A video has surfaced online with a claim that the building collapsed on school children in Nigeria.
The 57-seconds footage, which was posted on March 17, 2024, by a verified Facebook user, Gara Gombe with 43,000 followers, showed crowds shouting and rescuing school children from the collapsed building.
The caption read:
“School structure collapses on kids in Toro Bauchi State…very sad”.
“This is in a country where politicians are buying prado SUVs and alleged stealing of N500 million each from padded national budgets. They can’t build proper schools for their children. Some people waiting in the wings to embezzle public funds are preaching “keep hope alive.” 🙄🙇♀️😭💔❌”.
The post has gone viral online as it was shared by multiple Facebook users as seen here, here, here and here.
CLAIM
Video shows building collapsed on school children in Toro, Bauchi State of Nigeria.
THE FINDINGS
Findings by this researcher show that the claim is FALSE.
To verify the claim, this researcher subjected a screenshot of the video to keyframe analysis by conducting a Reverse Image search using Yandex.
The result led us to a DRC media report which attributed the incident to the collapse of a school in which school children were trapped on January 13, 2024. The incident happened at Mutshilua Primary School of the 28th CMUCC at Tshumbe in Sankuru, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
It was also posted on X (formerly Twitter) on January 14, 2024 as seen here.
Similarly, Pesacheck had also in February 2024 published a fact-check on the viral video.
THE VERDICT
The claim that the video shows building collapsed on school children in Toro, Bauchi State of Nigeria is MISLEADING; the incident happened in January 2024 at Tshumbe in Sankuru, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and NOT Nigeria.
