FACT CHECK: Did Tinubu Say He Intends to Abolish Naira and Adopt Dollar As National Currency?

A Tiktok user during the week shared a video with the claim that president Bola Ahmed Tinubu has declared his intention to abolish the use of Nigeria’s official currency (Naira) and adopt the United States Dollar in its place.

The video which has Arise TV’s logo also showed one of the station’s anchor Ojy Okpe as the presenter of the news. As at the time of this fact check, the video report had garnered over 6,000 likes and over 4,000 shares.

Claim: Tinubu said there are plans to abolish Naira and replace it with the United States Dollar

Verification:

The CDD War Room observed several discrepancies in the video, including significant synchronisation issues, especially between the mouth movements and the displayed audio. There were also several grammatical inconsistencies in the composition of the news headline. CDD War Room similarly observed an approximate 5-second pause before the next sequence.

Using diverse verification methods, we traced the video to a January 11, 2022, Arise TV Morning show broadcast and a Channels TV news report of January 10, 2022. The videos showed when Tinubu, who was at the time one of the major contenders for the presidential ticket of the All Progessives (APC) made his intention public during a visit to President Muhammadu Buhari.

To detect the manipulation, CDD War Room ran the video through a deep fake scanner which flagged the video as deep fake. Furthermore, we perused the page of the originator of the video and found that the user frequently shared manipulated videos about Tinubu and other influential individuals. A quick internet search also revealed that the claim that Tinubu intends to change Nigeria’s currency to dollars was not reported by any reputable media organizations.  

Verdict: FALSE

The CDD war Room found the video to be heavily manipulated by the Tiktok user who combined two unrelated video’s to peddle a false narrative. Multiple checks indicate that there is no plan to change Nigeria’s national currency from Naira to the United States Dollar as contained in the manipulated video.