Nigerian leader takes to Facebook to say he’s alive

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has an unusual new campaign pitch: he isn’t dead.

In a Facebook post on Sunday following a meeting with Nigerians in Poland, Buhari said he’d been asked whether it really was him speaking to the group or a clone, given speculation that he’d died last year when he was absent from the country on medical leave.

“I can assure you all that this is the real me,” he said. “I’m still going strong!”

Buhari, who turns 76 this month, has been dogged by questions about his health since spending more than five months in the U.K. being treated for an undisclosed illness. He faces re-election in February amid growing divisions within his own party and a challenge from Atiku Abubakar, a 72-yearold businessman and former vice president who’s promising an economic revival for Africa’s biggest oil producer.

A separatist group, the Indigenous People of Biafra, or IPOB, has taken advantage of Buhari’s health issues to peddle a conspiracy theory that he died in London and was replaced by a look-alike from Sudan named Jubril. Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the group campaigning for an independent Biafra in the country’s southeast, was arrested and charged with treason by Buhari’s government in 2016.

But while free on bail, Kanu’s residence was raided by the military in an operation that left several people dead. Kanu escaped the country and reappeared in Israel in October, according to his lawyer. He’s since been broadcasting his claims about Buhari’s alleged double via Facebook, helping to feed a social media frenzy back home.

“When I was away on medical vacation last year, a lot of people hoped I was dead,” Buhari said in his Facebook video on Sunday. He said his vice president had been contacted at the time by people assuming he was moving into the president’s job and offering their services as deputy.

Buhari’s challenger for the presidency, Abubakar, has sought to take advantage of the incumbent’s seeming aloofness. He’s challenged Buhari to a televised debate and beaten him in responding to attacks by Islamist insurgents, offering scholarships to the children of killed soldiers before the government extended official condolences.