Posts falsely claim Nigerian minister Nyesom Wike was arrested at US airport

“Breaking News Wike Arrested At U.S Airport Transferred To Washington D.C Prison Over 2023 Election,” reads a Facebook post shared more than  3,000 times since first being published on February 8, 2025. 

An eight-minute-long video in the post shows random clips of cars with blaring sirens and parked police vans.

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Screenshot of false post taken on February 17, 2025

A Facebook page called “Dabreezy Comedy” shared the clip with its nearly 700,000 followers.

“I have been seeing news on a matter since yesterday and I saw a viral video on YouTube. They said Nyesom Wike has been arrested in the US. He was arrested immediately after he arrived at the airport and taken to a prison in Washington. I don’t know how true this information is but watch this video,” the narrator says in pidgin English.

The video includes embedded footage from another Facebook page called “Oghi Family Fun2” where a different narrator comments on the same topic and refers to an article published on the subject by Legit.ng, a popular blog in Nigeria, (archived here).

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Screenshot showing the tweet from X handle, @celebrityblo

The claim about Wike was repeated on TikTok.

Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election was keenly contested and Wike was in the spotlight for openly supporting the eventual winner Bola Tinubu from the rival All Progressives Congress (archived here).

Discrepancies were later uncovered in the ballot results in Rivers state where Wike was governor at the time (archived here).

However, the claim that Wike, who now administers Nigeria’s capital city, has been arrested in the US is false.

On home soil

Wike is a seasoned politician in Nigeria, having held key positions in government since 1999, including two terms as governor of oil-rich Rivers state in the Niger Delta region (archived here).

News of his arrest would have made headlines in Nigeria. Keyword searches show this did not happen.

AFP Fact Check searched Wike’s verified X account and found posts (here, here and here) showing that he had been inspecting and commissioning construction projects in Abuja since late January.

A video published by the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) also showed Wike presiding over a meeting with security chiefs in Abuja on February 7, 2024 — a day before the post about his alleged arrest was published (archived here).

Four days later, he presided over a second meeting with the Federal Capital Territory security committee (archived here).

Wike’s spokesperson Lere Olayinka rejected the claim as false.

“The minister has been in Abuja since the beginning of February. He has not travelled overseas, [much less] being arrested at an airport,” Olayinka told AFP Fact Check.

Furthermore, the Legit.ng article cited in the false video was a fact-check that debunked claims of Wike’s arrest (archived here).

However, the narrator in the Facebook video only read the opening paragraph of the article summarising the claim and ignored the rest of the story, which concluded that the arrest rumour had been false.

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Screenshot showing the first paragraph of Legit.ng article referenced by the narrator

AFP Fact Check has debunked several claims about Trump and Nigeria here, including that he banned Nigerian politicians from entering the US.