No evidence that Nigeria’s “oldest man” pictured outside mosque is 261

“The oldest man in Nigeria from Kano State. 261 years,” reads the caption in this Facebook post, shared more than 2,100 times since June 25, 2020. 

Image

A screenshot taken on August 4, 2020, showing the misleading post

Two men feature in the picture, shaking hands outside the gilded doors of a building. One man is smaller in stature and appears older than the other.

The picture has also been shared with the same claim in other Facebook posts here, here, and here.

While many of the comments indicate people are ready to believe the claim, some question it, asking for evidence.

Where is this picture from?

AFP Fact Check ran multiple reverse image searches and found the picture has been online since 2018 when it was published on July 28 in a blog in Hausa, claiming “this is a 75-year-old man whom Sheikh Lukman Akanni met at a mosque in Abuja on Friday”.

The same picture was shared in another blog called naijagists on the same day. This time it claimed the image showed a “75 year old man trapped in the body of a 2 year old boy (sic)”. It added that the picture “is now trending online hours after an Islamic cleric shared it on social media”.

Both stories originated from a now-deleted Facebook post by Sheik Lukman Akanni, who wrote that “this is one of Alimighty Allah creature a 75years old man at Abuja central mosque (sic)”.

The identity of the man who is the subject of the claim is unknown (please contact us if you know who he is) and we have asked Akanni for more information about the image.

But there are other clues in the picture -- including the doors, the praying carpet behind the men and the slippers at the entrance -- to suggest it was indeed taken on the premises of a mosque.

Videos filmed from inside Abuja Central Mosque show that the tiles and carpet match those in the picture.

Who is the world’s oldest man?

When he died in 2014, Samuel Sadela, a Nigerian cleric who claimed to be 114 at the time, would have been the oldest person in the country -- possibly in the world. But his age was never verified by Guinness World Records. The oldest person in 2014 was Japan’s Sakari Momoi, who lived to 111.

In January 2020, a Nigerian monarch named Samuel Durodola Afolabi II was reported by a local news outlet to be 140 and the oldest king in the country. Though he has admitted he does not know his specific age, he said in a recent interview that he “should be up to that already”. Again, his age was never verified by Guinness World Records.

As far as the record-keeping organisation is concerned, the world’s oldest man as of May 2020 was Robert Weighton, who was 112. He died on May 28, 2020, and Guinness World Records has not yet verified Weighton’s successor to the title.

Since the inception of the records, the oldest person ever to have lived was France’s Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the reported age of 122 years and 164 days, while the oldest man ever was Jiroemon Kimura from Japan, who died in 2013 at the reported age of 116 years and 54 days. However, in Calment’s case, researchers have raised some doubts as to her age, as recently reported by The New Yorker.