By Ishaya Ibrahim
A photo of a brutalised man passed off as a victim of All Progressives Congress (APC) door-to-door campaign is false, CrossCheck Nigeria, a fact-checking coalition of Nigerian journalists has revealed.
The photo was widely shared on WhatsApp and Facebook with a post that the brutalised man suffered the fate while campaigning for the re-election of President Muhammadu Buhari. It, however, didn’t say where in Nigeria the assault happened.
CrossCheck Nigeria has confirmed the claim to be false and pretentious and that the man in the photo may not even be Nigerian.
The picture was posted by a Facebook user, Abaelu Ike-Anthony on January 7. It has garnered a lot of shares and likes.
In the post, he wrote: “Mr Dapo, one of the APC door to door campaign leader and a next level preacher was badly brutalized yesterday when he mistakenly visited the house of 3 hungry Nigerian graduates who lost their jobs immediately President Buhari took over in 2015.
“The three friends Imoh, Ikenna and Steven started panel beating the face of Mr Dapo with lots of anger until neighbours came to his rescue. When asked why they had to beat Dapo that way, one of the unemployed graduate Mr Imoh said ‘a Hungry Man is an angry Man’.”
Using the reverse image search tool TinEye, we found that the earliest version of one of the photos surfaced online on January 29, 2018, when a website called Timeofgist reported how a man was beaten for sleeping with another man’s wife in Lagos.
A day after, January 30, 2018, the photo surfaced online again on a Ugandan blog to depict another version of the same story, but this time naming the subject, Ntinda – the name of a suburb in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda.
