Reports alleging that former president of Nigeria Olusegun Obasanjo blocked 100 truck containers carrying nearly 1.5 million Chadians from entering Nigeria are going viral on social media.
This report which has gone viral on various social media platforms was attributed to singer Charles Oputa, better known as Charly Boy.
According to the report, Obasanjo had allegedly received the information from an immigration officer after which he called the Chadian president who denied knowledge of the incident.
“Since there was no space to keep such a multitude of people, the truck was ordered back to Chad,” the claim read.
Verification
While verifying the report, we spoke with Kehinde Akinyemi, Obasanjo’s spokesperson, who debunked the allegation stating that Obasanjo “does not work in the immigration”.
As president, Obasanjo was commander-in-chief of the armed forces, this position became null after his hand over in 2007 to Umar Musa Yar’Adua.
As a result, he has no power to neither order any security agency nor a sitting president of another Republic.
To further confirm the credibility of the report, we ran multiple reverse image searches on some of the images posted.
We discovered that the image was from a 2021 news report of the Nigeria Police stopping some Fulani herdsmen from entering Kwara state. The news was reported by several media houses.
Also of note was that the story was not confirmed by any credible media organisation, nor could the claim be seen Charly Boy’s social media accounts.
Verdict
The claim is completely false; Obasanjo’s spokesperson has debunked the claim, and the images making the rounds are old, and from a different context altogether.