|
Listen to article
|
Former Nigerian Minister of Information and Culture Lai Mohammed on Saturday issued a categorical denial of a widely circulated social media report attributing to him remarks about a so-called “Hausa insurgency,” describing the story as a complete fabrication and warning that its continued circulation risks inflaming ethnic and religious tensions in an already divided country.
The viral report, which has spread across X, WhatsApp, and Facebook over the past several days, claimed that Mohammed made the remarks during an interview with Splash FM 105.5, a Yoruba-language radio station based in Ibadan, Oyo State. No such interview took place, Mohammed said.
“I categorically state that I have never made any comment regarding a ‘Hausa insurgency’ on any platform whatsoever,” he said in the statement. “I urge all Nigerians to disregard the said interview in its entirety.” He described the report as the work of “relentless agents of fake news and deliberate distortion,” and stressed that misinformation of this nature, attaching inflammatory ethnic labels to fabricated statements by a named public figure, must not be allowed to go unchallenged.
The speed with which the false report spread before any correction was issued illustrates the structural conditions that have made Nigeria one of the most active environments for political disinformation in Africa. WhatsApp, which does not carry visible authorship attribution and circulates content within encrypted group networks that are largely inaccessible to fact-checkers, serves as the primary distribution channel for fabricated audio and text attributed to public figures. The inclusion of a credible named radio station, Splash FM 105.5 is a legitimate and well-regarded broadcaster in Ibadan, gave the report a veneer of institutional verifiability that encouraged further sharing before the station or Mohammed could respond.
The content of the fabricated remarks, an allegation of ethnic insurgency and the naming of sponsors, is particularly dangerous in the current Nigerian security context. Plateau State, Benue State, and parts of the northwest and northeast have experienced acute intercommunal violence in recent months, with attacks on farming and pastoral communities generating significant loss of life and displacement. False attribution of alarmist ethnic framing to a senior political figure of Mohammed’s stature has direct potential to accelerate tension, drive reprisals, and complicate the work of security agencies and community mediators operating in those areas.
Read Also: US Troops in Nigeria Won’t Fight Bandits, Ex-General Says
Mohammed is a prominent figure in Nigerian political and media life. He served as National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress before his appointment as Minister of Information and Culture under former President Muhammadu Buhari, a position he held from 2015 to 2023. Throughout that tenure he was a vocal and prolific communicator on government policy, and he developed a public profile associated with the media-management aspects of government information work. That visibility also makes him a frequent target of fabricated statements, a pattern he himself had occasion to address repeatedly while in office.
The irony of the situation is not lost on political observers: Mohammed spent eight years as minister repeatedly warning about the dangers of disinformation and its capacity to inflame religious and ethnic divisions, and is now the named subject of precisely the kind of fabricated inflammatory content he warned against.
“Fake news poses more threat to the nation than insurgency and militancy,” he told an Abuja audience in 2018, adding that the phenomenon had the potential to set Nigerians against one another along religious and ethnic lines. The fabricated Splash FM interview follows that precise template.
Read Also: Bandits Abduct Catholic Priest, 10 Others, Kill Three
The Nigeria Press Council, the Broadcasting Corporation of Nigeria, and civil society organisations working on media literacy have each called for stronger public education around the verification of audio and text attributed to public figures before sharing, a message that has gained traction in professional circles but has had limited reach within the informal networks where fabricated content spreads most rapidly.
Splash FM 105.5 Ibadan had not issued a statement on the matter as of Saturday evening. Mohammed’s statement did not indicate whether his legal team was considering any formal action against the originators of the fabricated report.
