall short of journalistic standards but reinforces the disinformation that is going around on the issue”.
He said CNN relied “heavily on manipulated social media videos”, adding that the “inciting report” was capable of setting the country on fire.
In an interview on Arise Television’s ‘Prime Time’ on Wednesday, Mohammed said no one denied that fatalities occurred during the unrest, noting deaths in Abuja, Lagos, and Kano.
However, the former information minister specifically challenged CNN’s reporting on the tollgate incident, adding that the network was not at the scene and relied on second-hand information.
“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.”
The former minister said five years after the incident, no families have come forward to say loved ones went missing 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.”
