Video showing pro-Biafra activists confronting Nigeria’s foreign minister in Austria is old news
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on August 28, 2019 at 17:27
- 5 min read
- By AFP Nigeria, Mayowa TIJANI
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A version of the video, archived here, has been shared by over 10,000 users on Facebook and seen more than 265,000 times since it was posted on August 20, 2019. The caption says it shows “Nigeria Foreign Affairs Minister, Dr. Onyeama Chased Out Of Nigeria Embassy In Vienna By IPOB In Austria”. “IPOB Is Everywhere!”, it reads.
The same video was also posted separately on this Facebook account on the same day, racking up another 15,000 views. The footage was accompanied by a similar claim that IPOB “chased away former Foreign Affairs Minister, Dr. Onyeama from Nigeria Embassy In Vienna” and that the group “means business”. Onyeama is Nigeria’s current, not former minister for foreign affairs.
The same video has also been uploaded to YouTube, where it has been seen by over 100,000 people. We have archived a few of the other recent posts carrying the footage here, here, here and here.
The captions do not mention the date the video was recorded, implying that it is new. The videos were uploaded in the wake of the recent attack on Senator Ike Ekweremadu in Germany and the threats by IPOB against other politicians making trips abroad.
The attack on Ekweremadu
Senator Ekweremadu was pelted with eggs, manhandled and hit by IPOB activists in Germany on August 17 as he attended a conference for the Nigerian diaspora. The group, which wants the mainly Igbo southeast of Nigeria to become an independent country, claimed responsibility and accused Ekweremadu of backing a government crackdown on its members. It said it would target other politicians from the Igbo ethnic group making foreign trips.
Various pieces of misinformation have been circulating around the incident; we’ve previously fact-checked false claims that Germany’s foreign minister wrote to President Muhammadu Buhari about it, and that videos of the assault show a Nigerian politician being attacked for seeking healthcare abroad.
Foreign Minister Onyeama comes from southeast Nigeria and would be a prime target for IPOB. He serves under Buhari, who has long been reviled by the group due to his role as an army officer fighting to crush the self-declared Republic of Biafra during Nigeria’s civil war in the late 1960s.
What happened in the video?
The video indeed shows Onyeama, re-appointed this month as minister of foreign affairs, speaking to a group of Nigerians in Vienna. While fielding questions, a group of men carrying the Biafran flag are seen walking in and asking that the minister explain alleged killings in southeast Nigeria.
One of the men dressed in a black suit lambasts Onyeama and calls for the release of IPOB’s leader Nnamdi Kanu after a court ruled that he should be granted bail.
Kanu was released in April 2017, almost two years after he was arrested in a Lagos hotel and charged with treason. He fled Nigeria and resurfaced in Israel in 2018.
The speaker in the video speaks of Kanu still being in detention, indicating that the video was recorded before the IPOB leader was released in April 2017.
AFP also found a November 2016 interview with the minister in which he spoke about the Vienna incident. Advanced Google searches revealed that the incident was not reported by the mainstream Nigerian media at the time.
Using Google time search tools through 2015, 2016, and 2017, we found a June 2016 article from a small website reporting the event, called Naijiant. We’ve archived it here. The image at the top shows Onyeama with a gold-framed portrait to his right and a television to his left. It matches the backdrop seen in the video.
In response to the videos circulating online, Nigeria’s foreign ministry said that the incident took place three years ago in Vienna. Spokesman Ferdinand Nwoye said via a statement that the reappearance of the footage was the work of “mischief makers” and called on the public to “disregard the video in its entirety”.
The ministry also insisted that Onyeama was not chased out of the embassy, but was simply “ushered out of the meeting room as the meeting had already ended”.
MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS PRESS RELEASE
— Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nigeria ?? (@AbujaMFA) August 23, 2019
MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS DISMISSES ALLEGED VIDEO OF MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS BEING CHASED OUT OF A MEETING IN VIENNA, AUSTRIA
How we know it’s an old video
The ministry said the footage was three years old, and the reference to Kanu being in detention also suggested it was not recent. But we wanted to verify that it was indeed filmed in 2016.
The article about the incident on Naijiant included a YouTube video, but by the time we accessed the article in August 2019 the video was no longer available.
YouTube searches for “Onyeama Vienna” and other related search terms yielded no sign of a version of the video dating back to 2016.
Eventually we were able to track it down thanks to the Wayback Machine, an internet archiving tool which creates snapshots of how websites appeared in the past.
Searching the Wayback Machine for the url of the Naijiant article, it emerged that the post had been captured twice previously: on April 4, 2017, and April 7, 2017.
The archived versions did not include the YouTube video itself, but they did show the title of the video before it was taken down: “Another disgrace to the Minister of Foreign Affairs by Nigerians abroad”.
Running another search of YouTube, using the title of the video before it was taken down, led us to another version of it uploaded in June 2016. This proves that the confrontation between Onyeama and the protesters at the embassy was not recent.
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