Faces to their Names: Nigeria's False Information Merchants
By Arinze Chijioke, Shehu Olayinka and Sodeeq Atanda
December 3, 2024
Sharing accurate information is a critical element of successful elections and vibrant democracies around the world, but this did not happen in many instances during Nigeria’s 2023 general election.
Rather spokespersons of political parties and influencers made blatantly false claims. These statements appeared not only intended to sway voters toward a particular party but, in some cases, to incite violence. For some of these individuals, this was not the first election during which they spread false information.
Femi Fani-Kayode, Dino Melaye, Festus Keyamo, Charles Oputa (Charly Boy), Adamu Garba and Reno Omokri are six prominent figures who garnered our attention. We are writing this story to let the public know what they did and encourage a skeptical attitude when encountering claims these men make on social media platforms. Yet while they were active online, none of the men besides Garba responded to requests for comment from CCIJ.
Femi Fani-Kayode
Fani-Kayode was appointed the director of special media projects and new media of the Campaign Council of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Nigeria’s ruling party.
Prior to the 2023 election, Fani-Kayode had held several top political positions like the Special Assistant on Public Affairs to Olusegun Obasanjo from July 2003 to June 2006. In 2006 and 2007 he also served as the Minister of Culture and Tourism and the Minister of Aviation.
Fani-Kayode has more than 2 million followers on social media platforms. During the build-up to the election, he made false claims that garnered millions of views.
Most notable: his tweet that suggested that Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar reportedly held a secret meeting with army generals to topple the government.
The tweet prompted an invitation by the State Security Service, which questioned him for five hours. Fani-Kayode expressed regret while explaining that he failed to verify the news source. But some questioned the sincerity of his apology because of other false claims he made following his interrogation. He did not respond to requests for comment from CCIJ.
Dino Melaye
Dino Melaye, the spokesperson for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential campaign council in Nigeria’s 2023 election, used his social media handles to spread inaccurate information to his more than 8.7 million followers on X, Instagram and Facebook.
On March 6, 2023, for example, the former Senator and member of the House of Representatives posted an unverified claim on X suggesting that INEC Chairman Mahmood Yakubu said that his life was “at risk.” The content had no traceable digital origin, and our investigation to substantiate the source or substance of the claim yielded no concrete information. Melaye did not respond to CCIJ’s requests for comment.
Festus Keyamo
Festus Keyamo also made the cut of prominent political stakeholders who spread false information to their large online audiences. The equivalent of Melaye in the All Progressives Congress (APC), Keyamo is the country’s aviation minister and a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN)
Prior to 2023, he made a name as a director of strategic communications of the then APC presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari campaign committee in 2019. Buhari made him the Minister of State for Niger Delta Affairs immediately after that election. He was later appointed Minister of State for Labour and Productivity by the former president.
In 2023, Keyamo led the party’s media team during the campaign. On February 9, 2023, he posted images on his social media handles which purportedly showed a large crowd at an APC presidential candidate Bola Tinubu’s campaign event in Sokoto state in the build-up to the election.
CCIJ fact-checked the claim and found that one of the pictures was originally taken in 2021, during the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago. The rest of the pictures were real photos taken during the Sokoto rally.
That false post was not a one-off claim Keyamo made or amplified during the election to his more than 1 million followers. He also stated on national television that he would employ “propaganda for propaganda” to match up with his master’s challengers’ tactics. Keyamo did not answer CCIJ’s requests for comment.
Adamu Garba
Unlike other spokespersons who played a role during the 2023 general election, Adamu Garba had a faint history in Nigeria’s political landscape apart from the fact that he was a presidential aspirant under the platform of the All Progressive Congress.
In the build-up to the 2023 election, Garba, who had more than 180,000 followers on social media, posted an image intended to depict Obi negatively to voters in the North. The picture not only portrayed him consuming alcohol, which is forbidden in Islam but also associating him with Hero beer, which some have suggested is linked to the southeastern Biafra separatist movement. SABMiller, the company that produced the beer, said in a 2014 statement that there was no political motivation behind the brand. However, our investigation found that the image was doctored, with Obi’s head and neck appearing disproportionate to the rest of his body.
When contacted by CCIJ in late November, Garba said on the phone that he could not remember the doctored photograph. “It was an election period and pictures were flying around and you had to promote your own candidate,” he said.
CCIJ tagged the altered image so that Garba could see it before sending him the original picture and asked if he had not verified the picture before posting it to his timeline.
“Wow, okay, I don’t know that,” Garba wrote.
Charly Boy
Charles Chukwuemeka Oputa, popularly known as Charly Boy, is a musician, television presenter and actor.
As of February 2023, the vigorous supporter of Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi had over 197,000 X, over 183,000 Instagram, and over 23,000 TikTok followers. An examination of his X accounts revealed that he posted at least six inaccurate claims between September 2022 and April 2023.
For example, he tweeted a picture on October 28, 2022, of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the All-Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, viewing Peter Obi on TV. However, the original image reveals Tinubu gazing at a blank TV screen while flying from the United Kingdom to Nigeria. But there was nothing visible on the screen.
Charly Boy also made a false claim about the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) electronic transmission of election results. He stated falsely in August 2022 that INEC would no longer transmit the result of Nigeria’s 2023 general election electronically as required by law, and urged Nigerian youths to protest the INEC decision. He declined repeated requests for comment.
Reno Omokri
Writing about false information in Nigeria’s political landscape wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Reno Omokri, a former Special Assistant on New Media to former President Goodluck Jonathan between 2011 and 2015.
Even after he left the political scene in 2015, Omokri has been active in Nigeria’s political landscape, earning a reputation among some observers for spreading false information, particularly on X, formerly Twitter.
A member of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Omokri has a following of over 3.8 million followers across social media.
Ahead of the 2023 general election, on January 16, 2023, Omokri claimed on X that the National Minimum Wage was N18,000. Apparently, the claim was intended to persuade Civil Servants to vote for Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the PDP, his party.
The minimum wage at the time he made the claim was N30,000, according to the National Minimum Wage Act 2019 and other available data. He did not respond to requests for comment from CCIJ.
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