Fake news inflames religious and ethnic tension in Nigeria
Observers say that social media creates picture of civil war in country
Misinformation risks worsening ethnic and religious tensions in Nigeria, media commentators and researchers say, at a time of heightened concern about internal security and fragile community relations.
In the months and weeks running up to recent elections a slew of false claims were made about politicians and their parties, in deliberate attempts to shape the election narrative.
Africa’s most populous nation is often characterised as teetering on the brink.
Security threats include Boko Haram Islamists in the northeast and violence between nomadic cattle herders and farmers in central states. The latter is primarily a battle for water and land but those involved are polarised along ethnic, sectarian and religious lines, in a country with more than 250 ethnic groups and where identity is seldom far from the surface.
Simon Kolawole, a former editor with Nigeria’s This Day newspaper and founder of The Cable online news site, said manufactured lies in the guise of news is “further endangering the delicate ethno-religious fabric of Nigeria”. It is also “hampering the credibility of news outlets”.
Information minister Lai Mohammed said misinformation and hate speech “threatens the peace, unity, security and corporate existence of Nigerians”.
Of particular concern is the fabrication of stories pitting the mainly Muslim north against the predominantly Christian south, a traditional fault line often used by proponents of restructuring the federal system and even breaking it up.
“When you go by social media, the impression you get is as if Nigeria is at war and as if Muslims are killing Christians,” said Mohammed.
Misinformation deliberate or not is not a new phenomenon in Nigeria. In November 1989, state broadcaster NTA announced the death of Nnamdi Azikiwe, the country’s first governor-general and president after independence in 1960. By morning, most of the newspapers were running the story but Zik, as he was known, was very much alive and would live for another seven years.
Thirty years later, rumours circulated that President Muhammadu Buhari, 76, had died during one of his lengthy absences from Nigeria in 2017 on medical grounds, and that he had been replaced by a lookalike called Jubril from Sudan.
It took two days for Azikwe to clear the air about the state of his health and inform the world he was still alive. The supposed death of Buhari, by contrast, spread like wildfire on Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp, so much so that he had to address the claim at a news conference. “It’s the real me,” he told supporters on a trip to Poland in December 2018.
The fact that the claim is still circulating is a sign of the scale of problem, and the task facing the media and fact-checking organisations.
Fredrick Nwabufo, a political analyst and columnist, said it was an open secret that Nigeria’s two main political parties ran media centres to pump out misinformation during the election. He agreed there was a risk that the practice could escalate ethnic and religious tensions.
To what extent fake news affected the result of the election is so far inconclusive. Sam Ejiwunmi, a doctoral student at the University of Lagos researching the possibility, said misinformation affects rural more than urban areas. “My fear is majorly with the impact it has on the credibility of the media. The media houses are no longer perceived as the custodian of credible news,” he said.