As part of requirements before becoming a reporter, I had to undergo extensive training on various aspects of journalism along with some of my colleagues.
One of the many classes we had was on fact-checking delivered by an expert in that field. Among many things he touched on was the need to have a ‘bullshit detector’, an attitude of initial skepticism towards any news that sounds implausible.
So it was that on Friday, August 27, a digitally altered version of THISDAY’s front page had the leading headline: “Shocking: Uzodinma declares Free Marriage between Fulani Settlers and Imo Ladies”. I came across it on a couple of WhatsApp updates seen from among my contacts.
The original headline was: “Buhari Elated as NNPC Breaks Jinx, Declares N287bn Profit, First in 44 years”. When I saw the earlier headline in circulation, it didn’t take me much time to spot that it was false. THISDAY issued a press release to quickly debunk the lie which was gaining traction.
Now I understand that many folks are not in the media business like I am, so I will try to help you hone your bullshit detector skills to keep you on your toes.
It is no news that Hope Uzodinma, the governor of Imo State, is not the most popular man at the moment.
A few days ago, THISDAY did a story about how he was the first of the 17 southern governors to break the pact on the anti-open grazing bill. That did not sit well with some people who considered him a recreant.
Given this backdrop, one sees the fake headline in a different light—the attempt by mischief makers taking advantage of an unpopular guy to fabricate a headline strong enough to generate public outrage.
The telling sign of B.S for me was that the story was not carried by other media houses. I will not name names but those conversant with Nigerian media know the kind of outlets that would swoop on such ‘scoop’, and yet, nada.
In contrast, the original headline—the one on the NNPC—was featured on the covers of nearly all major Nigerian newspapers.
I did reach out to those on my contact list explaining that the news headline was false and thankfully they took their posts down. Still, this speaks to the larger and intractable problem of the reach of fake news.
I need not dwell much on the menace that fake news is. The Ebola hoax that resulted in two deaths and 20 others hospitalised was from the viral report that Ebola was curable through the drinking of salt water. There’s the 5G hoax that led to the destruction of masts, and of course the coronavirus hoax to name a few.
But even more worrying is that reputable news sources can carry what is unconfirmed and unsubstantiated and allow it to run based on spurious data.
I was reading up on Nigeria’s Lunacy Act, and was redirected in the course of my study to a story by Al Jazeera.
In 2019, in commemoration of the World Mental Health Day, Al Jazeera beamed the spotlight on Nigeria with the story ‘Nigeria has a mental health problem’.
The report says that ‘one in four Nigerians suffers from mental illness’. To put it another way, 50 million Nigerians suffer from mental illness.
A note of caution: mental illness covers a wide range of illnesses affecting the mind varying from depression to schizophrenia. According to the American Psychiatric Association, it is defined as a health condition involving changes in emotion, thinking or behavior (or a combination of these). It in no way implies insanity as is often erroneously assumed.
It goes on to make some interesting claims, the likes of which one is almost tempted to take as a given by virtue of the prestige of the news organisation. Regardless, I did not think that sounded right. 50 million is a huge number and as the famous astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Although the report cites the WHO as its reference, no such thing can be found on the WHO website. In fact, the good people at Africa Check published a well-researched piece that countered most of the claims made by Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera standing by its report, said it is against its policy to reveal proprietary sources.
Here’s another. What is the population of Lagos? You may think you know the answer but do you really?
Aerial view of Lagos at sunset. Credits: Namnso Ukpanah/UNSPLASH
The 2006 national census put Lagos State at a little over nine million people. Currently, the World Population Review puts Lagos at around 14.8 million.
In an interview in 2011, the Lagos State commissioner for information at the time said, “Although, we have not conducted any census since 2006, we however counted 18 million residents. By our projection, population should now be about 20 to 21 million.”
Think about that. That’s over a 100 per cent growth rate in five years, a mathematical impossibility.
The 2021 Appropriation Law which details the state’s budget for the year puts Lagos at 28.1 million with a population growth rate of three per cent per year. However, that figure reflects more than 300 per cent population growth in 15 years and almost double the official population figures.
In 2006, the growth rate of Lagos was 3.79 per cent which is the highest rate recorded going back 15 years. In the years that have followed the growth rate has averaged 3.25 per cent. There’s no way nine million people at 3.25 per cent growth rate compound to 28.1 million in 15 years. The math makes no sense!
To think that such a figure was passed undisputed in a policy document is really scary. I shiver to imagine the scale of falsehood that exists uninhibited in government institutions across the country.
This lack of reliable data has become a leitmotif in the opera of Nigerian institutions spawning the Twitter catchphrase ‘this is Nigeria, anything you see you just have take it like that’. My final example may underscore this point.
When discussing Nigeria’s housing deficit, the usual figures bandied about are between 17 million and 22 million. This has become ‘common knowledge’ and is often quoted in various documents from respected sources.
In an interview I did in July with the President of the Architects Registration Council of Nigeria, I brought up these figures and he told me posthaste that he found those numbers dubious.
At the time, I presumed that he was probably being on the defensive. It was only a few days later that I came to understand the reason for his confidence.
At a ministerial press briefing in July which you can watch here, the minister of works and housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, said there was no data to back up claims that Nigeria has such a deficit.
I'll share this as seen on allAfrica:
Fashola said he had approached the subject critically, stating that one of the things he was confronted with on resumption as minister of housing, was the talk about 17 million housing deficit which was credited to the World Bank.
"I invited the country manager for World Bank and said this is credited to you and he said no we have no hand in it and we know nothing about it. And then somebody said it was the African Development Bank and I called the country representative, and he said we know nothing about it."
He then called the Director General of the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics and was told there was no data about people who need homes in Nigeria, but that there was data about the number of households (families in Nigeria), which is 35 million households.
So, he asked where the figure 17 million emanated from and the DG said if the analysis of that huge deficit exists then it means half of Nigeria is homeless. The DG then promised to collect data on this in future.
The minister said he then went to the Planning Commission that does census and told them the next census should include home ownership and home rental census, "because we can't solve a problem that we cannot measure.
"And I kept digging and found where 17 million deficit claim came from- it came from my ministry (Works and Housing) in 2012. There was a policy document and in the preface, somebody just put it there. I've called my predecessor on this desk and she said there was no data to support it.
"Quote me, Nigeria does not have a 17-million or a 22-million housing deficit. Two interesting things are that in 2017 when our household survey was 35 million, the housing deficit was 17 million, that is 48.57 per cent of the household number. Now, there is an updated household survey that puts Nigeria's household at 45, and you know the interesting thing, the housing deficit has followed it to 22 million which is being quoted and it is also 48 per cent. People are just adding up."
I’m not here to defend the government. There very well may be a huge housing deficit but we cannot know what that figure is because there’s no supporting data.
Fashola literally turned on his bullshit detector (the same way we turned on ours when he did that stunt at the Lekki Toll Gate).
He questioned the figures and as it turned out, someone within the ministry snuck it into a policy document which was how it became common knowledge.
This goes to show how manipulated data left unchallenged can be passed off as fact—the unsavory fruit of the poisoned tree. As Vladimir Lenin once pithily remarked, “a lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
The lesson here is simple: no one is impervious to fake news. We’re bombarded by it everywhere from WhatsApp to even the most trusted of sources.
Ultimately, an attitude of skepticism presents the best defense against the petard of falsehood. As Murphy’s Law reminds us, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.