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Sunday, December 3, 2023

Posts falsely claim Nigerian governor told the ruling party's presidential candidate to quit over age - Yahoo News

Social media posts shared a video purportedly showing the governor of Nigeria's Kaduna state urging the ruling party's candidate Bola Tinubu to withdraw from the presidential race because of his advanced age. But the claim is false: AFP Fact Check found that the clip was incorrectly translated as well as wrongly dubbed in English. Governor Nasir El-Rufai, who spoke Hausa in the footage, was talking about himself stepping down next year and being too tired to continue in office.

“If El-Rufai can disagree to BAT presidency, you must be a fool to want him (sic),” reads a tweet from November 19, 2022. “BAT” refers to 70-year-old Tinubu, whose full name is Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

A screenshot of the false tweet, taken on November 21, 2022

The tweet features a 16-second video of El-Rufai at a July 2022 press conference speaking in Hausa, one of the major languages spoken in northern Nigeria.

An English quote contained in the tweet claims El-Rufai said the following about Tinubu: “Since Asiwaju knows he’s gotten to the age that he no longer has the strength, he should leave it to those with the strength & we’ve been discussing with him even 2days ago we discussed that & he refused (sic).”

The tweet has been both retweeted and liked more than 6,000 times and was posted by an account that supports opposition candidate Peter Obi.

Reno Omokri, a former presidential spokesman and member of the opposition People’s Democratic Party, shared the video with an out-of-sync...



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