He said it with a straight face.
On Wednesday night, December 10, 2025, former Information Minister Lai Mohammed sat under the bright Arise TV lights to sell his new book, and ended up reopening Nigeria’s deepest wound.
“Nobody has come forward to say, ‘My child went to Lekki Toll Gate and didn’t return,’” he declared, five years to the day since soldiers opened fire on unarmed #EndSARS protesters.
The studio went quiet. Social media exploded.
For many young Nigerians, those words felt like salt poured on an unhealed scar. The 2021 Lagos Judicial Panel had already ruled it a massacre, at least nine dead, dozens wounded, bodies carted away in military trucks, blood washed off before dawn. Yet here was the man who once called it a “phantom massacre,” still insisting it was all fake news.
Even the interviewer looked stunned when Lai took a swipe at CNN again, repeating that their award-winning investigation had “no single piece of evidence.”
Twitter (now X) caught fire immediately. “Uncle Lai, the bodies were loaded into Hilux vans, not Uber,” one viral post sneered. Another shared side-by-side clips: DJ Switch’s 2020 live stream of gunfire versus Lai’s calm denial in 2025.
Some called it gaslighting on steroids. Others whispered the quieter, darker gossip: “How does a whole minister sleep at night knowing the panel named soldiers and recommended prosecution, yet nobody has been touched?”
In the same breath, Lai defended banning Twitter for 18 months as his “toughest but correct” decision. Nigerians just rolled their eyes; everyone remembers downloading VPNs while the government lost billions.
Five years later, no memorial plaque stands at Lekki Toll Gate. No officer has spent a night in cell. And the man who shaped the official story is out here signing books.
The question now trending isn’t whether there was a massacre. It’s whether Nigeria will ever stop letting powerful men rewrite history in real time.
The comments under Lai’s viral clip say it all: “We will never forget.”
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