By Pascal Oparada
A viral post published by a spoof account of the Al Jazeera news organisation has claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that Africa is a cemetery for Africans. But there is no evidence to corroborate this claim. No record of this statement appeared on a list of statements made by President Putin, available on the Russian government website.
A fact-check by a coalition of Nigerian journalists, including AFP, ICIR, TheNiche and 17 others under the aegis of CrossCheck Nigeria, a platform set up to combat misinformation and fake news online, have reviewed the claim and discovered it to be a hoax.
No supporting evidence from the Russian Government web page to substantiate the story.
The Facebook page purporting to be Al Jazeera is unverified. The name of the page is Al Jazeera but the handle is the westafricanhub. Many of the posts from the page do not link to Al Jazeera articles but are comments and pictures without reference.
The post, published by “@thewestafricanhub” designed to mirror the verified Al Jazeera Facebook page, made the claim on November 21st, 2018. The post was shared more than 32,000 times, with more than 13,000 interactions.
A number of other news websites have also published the claims. An article published on November 22nd, 2018 by information.ng also repeated the claims.
