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Please note that the FactCheckHub has not obtained any right from the authors or copyright owners of all third-party contents from embedded links and shall incur no liability in this regard.
Please note that the FactCheckHub has not obtained any right from the authors or copyright owners of all third-party contents from embedded links and shall incur no liability in this regard.
ON Tuesday 13th August, President Muhammadu Buhari disclosed that Nigeria has achieved food security, thus directed the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to stop Forex to food importers.
“We have achieved food security,” Buhari said proudly.
Buhari made this disclosure while hosting the All Progressives Congress (APC) Governors during Eid-el-Kabir celebration in Daura, Katsina State, stressing that the foreign reserve of the country would be spent solely to diversify the economy.
But this claim has been a subject of debate among Nigerians at home and abroad.
Buhari’s agriculture development policy
The Federal Government in 2016 unveiled the Agriculture Promotion Policy (APP) otherwise known as the Green Alternative. It was an integration of the past government’s agricultural policy – Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA). The policy was targeted to achieve ‘food security’, import substitution, job creation and diversify the economy.
It specifically prioritised crop productions as a way of achieving the food security plan, and boost export for increased foreign revenue.
“Focusing policy on achieving improved domestic food security and boosting export earnings requires a measure of prioritisation. Therefore, for domestic crops, the initial focus in 2016 – 2018 will be expanding the production of rice, wheat, maize, soya beans and tomatoes,” the policy states without a specific benchmark.
Going by the policy document, Nigeria is expected to have significantly improved food production beyond local demand, particularly farm commodities such as rice, wheat, maize, soya beans and tomatoes by end of the president’s first tenure in office.
Other crops targeted for increased local production and exports within the same period include cocoa, cassava, oil palm, sesame and gum Arabic.
But what is food security?
The term food security has an implied or explicit meaning, but there are major variables such as access to food, food availability and affordability in terms of prices. The continuous change in the operational definition of the concept has led to more inclusion of other parameters such as food safety and nutritional values for a balanced diet for a healthy living.
As defined by the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security, and adopted by the International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI), food security “means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active healthy life”.
The World Food Programme (WFP) also notesthat people are considered, “food secured when there are availability and adequate access at all times to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and better living”.
Also, 2019 Global State of Food Security and Nutrition report analysed food security from two indicators – Prevalence of Undernourishment (Hunger) which estimates the number of people that lacks access to dietary energy, secondly, those who lack access to nutritious and sufficient food due to lack of money or other resources. Does this apply to food reality in Nigeria?
In relation to the food situation in Nigeria, this means beyond food production, do we have enough nutritious food to maintain a healthy living of over 190 million Nigerians. Are these foods safe? Are they accessible and sufficient at all time?
The Global Food Security Index (GFSI), while measuring Nigeria’s food security ‘fete’ ranks the country 96 from the 113 index countries. Nigeria was surpassed by most African countries such as Angola, Rwanda, Togo, Kenya, Cameroun and Benin Republic in the food security index. Nations that are currently battling with crises, such as Myanmar where killings as a result of religious clashes, and forced migration still got higher ranks than Nigeria.
Nigeria which ranks 96 leads Sudan by only three steps, ranking 99 from the 113 nations surveyed.
The ICIR takes a further look into Nigeria’s volume of local food production as detailed by the FAO in alignment with the APP, it showed an unstable increase in production except for rice and maize but does not translate to food security. The agricultural policy has also not been fully realised.
For instance, Nigeria produced Soybeans to the tune of 588,523 MT in 2015. In 2016 it increased to 614,632 MT and 730, 000 in 2017 while local demand is currently 750, 000 MT.
For wheat, 60, 000 MT was produced in 2015 and 2016 while 66, 576 metric tons was realised in 2017. No available data on 2018 production while local demand is 4.7 million MT.
In 2015, Nigeria produced 6.2 million Metric Tons (MT) of rice paddy, in 2016 it increased to 11.3 million MT, while 9.86 million MT of rice paddy was realised in 2017. No clear data on 2018 harvest but local demand for rice stands at between 6.3 and 7 million MT.
In 2015, 10.5 million MT of maize was produced. In 2016, it increased to 11.5 million MT while 10.4 million metric tons of the commodity was realised in 2017. No available data on 2018 production. However, while the APP puts the demand figure at 7.5 million MT, the Maize Farmers Association of Nigeria placed the current production figure at 20 million MT.
As for tomato, about 4.22 million MT of the commodity, major perishable farm produce was produced in the country in 2015. Its production declined to 4.12 million MT in 2016 and in 2017, it further went down to 4.10 million MT while local demand stood at 2.2 million MT.
World Poverty Clock
One of the globally accepted platforms to measure attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 2), especially on extreme poverty is the World Poverty Clock. It says 94.17 million Nigerians are currently living in extreme poverty. According to the clock, as of January 2016, 78.04 million Nigerians were extremely poor. Meanwhile, the SDG goal two which connotes end hunger; achieve food security as well as nutrition should be achieved by 2030.
However, these imply that between 2016 and August 2019, 16.13 million Nigerians have been plunged into extreme poverty. But if the claim by the federal government is true that 5 million people were rescued from poverty in the first four years of Buhari’s administration, it means, there would still be over 11 million extremely poor Nigerians. The clock further predicted a likely increase in the percentage of people living in extreme poverty to 46 per cent by 2030.
Malnutrition still on the increase
In addition, the FAO in its report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (2018) largely linked access to a healthy diet and safe nutrition to food security. It maintains that food insecurity could cause child stunting, micronutrient deficiencies and obesity. As a result, the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) in the latest 2019 state of food security and nutrition report, however, says an estimated 2 million children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition in Nigeria.
“The alarming signs of increasing food insecurity and high levels of different forms of malnutrition are a clear warning that there is considerable work to be done to make sure we leave no one behind on the road towards achieving the SDG goals on food security and improved nutrition,” the State of Food Security and Nutrition Report 2018 and 2019 states, affirming the link between food security and malnutrition.
The reports were signed by Jose Graziano da Silva, FAO Director-General, David Beasley, WFP Executive Director, Gilbert Houngbo, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Henrietta Fore, UNICEF and Tedros Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.
But specifically, the report affirmed that 46.1 million Nigerians were severely food insecure between 2015 and 2017. It shows further that 21.5 million Nigerians were as well under-nourished between the same period as against 1.7 million persons in Senegal and 1.9 persons in Sierra Leone. It also listed Nigeria among low-income food-deficit countries.
2018 version of the same report, released this year shows the prevalence of stunted children rose to 43.6 per cent from 13.9 per cent in 2017. The number of severely malnourished people also rose to 25.6 million people.
In conclusion, the FAO further identified food security as a multi-dimensional phenomenon rather than a single indicator to measuring attainment of food security as disclosed by the president.
Verdict
Based on these pieces of verifiable pieces of evidence, the president’s claim of achieving food security cannot be substantiated, thus MISLEADING and at worse FALSE. This is because food security goes beyond food production. Rather it also comprises access, affordability, nutrition and safety. Aside from the available evidence, Nigeria has currently ranked among the nations with second-highest burden on stunted children globally with 32 per cent national prevalent rate.
IBRAHIM Ali, a one-time Nigerian minister of state for petroleum resources and former managing director of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), said that “20 per cent of power generated globally is from solar”.
“Germany’s 20 per cent electricity is solar generated even when they are not as endowed as we are, sun wise. It is all about believing in yourself and your ability to identify your shortcomings and needs and which best is the way to go about solving them,” he added.
Ali, who was an honorary special adviser to former Borno State governor Kashim Shettima and in charge of executing his industrialisation policy, made the claim during an interview granted to Daily Trust in April.
Speaking primarily on the state’s recently unveiled solar panel manufacturing plant, he described the factory as “world-class”, “best and biggest in Africa”. But a fact-check by The ICIR established there are at least two others on the continent with larger production capacities.
Solar energy actual contribution is much lower
Checks revealed that the contribution of solar power to the global energy output is not up to 20 per cent. Indeed, it hovers a little above 2 per cent.
According to the International Energy Agency’s 2018 statistical overview on renewable energy, as of 2016, solar, wind, geothermal, and tide energy all constituted 1.6 per cent of the world’s total primary energy supply (This increases to 5.5 per cent if the data is restricted to electricity production). In fact, all renewable energy sources, including hydro-power and bio-fuels, contributed only 13.7 per cent.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) energy has, however, grown annually since 1990 at an average rate of 37.3 per cent, and solar thermal at 11.5 per cent.
The same agency, in its report on Solar PV, last updated in May, says with its estimated growth in 2018 “the solar PV share in global electricity generation exceeded 2 per cent for the first time”.
The IEA’s figures are corroborated by the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which states that the overall contribution of solar energy to global power generation remains low at 2.2 percent.
Also, according to the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, Europe’s largest solar research institute, solar energy has contributed 10.7 per cent of Germany’s net electricity generation in 2019, growing from 7 per cent in 2017.
DIRECTOR-GENERAL of the National Population Commission (NPC), Ghaji Bello, on Wednesday, said the estimation of Nigeria’s population presently stands at about 198 million.
The NPC was set up by the federal government to collect and publish data on population, so it is the topmost authority on the subject.
“We arrived at the estimated 198 million after elimination of all the variables like mortality rates,” Bello told the News Agency of Nigeria, ahead of the World Population Day marked globally today.
But the agency gave the same figure well over a year ago.
Eze Duruiheoma, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and NPC’s immediate past chairman, made the disclosure in April 2018 while delivering a talk at the 51st session of the Commission on Population and Development in New York.
“Nigeria remains the most populous in Africa, the seventh globally with an estimated population of over 198 million,” he said.
Whereas, in 2017, the commission’s Director-General had given the country’s population as 182 million. That estimate, he had explained, was based on “the population of 140 million recorded in the last census a decade ago, using an annual growth rate of 3.5 per cent weighed against other variables such as rising life expectancy and a declining infant mortality rate”.
So, is it that Nigeria’s population has remained the same since 2018 or has the NPC simply failed to update its data to reflect the country’s growth rate?
What is Nigeria’s true population estimate?
The website of NPC has been inaccessible for a while and the data reports and publications previously uploaded could not be extracted.
However, data from the commission first published as a gazette in 2009 and titled “Population Figures and Growth Rate Based on 2006 Population and Housing Census” has been made public by the National Bureau of Statistics.
The document shows population estimates between 2006 and 2016 based on the last census conducted by the commission. An analysis of the data shows that the progression over the years since 2006 are all based on the assumption that there’s a constant growth rate of 3.25 per cent.
The NPC projected that Nigeria’s population as of 2016 would be an estimated 193.4 million. Using the same growth rate figure, then the country’s population in 2019 should be 212.9 million. But international organisations have formed a different assessment.
The United Nations’ Economic and Social Affairs, in its 2019 World Population Prospects Data Booklet, has stated that Nigeria’s mid-year population is 200.9 million in 2019, will be 263 million in 2030, and 401 million come 2050. The growth rate adopted by the agency, for 2019, is also a modest 2.6 per cent.
So, is the NPC wrong to have maintained that Nigeria’s estimated population is 198 million even since April 2018? Bola Lukman Solanke, a senior lecturer at the Obafemi Awolowo University with a Ph.D. in Demography and Social Statistics, does not think so.
“We should understand that all population projections all over the world are based on assumption. The way we do it technically is we have low variant, medium variant, and high variant,” he explained to The ICIR.
“That 198 million he is talking about is the medium variant. He is not talking about the high variant. He is just being realistic. It is an average person that will say because it is a new year, we expect the population to increase.
“But when you are talking in terms of the aggregate, the increase or the reduction are not that obvious. So you want to play safe by holding on to the 198 million which they reported last year. Aggregating population to determine increase or decrease is not done per month or per quarter; we do it yearly … I believe that’s why the NPC director is not going beyond that.”
Solanke also said the accurate estimate of Nigeria’s population depends on who is making the estimate and what assumptions they rely on to make projections, based on 2006 census figures.
“Roughly now, what we adopt, we are talking in terms of about 198 to 200 million, based on the growth rate obtained from the 2006 census,” he said.
Awaiting an overdue census exercise
One fundamental reason for the conflicting reports about Nigeria’s population estimates is that no population count has been conducted since 2006. The United Nations Population Fund has recommended that a national census is conducted every 10 years.
“Though it is a very laborious and costly operation, it is a vital one. Only a census can provide the fine-grained and accurate data needed by analysts and policymakers to make informed, evidence-based development policies,” it states.
“A series of censuses allow experts to assess the past, describe the present and estimate for the future.”
Nigeria’s constitution does not state how frequently censuses are to be taken in the country, but only empowers the NPC to undertake “periodical enumeration” of the population using surveys and censuses. This is however not the case in some other countries. For instance, the constitution of the United States mandates that a census be done every 10 years.
The NPC had said the census proposed to be held in 2018 and projected to gulp N222 billion could not go as plan due to poor funding, but it assured last weekend that one will be done before the end of President Buhari’s second term.
Solanke blames what he calls “political pressures” for the delay of census-taking and inflation of figures in Nigeria.
“Ordinarily, it’s supposed to be a routine statistical exercise, but in Nigeria, it is politicised. I understand that there are aspects of the constitution that provide that states of the federation, they receive money from the federation account based on the population,” he noted.
“And then the Independent National Electoral Commission also delineates constituencies based on population, so every politician wants to struggle to make sure that his area or his constituency has an inflated figure. That has been the problem we have, but we are supposed to take the census only as a statistical exercise without political involvements.
He added that Nigeria is already behind schedule and needs to have another census soon, whether emphasis is placed on politics or technicality.
“We need this information to update our national database for administration. A lot of new things are emerging. If we really want to administer this country efficiently, we need this accurate population census.”
Following a recent rape allegation against Biodun Fatoyinbo, senior pastor at the Commonwealth of Zion Assembly (COZA), one claim that has gone viral on the social media is that only 18 defendants have ever been convicted of rape since the start of Nigeria’s legal history. But checks by The ICIR show this to be inaccurate.
The statement originated from a speech delivered by human rights lawyer Evans Ufeli who reportedly said at an event in 2015 that, “The Nigerian criminal code recommends life imprisonment for rape convicts and 14 years for attempt rape, but only 18 people have ever been convicted in Nigeria.”
He has, however, denied saying this, in an interview with The ICIR, and attributed the error to the journalist who filed the report. But this has not stopped many, including academics and foreign organisations, from believing and restating the claim.
Ireti Bakare-Yusuf, the Principal Partner of NottingHill Media, repeated the statistic in a 2018 interview with the BBC Pidgin. “Since Nigeria was born, 58 years, we only get 18 rape convictions,” she said.
Google’s search engine returned “about 560 results” for online platforms where this claim has been shared, including Nairaland, Lawyard, Daily Advent, Medium, and Academia. It was also cited in this 2016 Country Information and Guidance report published by the United Kingdom Home Office.
When the scandal against the COZA’s pastor went viral on social media, many Nigerians dug into past records to resurrect the 2015 claim and it has again gone viral—as proof of everything that’s wrong with the Nigerian criminal justice system.
The claim was shared here on Twitter and has also been widely circulated on Facebook and WhatsApp. One of the tweets has been liked 205 times and retweeted by 316 users, and a similar post on Facebook had over 5,500 reactions.
“I heard something profound yesterday, which was confirmed to me by a lawyer today,” one Nigerian, Etin-Osa Imagbenikaro, tweeted. “In the history of Nigeria, we have only had 18 rape convictions so far. 18!! The law as it’s written on convicting a rape case is very archaic and does not do justice for the victims.”
Our findings
The lack of an aggregated record of sexual offenders in Nigeria makes it difficult to state with certainty how many convictions have been recorded over a period of time.
Some have clamoured for the country to introduce a Sex Offenders’ Registry for this purpose as is the case in Australia, Canada, USA, USA, and other countries. For now, only Lagos and Ekiti states are notable for having such a registry, but even these are not easily accessible and are said not to be regularly updated.
However, in fact-checking the validity of the claim, we mined both law reports and news reports focusing on court cases where there were rape charges, and we were able to trace and gather 65 rape convictions between 1973 and 2019.
Of all these convictions, 32 took place in 2015 and the years before, while 33 took place after 2015. Most of the verdicts were delivered by Magistrate, Sharia, Upper, and High Courts. The punishments range between seven lashes of the cane and death by hanging.
And this list isn’t exhaustive. It does not include all the cases mentioned in law reports or spotlit by reports from media organisations. Also, not all convictions secured against persons alleged to commit rape make their way into such reports in the first place.
This was confirmed by Chinedu Obianu, lawyer and Principal Partner at Zest Partners, who said though rape is an offence that’s difficult to prove in court, “that figure is too small” and not reasonable.
He said finding the accurate statistics will involve research into law reports, noting that the reports cover only judgments from the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. Consequently, cases that are not appealed beyond the high court level will not be featured.
“But the truth is that the bulk of these cases are handled by the various state high courts and magistrate courts across the nation,” he added.
This is not to suggest that Nigeria does not have very low conviction rates when it comes to sexual assault cases. It has been noted that out of a total of 283 cases of child defilement reported in Lagos in 2011, only 10 were prosecuted and convicted, and studies suggest that “sometimes as much as 84 percent of the female population have experienced sexual assault or defilement in childhood”. This means there is a conviction rate of less than 10 per cent.
Wanda Ebe, the founder of Wanda Adu Foundation, an NGO aimed at eradicating violence against the girl-child, said she does not know the exact number but “a lot of times we don’t get justice on rape cases”. She blames this on victim-blaming and extortion by police officers as well as inefficiencies in the judiciary.
“I haven’t seen any case where justice is served that I have handled directly,” she told The ICIR. “And, even for my sister-colleagues, I just hear of reports, investigations, follow-ups, but we have never been successful in getting justice on any case of child defilement. So it is annoying and discouraging because the whole justice system is messed up.”
Verdict
Even though the exact figure is not available owing to poor record-keeping, available reports show that Nigeria has recorded well over 18 convictions for rape trials—even as of 2015. The claim is therefore not true.
‘I said 18 per cent, not 18 cases,’ Ufeli clarifies
Ufeli, whose reported statement is the origin of the misconception, has told The ICIR he never said what was reported in the online paper. Cadrell Advocacy Centre, where he is the executive director, had conducted a survey that focused on incidents of rape between 2005 and 2015.
The advocacy group, which provides legal aid to indigent sexual assault victims, had discovered that the alleged perpetrators were only convicted in 18 per cent of the cases studied.
“We did a survey looking at the conviction rates and then looking at possible causes and effects of the low rate of conviction,” Ufeli said. “We posed a lot of questions: is it that the rape incidents are low? Or is it that it is high but the legal system is weak? Or is it that both the legal system and the offence are both weak and low?”
“Then we conducted this survey and found out that from all the cases that have been conducted ten years to that time, there was a conviction rate of 18 per cent. Not even from 1960; Premium Times went to write that from independence,” he clarified.
“It was shocking. A lot of people called me. Even I was invited to the UK on that issue, and I had to explain to them that it is not 18 cases. It was 18 per cent and it was in a span of 10 years; 10 years to that event.”
He also said he has asked Premium Times to correct the error in the report, but “it’s still like that till today and a lot of people are doing research; they are making reference to it. And my name is there.”
Ahead of the 2019 Nigeria’s general elections, many Nigerians knowingly or ignorantly shared misinformation on the social media. Some of these purveyors of fake news have large followings on the social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Damilola BANJO and Shola LAWAL sifted through some of the widely shared posts that turned out to be fake news. Here is the excerpt of the report:
NIGERIA’s tightly contested general elections held three months ago amid pockets of violence and unrest. In Lagos, Rivers and Kano States, there were multiple reports of voter intimidation, assault, and even death. Across the country, at least 39 people died during that period.
These unrests have become characteristic of Nigerian elections and therefore are hardly surprising. But the chaos this year were also likely fuelled by violent propagandist messages spread on social media by agents of political parties, particularly supporters or opponents of the two major parties and their candidates: Incumbent president Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
Photographs and videos of purported rigging and violent attacks by political thugs littered the walls of Facebook and Twitter. Many more were circulated on WhatsApp messenger – the most used messenger in Nigeria and across Africa, according to WeAreSocial.
We have analysed five of the most interesting and the most widely circulated propagandist messages in the form of videos and photos.
Professor of Falsehood?
One of the videos shows a woman thumbprinting several ballot papers while casually chatting with a friend. The video was shared by several users on Twitter and WhatsApp.
Farook Kperogi/INEC official Screenshot
But a high-profile account share seems to have garnered a high number of views and engagement. Mr. Farooq Kperogi, an associate professor of Journalism at Kennesaw State University – according to his Twitter profile – shared the video with his over 30,000 followers. A quick scroll through Kperogi’s Twitter reveals he’s a staunch critic of the Nigerian Government led by President Muhammadu Buhari, and that gave us an idea of his political leanings. Mr. Kperogi also shared another interesting video – this one shows about 4 Hausa-speaking men thumbprinting massively, but we’ll come back to it.
In the first tweet, Mr. Kperogi claimed the woman in the video was an INEC official “thumb printing on an industrial scale”. The tweet, posted on February 25, implied rigging during the February 23 elections. It came just in time: Nigerians were anxiously waiting for the election results and violence in states like Rivers and Kano had already spiralled out of control. Those elections had to be put off till later dates. Many Twitter users pointed out that the video was fake, that it had no relation to the 2019 polls, but Mr. Kperogi paid them no mind. One seemingly frustrated user asked Mr Kperogi, “Are you a professor of falsehood?”
The video
It was tough to know exactly where this video was filmed. It had appeared on social media dozens of times with different captions, claiming a number of far flung locations. Apart from Mr. Kperogi, and some 1,414 people who retweeted the video from his account, we found the video across multiple social media platforms with a plethora of claims.
One Twitter user, @chrysaloy, who tweeted it two days after the elections claimed that the “INEC official”, was rigging for the APC, in favour of President Buhari.
We were fascinated by all these, so we dug deeper. Several image reverse searches later, coupled with repeated scrutiny on Google Maps, we cracked it.
Our investigations revealed that this particular clip is actually a favorite for fake news accounts. The same video was shared on Youtube during the 2016 Edo State governorships and was captioned ‘INEC Officials rigging in Edo state’.
Ebal’s blog/INEC official screenshot
It turned out this video was that of an INEC official rigging elections. Only it was neither the 2016 nor the 2019 elections.
We know this because we found the original version of the video, and possibly the first Youtube upload, back in 2015.
As expected, the original version was sharper, with better resolution. We were able to look closely at the ballot paper and evidence that this is a ‘fake news’ video became clearer.
First, the ballot papers used in the 2019 elections were definitely different – bigger and a bit longer. The papers in the video are smaller and less colorful, closer to the ones used in the 2015 elections.
Also, since we now have a higher resolution video, it was easier to make out the exact party the official was thumbprinting for. If you look too, you’ll see that her thumb pressed on the logo of the first party on the list. We checked the 2015 ballot papers to confirm which party that was. It’s the Accord Party. The bright yellow logo of the party is unmistakably the same one the official repeatedly presses on. Besides, because the parties are listed in alphabetical order, the Accord Party often comes first on the ballot paper.
This clearly debunks the claim that the woman was thumb printing for the APC. But we were not done. We still wanted to know exactly where this incident happened.
Our search took us from Youtube to Nairaland. We discovered the Nairaland account of the original Youtube uploader, a blogger named Alex Report. Alex wrote on his page that the video was filmed in Ward 4, Aniocha North Local Government Area in Delta State. We believe this to be true because there wasn’t any information about the clip predating Alex’s report.
Other voters in that area left helpful clues in pictures posted on Twitter that helped us narrow the location possibilities. They showed pictures of polling units in other schools in Aniocha North. From Alex’s video, we already guessed that the woman was sitting on a school chair and desk, the type used in many government schools in Nigeria. In Ward 6, for example, the school blocks share the same colors with the class block in the video.
Screenshot Ward 6/ INEC Official video
Alex, the original poster was kind enough to leave the number of the Ward 4 supervisor. We used the Truecaller application to confirm the supervisor’s identity. Her name was revealed as Faith Nkechi Chiejile. We even called her. She denied knowing the person in the video but admitted being an ad hoc INEC staff at that ward during the 2015 elections. We pressed further. Surely, as the team leader, she must recognise the culprit. We sent her the video and followed up with questions. At this point, she stopped responding.
So, we concluded that the video was not recorded in 2019 as Mr. Kperogi would want people to believe, neither was the rigging in favour of APC as claimed by several Twitter and Facebook users.
Inferno During Election?
We analysed other interesting videos but none was as intriguing as that of a fire allegedly set off by Yoruba APC members in Oshodi, Lagos to intimidate Igbo PDP voters. It was first posted by Twitter user @iamchiomaa. The video circulated widely on WhatApp messenger with the same claim.
Screenshot Chioma’s tweet/Fire video
There had been political tensions among the Igbos living in Lagos, a predominantly Yoruba state. High ranking party officials of the APC had stoked this tension with comments suggesting that the Igbos should go back to eastern Nigeria. So this tweet played on emotions that were already running high. It was shared severally among Igbos who believed that shops of their kinsmen were getting burnt to the ground.
The same video was posted on Youtube; the caption implying it was taken during the elections, but this time, in Adamawa State. People fell fast for it on Facebook too, where it was similarly linked to violence in Adamawa.
It’s easy to see why this video was easy fodder for propagandists. The fire in question raged with intensity, taking a whole row of shops with it. A Twitter codec that distorts audio uploaded on Twitter affected the video. This meant that the versions uploaded on Twitter were not audible, making it harder for unsuspecting sharers to discern what the people in the video were saying. Luckily, a media researcher who had received the video on WhatsApp sent it to us for verification. The version sent on WhatsApp has better audio and we were able to analyse the voices from this version.
Not Lagos, not Adamawa, but where?
We knew the location of the burning shops was not Oshodi in Lagos, neither was it Adamawa. We pored over the video frame by frame. Our multiple reverse image searches only brought false positive results. But we kept looking because we had clues from the video that convinced us it was shot anywhere but Lagos or Adamawa.
For one, the language spoken in the clearer versions of the video was neither the Yoruba or Hausa spoken in Lagos or Adamawa. The women screaming as the fire raged were not covered with hijabs, as would be the case in majority-Muslim Adamawa.
Residents in Oshodi confirmed to us that there was no recent fire incidence in the area. We already had our doubts. But we still didn’t have a location.
The MTN signboard visible in the video points to somewhere in West Africa, where the telecom company operates. But the ‘POS withdrawal’ business sign post in the video is mostly found in rural communities with no bank presence. Again, this greatly reduces the possibility that the fire was in Oshodi, where banks are within proximity.
On the other hand, these withdrawal businesses are common in Nigeria’s south-south region – where customers POS machines serve as ATMs. We know because we’ve reported from the area and we’ve seen them. But at this point, we were still guessing. The presence of fuel kegs at the site of the fire outbreak reinforced our guess: It’s common to sell illegally-refined oil and petroleum products cheaply in roadside markets in the oil-rich Niger-Delta.
Still, all these were at best circumstantial. It didn’t point us to an exact spot.
So, we put the open source principle to use. We sought help within the open source intelligence community. People pointed us to Togo, Ghana, and Cameroon. But two Anglophone Cameroonians we spoke to said: ‘That’s definitely not Cameroon.’ Another said: ‘We don’t have those POS things’. Therefore, Cameroon was out.
We continued to look. We took screen shots and did several reverse searches again, while following trails left on social media and by the OSINT community.
Weeks after we put out the call, we stumbled on a clue on Facebook that would lead us to where the video of the alleged Oshodi fire was filmed.
Screenshot commenter on Facebook/Fire video
A commenter on one of the many posts claiming the fire was from the 2019 elections said the fire had no connection to the polls and that it had, in fact, occurred in her locality.
We investigated this claim like hundreds of other pointers we had followed to deadends. We found that truly, a devastating fire had occurred in February in Bomadi Local Govt Area, Delta State. Only one news website reported it. Two children had been cooking noodles on a kerosene stove when it exploded, burning the shop they were in. Sixty more shops were razed in that incident, according to the article. The fire happened along Bomadi Gbaregolor Akugbene Ezebiri road.
Close up of screenshot 5
The article led us to another video of the fire that we had missed earlier. This new video was shot from a different angle, northwest of the location of the first filmer, who was standing right in front of the inferno. Fifty-two seconds of footage confirms that the fire was also in Bomadi, but doesn’t confirm the street. We are convinced that the two videos show the same fire because of matching clues in both.
The burning structures in the videos have similar triangle-like patterns, that matched.
Vegetation behind the structures in both videos are similar too.
We matched similar electricity poles, and the curves of the streets.
Note too, that the filmer in the second video says nothing about elections. It’s perhaps because the video was posted on the 21st of February, 2 days before the elections. That puts the fire on or before the 21st of February. It most definitely had nothing to do with the February 23 polls.
Although the initial poster on Twitter deleted the video due to pressure from those who would not stand for tribalism and misinformation, the damage was already done. The video had already spread on other sites, including WhatsApp. And the truth, sadly, could not catch up.
Misrepresented
Before we go back to the second video we linked to Mr. Kperogi, let’s talk photographs.
Dino Melaye”s tweet of a dead man
There were scores of pictures shared depicting violence during the elections. Things got worse during the turbulent supplementary elections in Kano State. Many of the posts were gory, showing stab wounds, fresh blood and dead bodies. It is hard to tell just which ones were real or fake – the pictures revealed nothing after reverse searching. But a few shared on the official Twitter accounts of the PDP and Senator Dino Melaye, a Nigerian lawmaker, caught our attention.
Senator Melaye, an already controversial politician, tweeted out the photo of a dead man laying in his own pool of blood. He claimed the man was killed in election-related violence that had erupted in Kano.
He went ahead to call for the suspension of elections in the state, using the photo as the basis for which he called on the electoral commission to cancel the Kano State governorship elections.
This tweet – retweeted by 655 accounts and liked by double that number – is in fact, deliberately misleading. It took us just one image reverse search to unravel the truth. We found a 3-year old article with the same image now posed off as a casualty from Kano State elections. The picture first appeared in a 2017 article detailing a clash in Nairobi, Kenya.
We contacted Senator Melaye to know who his source was and how he got the picture. We got no response. We left him text and Whatsapp messages. The double, blue ticks that signified message had been read came up on Whatsapp, but no response followed. We did contact Mr. Kperogi for information on his sources too but we were ignored. We tried to reach Mr. Kperogi through his social media accounts – Facebook and Twitter – where he commands over 76,000 followers combined. Although his Direct Message, DM as commonly called, on Twitter is not open, meaning that only those he follows can send him a direct message, the same message was sent to his Facebook messenger. We also requested comment through his WhatsApp messenger, like Senator Melaye, we only saw the blue ticks.
Senator Melaye, an already controversial politician, tweeted out the picture of a dead man laying in his own pool of blood. He claimed the man was killed in election-related violence that had erupted in Kano. He went ahead to call for the suspension of elections in the state, using the picture as the basis for which he called on the electoral commission to cancel the Kano State governorship elections.
This tweet– retweeted by 655 accounts and liked by double that number– is in fact, deliberately misleading. It took us just one image reverse search to unravel the truth. We found a 3-year old article with the same image now posed off as a casualty from Kano State elections. The picture first appeared in a 2017 article detailing a clash in Nairobi, Kenya.
The next photograph we looked at was uploaded on the official Twitter handle of the PDP.
Screenshot PDP tweet dry-wound pictures
The opposition party tweeted out the photo of an injured man and claimed that “APC thugs brutally attacked PDP agent in Kibiya Local Government Area of Kano State”.
The opposition party tweeted out the photo of an injured man and claimed that “APC thugs brutally attacked PDP agent in Kibiya Local Government Area of Kano State”.
This particular picture was shared on 23 March, the day of the supplementary elections. It is important to note that our analysis of these photographs is hardly open source investigation, but we thought it interesting anyway.
The appearance of these wounds raised suspicion: for purported fresh wounds, it is unsettling to see that the wounds were dry. There’s no blood gushing from the man’s head, but there’s somehow blood on his shirt.
Granted, they could have cleaned up before taking the picture but take a look at the wounds again. Does anything appear amiss? We thought so, too. We spoke to medical doctors for their expert opinions. The first doctor we showed the picture to said the wounds don’t seem fresh.
“Maybe a few days old,” Dr. Samuel Ezekwesili said, before adding that only close examination can truly reveal how long the wounds were before the pictures were taken.
Dr. Joshua Adeoye also thinks the wounds have been treated previously, contradicting PDP claims that the attacks happened “this morning”. “They’re not really fresh. At least, they’ve received some medical attention. You can see the first one has had cotton wool applied. And the second one, that wound on scalp and neck would not stop bleeding except it receives attention.
“Those places are vascular– very well supplied with blood. However, if the wounds were older than 2 days, you’d start seeing scabs on them, which seem absent on these ones. So, best guess is between 1 to 2 days.”
The experts’ opinions were clear; the wounds are not as recent as handlers of the PDP Twitter page would want Nigerians to believe. Again, even if the men were attacked “this morning”, as claimed, can PDP Twitter handlers, at least, acknowledge that the men have had a clean up and only wore their clothes back for photo session?
Senator Dino Melaye shared the pictures in question too. We asked again how he got them, and again, we got no response.
The online atmosphere in Kano State, where the injured man’s photos allegedly emanated from, was awash with political misinformation and misrepresentation, according to recent research funded by WhatsApp. With the surge of cheap internet enabled phones in northern Nigeria, the researchers found that social media users in the region were particularly vulnerable to propagandists motivated by personal gains, and who pay no attention to accuracy.
One of the machineries used by both APC and PDP, according to the research, were photographs wrongly captioned or outright falsehood. Our own findings corroborate this. “Accuracy is not always prioritised over political point-scoring, especially as these online operators are looking to illustrate their value to the party or candidate by creating viral content that increases their visibility,” the researchers wrote.
Now, back to videos
We mentioned a second interesting one shared by Mr. Kperogi. Watch it here.
In this video, some men and one woman wearing what look like official tags appear to be thumbprinting massively for a party. The reason we found this interesting is because we set out to debunk many videos we believed to be old or not related to the elections. We were not prepared to deal with actual, blatant rigging, not with the PVCs and not with the improved vigilance that was supposed to be a key feature of the 2019 polls. We had to know where this happened and what was really going on.
So, we checked the video for clues. One of the officials is wearing a 2019 tag, which immediately signaled to us that this is a recent case. On the tag, we could make out the phrase “Ward Supervisor”.
2019 printed on the tag
While we cannot emphatically state that those stamping and thumbprinting the ballot papers are INEC officials, we know for a fact that it is a recent voting exercise. Two people wear similar vests as won by INEC officials during the 2019 elections and there are materials on the table with ‘INEC’ printed on them.
We could not distinctly make out the party being thumb-printed but we could see from the video that it was the second party on the first column that received this illegal votes. We checked this information against the ballot papers used in Borno and Yobe. But, it is hard to tell.
INEC printed on a booklet
We analysed yet another video of men rigging in what we presume is a northern state because of the Hausa language being spoken. Twitter user @thechefchii with over 18,000 followers, posted a video showing illegal thumb printing of ballot papers. The user claimed that the rigging was in preparation of the February 23 elections, in favour of the ruling party, then urged Nigerians to “RT”.
The same video was shared by @LLumamba, another Twitter user. The caption was a bit different. “APC plus INEC rigging elections in Nigeria”, the handle claimed.
screenshot of Chef Chi
But more importantly, we found that the video was uploaded on Youtube in 2018 with the caption “Zaben kanana Hukumomi Ta Jahar Kano”. The phrase translates from Hausa to mean “Watch how Kano state vote today”. It had nothing to do with 2019. And so, we cracked another old ‘fake news’ video.
In the end, we only analyzed a few of the hundreds of fake photographs and videos shared during the elections and used as weaponry by party propagandists and loyalists. It is unclear how successful their work was or just how big the machinery that fueled the attacks is: and to be clear, these fake posts were attacks on the ordinary Nigerians who only wanted to vote, however you look at it.
The 2019 elections recorded the lowest turnout in Nigeria’s 20-year democracy. [Data for 2019 archived here, and 1999 here] Fear of violence caused many to shun the polls, and social media messages like the ones we’ve analysed here did nothing to allay people’s fears.
Rivers Watch Fake Facebook page (Source, DFR Lab
To get a sense of the scale of online attacks during the elections, we must connect these incidents to a recent development. Just last month, Facebook pulled 265 Instagram and Facebook accounts linked to Archimedes Group, an Isreali campaign agency. The accounts, posed as locals and local news agencies to spew fake election news in targeted West African countries, especially Nigeria. They reached a combined followership of almost 3 million people and spent almost a million dollars on advertising. The Digital Forensic Lab specifically found posts targeting both Atiku and Buhari’s supporters, suggesting Archimedes was lobbying for both sides simultaneously. The account managers were traced to locations in Israel, United Kingdom, Portugal and Senegal.
Twitter has failed to do a similar sweep, meaning there are likely hundreds more fakes on the platform. None of the Twitter or Facebook accounts we listed in this report have been linked to Archimedes Group and therefore have not been removed or sanctioned – to the best of our knowledge. But without a doubt, political information warfare is being commercialized and weaponised, and Nigeria remains highly vulnerable to such attacks because of low media literacy levels. High profile Twitter account holders such as Mr. Kperogi and Senator Melaye are still active on social media and it is conceivable they will share more fake news in the future. That makes us worry. What will they post next?
WHETHER or not the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, made use of a central server in storing poll results for the 2019 general election has recently been a subject of heated controversy.
In a petition sent to the presidential election tribunal in March, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) claimed its candidate, Atiku Abubakar, defeated Muhammadu Buhari, candidate of the ruling party, by 1.6 million votes. This information, the party said, was retrieved from the electoral commission’s server, which has the authentic results.
INEC, however, replied that the numbers peddled by the PDP were fabricated and said it did not adopt electronic transmission of collation of results.
Atiku, in April, gave the tribunal what he called the “unique MAC address and Microsoft product ID of the INEC server”.
“The figures and votes were transmitted to the first Respondent’s Presidential Result’s Server 1 and thereafter aggregated in INEC_PRES_RSLT_SRV2019, whose Physical Address or unique Mac Address is 94-57-A5-DC-64-B9 with Microsoft Product ID 00252-7000000000-AA535,” he said.
“The 1st Respondent specifically denies the existence of electronic transmission of results as it is unknown to the Electoral Act, 2010 (as amended) and Regulations and Guidelines for the conduct of the elections, 2019,” it said in its response.
Following an application to the tribunal by the PDP for an order compelling INEC to grant access to the server, the agency maintained that it does not have any server.
“They are asking us to bring something we do not have,” Yunus Usman, its lawyer, said, though this position contradicts statements made before the election by INEC’s commissioners.
Claims have been circulated suggesting that INEC spent “millions of naira” on a server. In this fact-check, The ICIR takes a look at documents drafted by the commission itself, which confirm that it intended to procure various servers for the 2019 election and that, in fact, it got funded for those procurements.
A little background
President Buhari had, in July and September, written to the National Assembly requesting for N242 billion as virement and supplementary budget to fund the 2019 general election. Out of this amount, N189 billion was allocated to INEC while the rest went to the Nigeria Police, Civil Defence, and other security agencies.
The Senate Committee on Appropriations on the Virement Request headed by Muhammed Danjuma Goje, in its interim report, recommended that N144.7 billion be transferred from the Special Intervention Programme recurrent budget and N44.2 billion from the programme’s capital budget.
Adding this to the N45 billion recurrent expenses already approved for INEC in the 2018 budget, it meant INEC’s total budget for 2018 was N234.5 billion.
In October, the National Assembly approved the N242 billion supplementary budget as sent by the president—only changing the source of the funding from the legislators’ special projects votes to the Special Intervention Programme.
Does the supplementary budget provide for servers?
Yes, it does. INEC’s supplementary budget was made public by the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre (PLAC), a nonprofit committed to facilitating legislative advocacy and access to public policies.
According to the document (archived here), INEC proposed to spend N143.5 billion on 209 items. Out of that amount, N2.27 billion was budgeted for server-related procurement items, with budget code 230808. The purpose of a computer server is simply to store, retrieve, and send information to other computers connected to a network.
N1.37 billion was budgeted for nationwide replacement of servers for 25 states and National Data Centre, N99.7 million for an upgrade of the server version of OpenVR for compatibility with new Dell server, and N800 million for the migration of voter registration database from MySQL Open Source to OracleDB (both database administration services).
INEC’s supplementary budget. Source: PLAC Nigeria
INEC also budgeted N157.5 million for the renewal and maintenance of cloud infrastructure, with budget code 230709.
Though the National Assembly sub-committees on INEC and electoral matters, headed by Suleiman Nazif and Aishatu Dukku, recommended the reduction of the some of the proposed amounts, the proposed budget was eventually passed in full.
Not only was the approval absolute, but the office of the Accountant-General reports in its “Capital Performance of the Budget” document that all of the amount (N188.9 billion) was released to INEC and spent by it.
The plan for servers predates 2018 budgeting process
It is worth mentioning that the word server is likewise used four times in INEC’s “2017-2021 Strategic Programme of Action” (archived here).
According to the plan, the agency’s ICT department was expected to award contracts by the first quarter of each year for the upgrade of existing mail server and expansion of INEC mail system to states and local government offices.
The department was to get approval by the second quarter of 2017 and 2018 for the procurement of servers for all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. It was also to upgrade the server version of Open VR for compatibility with the new Dell Server.
INEC’s 2017-2021 Strategic Programme of Action
The renewal and maintenance of cloud infrastructure as well as the development of data management tools “for archiving election results and other electoral activities” were also provided for in the programme of action.
Conclusion
It is true that money (over N2 billion naira) for the procurement and upgrade of servers was approved for INEC by the National Assembly and it has had a longterm plan favouring the electronic storage of electoral results.
The amount was also released to INEC and the commission reported it as utilised. If the agency insists it does not have a server, then it has some explaining to do on how exactly it spent the relevant funds.
THE Director-General of National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), Brig. Gen. Shuaibu Ibrahim on Friday says the Corps has been at the forefront of total compliance with the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), but the statement is false.
He disclosed this on Friday during the opening ceremony of the NYSC Freedom of Information Desk Officers’ workshop held in Abuja.
“You will recall that since the enactment of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 2011, NYSC has been at the forefront of ensuring total compliance with the provisions of the Act,” says Ibrahim.
“I, therefore, charge you to continue on this positive stead by ensuring effective record management, effective liaison as well as prompt response to enquiries in your respective secretariats.”
The event was put together for the 37 FOI desk officers of the public institutions nationwide, including the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
The DG described the recruitments, training and mentoring of the FOIA corps as laudable.
However, an annual survey of FOIA compliance conducted by an independent Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Public Private Development Centre (PPDC) has shown the DG’s claim to be false.
Since 2015 till 2018, the PPDC annual FOI ranking revealed that NYSC has not been complying with the FOIA requests, let alone lead the compliance ranking.
In 2015, the NYSC ranked 116th position while the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) ranked first on the list. In 2016 it rose to 97th position while the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR) took the first position.
While the BPSR maintained its first position in 2017, the NYSC ranked 75 on the list. The most recent survey conducted by the PPDC for 2018 had the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) taken the first position while NYSC ranked 82nd.
There was no time since the enactment of the law that the NYSC led on the compliance table.
NYSC in fact is among other several government Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) notorious for ignoring FOIA requests.
The FOIA was enacted in 2011 as part of measures to promote transparency and accountability in government institutions whereby the public is legally permitted to request and receive public information of interest.
The ICIR severally reported how agencies of government under President Muhammadu Buhari disregarded FOIA requests during his first term in office.
DELIVERING the customary annual speech on the occasion of Nigeria’s Democracy Day celebration on Wednesday, President Muhammadu Buhari said the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to grow by 2.7 per cent in 2019. This projection has, however, been found to conflict with various other sources.
“We now have witnessed eight quarters of positive growth in the economy and our GDP is expected to grow by 2.7 percent this year,” Buhari said.
While it is true that Nigeria has witnessed positive economic growth for eight quarters, since it exited recession in the second quarter of 2017, The ICIR could not find a single authority backing the claim that GDP will grow in the same measure as quoted by the president.
AfDB, CBN, others disagree
The African Development Bank (AfDB) in its Nigeria Economic Outlook states that the country’s real GDP is projected to grow by 2.3 per cent in 2019 and 2.4 per cent in 2020 “as implementation of the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan gains pace”.
Also, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its World Economic Outlook reports released in January and April stated that Nigeria’s economic growth rate is 2.1 per cent in 2019, and will be 2.5 per cent in 2020.
Its downward revision of the figure, the IMF explained, is as a result of the global “softening of oil prices”.
Former minister of budget and national planning, Udo Udoma, however disagreed with the international organisation’s forecast, insisting that the economy is expected to grow by 3.01 per cent this year.
Udoma’s figure was echoed in April by Ben Akabueze, Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation.
Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) likewise said the bank has made a forecast that the economy will pick up and grow by three per cent as recovery from the recent recession is becoming more self-sustaining.
Infographic by Damilola OJETUNDE
Conclusion
The president’s claim is inaccurate and cannot be substantiated relying on projection by experts. Meanwhile, two other claims made by the president were found to be correct.
He said: “According to United Nations estimates, our population will rise to 411 million by 2050, making us the third most populous nation on earth behind only China and India.” This is supported by the United Nations’ World Population Prospects of 2017.
He also said: “The Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index which is the gauge of manufacturing activity in the country has also risen for 26 consecutive months since March 2017 indicating continuous growth and expansion in our manufacturing sector.”
Again, this claim is supported by the CBN’s monthly Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) Reports. Though the index points occasionally reduce compared to preceding months, the CBN explains that “a composite PMI above 50 points indicates that the manufacturing/non-manufacturing economy is generally expanding”.
NIGERIA’s Minister of Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige, has said there is nothing worrisome about the population of doctors in the country as there are in fact more doctors than are needed. But is he right?
Speaking on Wednesday on Sunrise Daily, a programme aired by Channels Television, Ngige said young Nigerian medical practitioners are free to travel abroad for employment and then send money back to the country because there is a surplus of physicians already. He stressed this point repeatedly and challenged anyone to quote him.
“I’m not worried, we have a surplus (of doctors). If we have a surplus, we export,” the minister said. “I was taught Biology and Chemistry by Indian teachers in my secondary school days. They are surplus in their country.”
He added: “We have a surplus in the medical profession in our country. I can tell you this. It is my area. We have excess. We have enough, more than enough, quote me. There is nothing wrong, they go out to sharpen their skills, earn money and send them back home here. Yes, we have foreign exchange earnings from them, not from oil.
“Those guys go there, they are better trained because of the facilities they have there. Eventually, I know a couple of them who practise abroad but set up medical centres back home. They have CAT scan, MRI scan which even the government hospitals cannot maintain. So, I don’t see any loss.”
What our findings showed
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended a doctor to population ratio of 1:600.
But in Nigeria, according to WHO’s Global Atlas of the Health Workforce Statistics, there are four physicians (people qualified to practise medicine) for every 10,000 persons. This finding is also supported by data from the World Bank stating the ratio of doctors to patients to be 0.395 to 1000 persons, while 1.49 to 1000 persons is the global average. Austria has 5.2 doctors per 1000 persons, Italy has 4, and Switzerland 4.2.
Also, a 2017 survey report published by Nigeria Health Watch and NOIPolls, titled ‘Emigration of Nigerian Medical Doctors’, confirmed that Nigeria’s “medical workforce to population ratio is much lower than the recommended standard”.
It stated that, according to figures from the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN), there are about 72,000 doctors registered in Nigeria, but only approximately 35,000 stayed to practise in the country.
“When these figures are compared with the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended doctor to population ratio of 1:600, we easily deduce how poorly we are performing against this benchmark,” the report stated.
“Nigeria’s National Population Commission (NPC) has projected our current population to be about 182 million at a 3.5 per cent growth rate from the 2006 census. This means we need about 303,333 medical doctors now, and at least 10,605 new doctors annually to join the workforce. Only at this level can we expect good quality patient care that is not compromised by errors occasioned by fatigued and overworked medical doctors.”
Source: 2017 ‘Emigration of Nigerian Medical Doctors’ Survey Report by Nigeria Health Watch and NOIPolls
In 2015, Folashade Ogunsola, a professor of medicine and then chairman of the Association of Colleges of Medicine of Nigeria, also validated this claim. “We will need about 237,000 medical doctors and we have about 35,000 working in the country today,” she said.
Two years later, the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) announced, that Nigeria has a ratio of one doctor to 6000 people according to an analysis conducted by the association.
In September 2018, however, Minister of Health Isaac Adewole provided an updated figure of the country’s physician population. He disclosed that data obtained from the MDCN as of May 30 showed that 88,692 doctors are registered in the country.
“Of these doctors, only 45,000 are currently practising and that gives us a ratio one doctor to 4,088 persons,” he said.
Conclusion
Ngige’s claim that Nigeria has surplus medical doctors is false. Rather, statistics provided by the Minister of Health, NMA, MDCN, and WHO showed that the doctor-to-population ratio in Nigeria ranges from 0.15:600, 0.1:600, 0.12:600, to 0.24:600 respectively—all very different from the recommended ratio of 1:600.
FEMI Adesina, special adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on media and publicity, on Saturday published an article about the administration, titled ‘PMB’s Second Term: Looking Back, and Looking Forward’.
“The tested retired Army General [President Buhari] took the war to Boko Haram,” he wrote in the sixth paragraph.
“Stressing that you can’t efficiently manage a country until you have secured it, he relocated the command centre of the war to Maiduguri, which is the epicentre of the insurgency. Steadily and progressively, the insurgents were beaten back, till they got circumscribed in Sambisa Forest. Even that was taken away from them, till they became like sheep without shepherd, mingling with the civilian population to attack soft targets.
“Today, the insurgency is terribly degraded. Though not totally conquered, it is only a matter of time. The situation today can in no way be compared to what we had in 2015. President Buhari is winning the security war.”
Now, is it true that Sambisa Forest is no longer home to the insurgents and they have no option but to mix with civilians in the cities and villages as claimed by Adesina?
Our findings
In December 2016, the federal government announced that it had successfully dislodged Boko Haram from the Sambisa Forest.
“I am delighted at, and most proud of, the gallant troops of the Nigerian army on receipt of the long-awaited and most gratifying news of the final crushing of Boko Haram terrorists in their last enclave in Sambisa forest,” the president had said.
The following year, Tajudeen Yusuf, Commander of the Air Component of Operation Lafiya Dole, admitted that Boko Haram members had returned to parts of the Sambisa general area from where they were dislodged.
The Nigerian Air Force also announced in September that year, for example, that it was able to destroy hideouts belonging to the group in Kollaram, Bula Korege within the Sambisa Forest, as part of Operation Lafiya Dole. About twelve dwellings and solar panels were destroyed and several of the terrorists were killed during the shelling, according to reports.
Likewise, in January, Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Saddique Abubakar, revealed that the Air Task Force destroyed one of Boko Haram’s logistics base in the forest using two Alpha Jets. There have been several other attacks against the insurgents since then.
More recently, Monday last week, Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Yusuf Buratai, stated that activities of the terrorist group have been confined to the Lake Chad Area and Sambisa Forest. He said this while delivering a lecture at the the Centre for Contemporary Security Affairs, Igbinedion University, Edo State.
Also, according to the United Kingdom’s Country Police and Information Note (on Nigeria) published in January: “The forest around Sambisa and the vegetation along the shores of Lake Chad provide a degree of natural coverage for both factions [of Boko Haram], resulting in strongholds in those locations.”
The document notes that Boko Haram activity has been concentrated in Madagali, north of Adamawa, and Mandara mountains to the east, close to Cameroon.
“Boko Haram Beyond the Headlines”, a report of the United States’ Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point published in May 2018, also notes that only some of the Boko Haram camps in Sambisa Forest have been dismantled.
Verdict
Adesina’s claim that the terrorist group is no longer hiding in Sambisa Forest is not true. It is an outdated achievement, and contradicts more recent reports from the Nigeria Army, European Asylum Support Office, United Kingdom Home Office, and United States Military Academy.
The ICIR takes a further look into Nigeria’s volume of local food production as detailed by the FAO in alignment with the APP, it showed an unstable increase in production except for rice and maize but does not translate to food security. The agricultural policy has also not been fully realised.
