Debunked video falsely linked to suspended Nigerian central bank chief

“You need to see... What DSS Discovered in Emefele house (sic),” reads a tweet published with a video on June 14, 2023.

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A screenshot of the false post, taken on June 17, 2023

Retweeted more than 2,800 times, the 27-second clip shows two men arranging bundles of cash on tables. Igbo words “Afu Nwa Chidi” (meaning “Chidi’s child” — Chidi is a common name in southeastern Nigeria) appear on the bottom left of the footage.

Simon Ekpa, a disputed leader of the Nigerian separatist group Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), shared the same video with a similar claim.

“So Emefele has this type of cash in his house and we are looking for sponsors (sic),” he tweeted on June 15, 2023. Ekpa has been the subject of several debunks (here and here) by AFP Fact Check.

Accounts on Facebook also shared similar claims.

Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu suspended Emefiele from his role as the governor of the country’s central bank on June 9, 2023, as part of an “ongoing investigation of his office and the planned reforms in the financial sector” (archived here). He was arrested soon after (archived here).

His arrest sparked an earlier false claim that authorities had confiscated a fleet of government cars from his home.

Although Nigerian media reported that the Department of State Services (DSS) planned to search his home and office, the claim that the video currently circulating shows money seized from his house is false (archived here).

Video from Sudan

Using the InVID-WeVerify video verification tool, AFP Fact Check found that the footage has been online since April 2019 and is unrelated to the Nigerian central banker’s legal troubles.

A slightly longer version of the same video was published in a report by a Ugandan news outlet on April 19, 2019. The report said the video showed a cache of money seized from former Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir (archived here).

The same footage was published a day on Twitter a day later by a Sudanese account (archived here).

These versions of the video did not have the cryptic Igbo caption that appeared on the clip in the false claim, unlike this Facebook post from December 2020 which made no mention of what the footage showed.

Nine seconds into the video shared with the false claim, the words “Central Bank of Sudan” are visible on a white label covering one of the bundles of US dollars.

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A screenshot shows “Central Bank of Sudan” on a label, taken on June 17, 2023

The Sudanese military ousted Bashir after nearly three decades in office (archived here).

AFP reported then that more than $113 million dollars of cash in three currencies were seized from his residence (archived here).

This is not the first time the video has been the subject of false claims in Nigeria.

It went viral in May 2022 in the run-up to the presidential primary election of the ruling All Progressives Congress, with claims that it showed members of the party preparing cash to secure votes. Read AFP Fact Check’s debunk here.