For many Nigerians, Lai Mohammed has reopened the wound of Lekki Tollgate massacre.
Appearing on Arise TV yesterday night, Mohammed said it was misleading for international and local media to brand the incident as massacre.
Recall that Nigerians, frustrated over the brutality of the defunct SARS, arose in nationwide protests in 2020. The government’s response was again unusually brutal, especially at Lekki Tollgate. That fateful day – October 20, 2020 – heavily armed law enforcement agents and soldiers opened fire on harmless protesters and murdered countless number of people in cold blood.
In his characteristic hyperbole and shameless lying, Lai Mohammed said in a national TV that no Nigerian was killed at Lekki Tollgate.
“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,” Lai Mohammed lied.
According to the former minister, it were policemen and soldiers, not protesters, who were killed.
“Massacre is fake news. Thirty-seven policemen were killed, six soldiers were k!lled. This is what I kept saying,” he continue.
Notorious for his habitual lying habit throughout his days in Buhari’s cabinet, Lai Mohammed was deeply hated. And it didn’t help that he was serving under an administration which thrived in errors. He needed to lie many times everyday.
His fresh interest in the Lekki Tollgate incident may be part of the broad campaign for President Bola Tinubu’s second-term bid in 2027. Nobody knows. Or it could be part of covert actions to right the country’s image before the international community at the time when US President Donald Trump is highlighting the Nigerian politicians’ alleged complicit in the ongoing atrocities in the country.
Tinubu is still widely believed to have used Federal Government to orchestrate the massacre.
