2023 Election: Festus Keyamo, Fani-Kayode On EU Report For Spreading Fake, Misleading News Against Peter Obi

The European Union (EU) Election Observation Mission (EOM) in their final report for the 2023 general elections inCudes the country’s former Minister of State and Labour, Festus Keyamo, Femi Fani-Kayode, the former Minister of Culture and Tourism for spreading false and misleading information to the general public.

VerseNews Nigeria reports that EU in their final report said the 2023 general elections did not ensure a well-run transparent and inclusive democratic process as assured by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

The noted that the public confidence and trust in Independent National Electoral Commsiion (INEC) were severely damaged during the presidential poll and was not restored in state level elections, leading civil society to call for an independent audit of the entire process.

Gathering evidences, Keyamo and Fani-Kayode were included in page 92 of the report for spreading FAKE NEWS on social media.

EU took a screenshot of Mr. Keyamo’s FAKE NEWS tweet and an evidence of their observation.

 EU in the report said; “The EU EOM social media monitoring team came across a substantial number of false news captured during monitoring process or shared by EU EOM members including long-term observers.”

“The messages were in a variety of formats, ranging from text to images, videos and audio recordings. Of the 140 messages that were captured/received as suspicious between 23 January, the start of the monitoring process, and end of March, the EU EOM social media monitoring team assessed 93 as false, 14 of which were directly refuted or confirmed by fact-checking organizations.”

“A further 47 reports could not be verified as clearly false because verification would have required actual in-depth fact-checking, for which the team did not always have the capacity or sources of information. There was an increased incidence of misleading information in the days leading up to and during the election. In many cases, false reports were spread by well-known personalities associated with political parties.”

“For example, Femi Fani-Kayode, a former minister of aviation and an APC party member, made a claim on February 11, 2023, that the PDP presidential candidate Abubakar, had a secret meeting with serving military Generals in Abuja. He accused Atiku of wanting to incite chaos, provoke a coup d’état, and establish a new and unconstitutional order.”

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See Evidence below:

“Kayode posted this claim across multiple social media platforms, and it garnered 281.2k total impressions. The next day, he posted that the Army denied reports about a meeting between its officers and Atiku. On 12 February Festus Keyamo from APC promoted information published by a suspicious website, accusing Peter Obi of bribery. The story quickly become viral and was in few hours debunked.”

“On March 3, 2023, a Twitter user; @vicdubem posted screenshots of a non-existent joint press statement from the EU, and NDI/IRI Election Observation Mission, dated 2 March 2023 calling for the disqualification of Tinubu for “gross electoral misconduct”, and demanding INEC chairman to step down, and the election result to be reviewed or the election re-run.”

“The was seen about 20,000 times, and despite being reported to Twitter, it remained active, and become viral again after the 18 March election day, further collecting views reaching all together almost 50,000 views.

“On Sunday 19th March 2023, a plethora of social media pages congratulated senator Aisha Binani, the APC female gubernatorial candidate as she was said to have emerged as the first elected female governor before the official announcement of the winner by the electoral body, INEC. The elections were however inconclusive. The posts were shared multiple times, including by some reputable sources.”