Labour Party's 2023 presidential candidate, Peter Obi, is being investigated for allegedly deceiving the public through his supporters, known as 'Obidients', by using old images of Lagos schools in need of renovations. This was revealed in a recent investigation conducted by Fact-Checkers.
A supporter of the opposition leader recently posted photos that he claimed depicted the current state of a public school in Lagos.
However, AFP Fact Checkers found that the claim was misleading as the photos were taken in 2017 and 2019 respectively.
The school mentioned in the claim, as posted by Peter Obi’s supporter known as Ejikeme on X.com, has already been renovated by the state government.
Furthermore, one of the images used in the misleading post shows an unrelated building.
An X post captioned “Eric Moore Junior High School, Surulere,” has gained more than 1,400 shares and comments since it was published on April 26, 2024.
The post features four pictures: the two in the top row show students wearing brown checked shirts over plain brown shorts, grouped into two classes in a run-down outbuilding.
In the photo on the bottom left, students with the same uniforms sit on the floor holding notebooks.
The fourth image shows children wearing grey and white uniforms in a roofed class with a bare floor.
Comments below the post indicate that many people believed the claim.
One user wrote, “So pained to see that this school hasn’t changed,” while another described the images as “an eyesore”.
The pictures were posted by a Nigerian-based account called “Ejikeme”.
The user, as confirmed by an AFP Fact Checker, regularly shares content in support of the Igbo ethnic group as well as Obi.
Ejikeme’s handle also includes posts with other images of dilapidated schools in Lagos in response to the #TinubuLagosSchoolSeries trending topic.
Last month, the hashtag began trending after opposition politician, Reno Omokri, accused Obi of not building any schools during his tenure as the governor of Anambra State.
Omokri promised to give $10,000 to anyone who could prove otherwise and insisted that Tinubu, who defeated Obi in the elections, was a better candidate.
In response, Obi’s supporters began sharing posts that showcased the deteriorating public infrastructure in Lagos, where Tinubu served as governor from 1999 to 2007.
However, the claim about the images depicting the state of Eric Moore Junior High School is misleading.
Using a reverse image search, AFP Fact Check found that the first three pictures were taken from a 2017 article by Nigerian news site The Guardian.
Published on May 17, 2017, the report explained the lack of basic amenities for students of Eric Moore Junior High School in Surelere, a suburb of Lagos.
Two years later, former Lagos Health Commissioner Akin Abayomi attended an inauguration ceremony at the school after four blocks of classrooms and the toilets were renovated.
The Lagos State Ministry of Health released images of the school’s new structures in a thread on X in 2021.
An AFP journalist took geo-tagged pictures of Eric Moore on May 2, 2024, showing blue roofs and two-tone walls matching the health ministry photographs.
A picture from space of the school area displays the same blue roofs, as well as a basketball court and solar panels on a nearby building.
These characteristics match another picture taken by AFP on May 2, 2024.
Meanwhile, pictures on Google Maps from 2023 also exhibit the updated school, though the solar panels were not put in place at that time.
A search using the fourth image uncovered a local news article released on May 26, 2019, about the condition of the facilities at Ojota Junior Secondary School in Lagos.
The 2023 presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, is being investigated for supposedly tricking the public through his supporters called ‘Obidients’ with old images depicting Lagos schools in need of serious renovations, as per a recent investigation by Fact-Checkers. A supporter of the opposition leader recently shared photos he alleged showed the current state […]
