Old video falsely shared as showing recent economic hardship protests in Nigeria

A series of reforms by President Bola Tinubu aimed at jump-starting Nigeria’s struggling economy are causing hardships in the country. The economic crisis is fuelling false narratives on social media, including a post that claimed a video showed naked women protesting against Tinubu in his Lagos stronghold. But the claim is false; AFP Fact Check found that the video, online since November 2023, showed women protesting against fatal gang clashes in Awka in southeast Nigeria.

“Lagos Women protesting Naked, placing curse on Tunibu over hardship of the Nation (sic),” reads a post shared on X on February 17, 2024.

Shared more than 430 times, the post features a 30-second clip of women protesting naked with a crowd around them.

“Tunibu” in the claim refers to Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who is widely regarded as the godfather of Lagos. He was the governor of the Nigerian economic powerhouse between 1999 and 2007.

The Nigerian leader announced a series of policies shortly after he was sworn in as president in May 2023.

He removed the costly fuel subsidy that has kept the prices of petroleum products artificially low the day he took office in 2023 and ended years of foreign exchange control.

But those policies have spurred one of the country’s worst cost of living crises in recent years (archived here).

Nigeria’s statistics office said inflation stood at 29.9 percent in January, up from 28.9 percent in December 2023 (archived here) and more than eight basis points higher than a year before, with food inflation at over 35 percent.

Rising prices have sparked pockets of protests in major cities (archived here) and labour unions are set to hold a two-day march at the end of February (archived here).

However, the claim that the naked women in the video protested against Tinubu’s policies in Lagos is false.

Old video from Anambra

To verify the claim, AFP Fact Check took a screenshot of the clip in the claim and carried out a reverse image search.

We found that the video has been online since November 2023 (archived here). The caption explained that the clip showed women protesting the “Incessant Killings Of Their Kinsmen”.

Another X account published the same footage of the protest as well as another version on November 23, 2023 (archived here).

Both accounts said the protest took place in Awka, the capital city of Anambra state in southeast Nigeria.

A local media outlet reported the event and published a photo showing the same banner seen eight seconds into the video clip in the false post (archived here).

“Cultists are killing our people,” reads the inscription on the banner. “Cultists” in Nigeria usually refers to street gangs who resort to violence to settle scores.

The names of police officers described as “bad eggs” also appear on the banner.

Screenshots show the similarities in the banners in the claim and the media reports, taken on February 26, 2024

Days after the protest, police told local media that it was sponsored and that the person behind it had been arrested (archived here). Police alleged that the protest was staged to soil a local police officer’s reputation.