Claim
A viral video on social media alleges that the All Progressives Congress (APC) reached an agreement with some members of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Ogun State, to fake a mass defection to APC from the PDP.
However, according to the video, it turned out that the fake decampees are now protesting, with a claim that an arrangement was breached by the APC, who failed to pay them for services rendered.
In the video, the people could be seen protesting and demanding that their money be paid.
“Give us our money!”
The caption of one of the videos published on Facebook read: “Give us our money’, fake political decampees ask All Progressives Congress in Ogun State to pay them for faking their defection from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress”.
The video was posted by Jahmal of Port Harcourt on X formerly known as Twitter. As of the time of publication the post had gathered 1880 views,
Also another X account, Sojah, that published the video wrote in his caption: “Give us our money!” Fake political decampees allegedly demand payment from APC in Ogun State after pretending to defect from the PDP to the APC. Fake bishops, Fake decampees, nothing about APC is real. Everything is a fraud “.
The claim can also be found on Facebook here and here.
At the time of writing this fact-check, the video on X had over 57k views, 144 replies, 599 retweets, 878 likes and 82 saves…
Why We Checked
Nigeria is in the build-up to the 2027 general elections and a video like this could trigger resentment and hate for political candidates from the political party or parties called out in the video.
To ensure that the video does not sway the public to act in a premeditated manner, we decided to fact-check the video to find out if it was real, manipulated or an old video being recycled.
Verification
We began by taking out a frame from the video and used Google reverse image to know if it was an old video or if the visual existed before now.
We found that it had not been used before
Also, we uploaded the video to an AI video verification tool hivedetect.ai and it returned with 0% possibility that the video was ai generated, 0% possibility of being a deep fake video.
Meanwhile, the drama and the caption of the viral video on social media was what caught our attention.
We translated the audio of the video which was mainly in Yoruba language, and it turned out that the protesting persons were saying: “Let them know we are here in Owode.” Another speaker said “Speak to the camera”.
Then the protesters began their demands, “Give us our money, we want our money, we have not eaten anything since morning. Please, give us our money, we have stressed ourselves since morning. So, please give us our money”.
The protesting individuals did not mention the name of any political party and this means the video could have been that of people protesting for other reasons.
There were no banners of the accused political party or anything to tie the video to any political party in the video.
However, one could tell that they were unhappy with the situation they were in.
Further checks on the internet showed that the thirty-one seconds video could not be found on the pages of any reputable media in Nigeria.
Though we came across reactions from ADC to the viral video on the pages of SaharaReporters and Independent Newspapers.
We also noticed that the viral video did not generate any response from the PDP, which may mean that this set of actors were not members of the PDP in the first place.
Verdict
From our findings the claim that the individuals in the viral video demanding for payment were fake decampees from the PDP to the APC cannot be substantiated.
Also, there were no signs, evidence, or statements to show that they were making the demand from the APC.
Therefore, the claim is unproven and misleading and the captions added to the videos by publishers were meant to sway the public to think the individuals in the video were decampees from the PDP to the APC and that they were making the demands from the APC.
