|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Claim: A Facebook user claimed that the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said the Igbo were intransigent and unconquerable, and that it was because of this that Ahmadu Bello was chosen to rule Nigeria.
Verdict: False. The video is AI-generated and uses Churchill’s image to falsely attribute statements about the Igbo, British colonialism and Ahmadu Bello to him.
Full Text
Conversations around Artificial Intelligence, its use, ethics, transparency, and accountability abound; also, the opportunities it presents have grown from occasional to constant. As this frequency has increased, so has its use, modification, and upgrade.
While AI has opened up opportunities and sharpened skills, it has also given social media an avenue to create content, both realistic and unrealistic in appearance, that contains false or misleading claims. This has added to the constant need for fact-checkers to debunk such claims, especially those with the potential to be believed, cause harm, sow chaos, and distort facts.
DUBAWA has documented samples of such debunked claims here, here, here, and here.
In line with this, a Facebook user, @Victor Iwenay, shared a video showing the late Winston Churchill suggesting that, among other things (archived here), Nigeria was colonised because the Igbo were defiant and unconquerable, which was why Ahmadu Bello was chosen to rule Nigeria.
The two-minute, 27-second video showed a man in the background, with an overlay in which Churchill said, “So you Igbo people think that we the British people are against you. Tell me why we won’t be against you? When we came to Nigeria, every tribe bowed to us, and we ruled them. It was only through indirect rule that we could lead you.“
As the video progressed, Churchill went on to say that the Igbo, like Nelson Mandela, invited bombers from foreign countries to fight the British. He also claimed they continued rebuilding on their own after the British left and are currently agitating for a country of their own.
“Tell me why we will not be against you. Tell me why we will not pick Ahmadu Bello as prime minister. Others are unwilling tools, but only the Igbo man has refused to bend,” he added.
As of Sept. 3, 2026, when DUBAWA last viewed the footage, it had garnered 3,100 likes, 308 comments, over 2,000 shares, and 700,000 views.
DUBAWA then reviewed the comments to gauge how respondents reacted to the claim.
One, @Chiwendu Louisa, replied, “Igbos are strong and undefeatable. God is on their side.”
@Ngozi Nuabuisi, whose tone appeared agitated, said, “You are a fool. After all this, don’t you know that God is with the Igbo people?”
@Alexander Okeso used the comment as an opportunity to raise additional claims: “I have always known that Britain is behind the rendition and imprisonment of Nnamdi Kanu and all the difficulties the Igbo are going through in Nigeria. It is Britain that is rigging all the elections in Nigeria just to prevent an Igbo from emerging as president.”
The same claim was also shared by other Facebook users here and here.
Considering the sensitive nature of the claim, its potential to deepen ethnic distrust, and the fact that many respondents appeared unaware of who Winston Churchill was, DUBAWA decided to investigate whether he ever made such a statement.
Verification
Winston Churchill served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the Second World War and again from 1951 to 1955. He is widely remembered for his wartime leadership and his role in shaping British colonial policy across Africa and Asia, including Nigeria. He died on Jan. 24, 1965, at age 90.
Given that Churchill has been dead for decades, and the video claims to show him making these statements, DUBAWA searched for any past recording or documented statement in which he spoke about the Igbo people or Nigeria’s colonisation in this manner. No such record was found.
Beyond the absence of any prior record, the video itself carried visible inconsistencies. His facial and body movements appeared faster-paced than natural human speech, his voice carried an unnatural, almost mechanical quality, and there were odd pauses in the audio that did not match normal speech patterns.
These inconsistencies prompted DUBAWA to run the video through AI detection tools to verify its authenticity.
We used Hive, an AI detection tool, to analyse the video. The result showed a score of 100.0%, indicating that the footage is AI-generated.
We further examined the video with Zhuque AI Detection Assistant. The tool scored it at 86.01%, a result suggesting a strong possibility of AI-generated or altered content.
DUBAWA conducted an Error Level Analysis (ELA) using a screenshot from the video, and it returned patches on the image. This usually indicates that the image has been altered from its original form.
DUBAWA also took a screenshot of the video showing Churchill’s face and ran it through a Google Lens search, since the video itself was not authentic footage. The search led to an Art UK listing for a 1946 portrait of Sir Winston Churchill by Oswald Hornby Joseph Birley, held in the Parliamentary Art Collection. This confirmed that the face used in the video was lifted from an existing portrait of Churchill rather than from any authentic recording of him speaking.
Lastly, we checked the accounts of the people who shared the claims, and one thing they all had in common was that they were pro-Biafran accounts that constantly shared videos that relate to the movement. This finding already helped DUBAWA understand why they shared the claim.
Conclusion
DUBAWA’s investigation set out to determine whether there was any authentic recording of Churchill making these statements, since he had been dead for decades before the video surfaced. None was found. Instead, AI detection tools confirmed the footage was synthetic, and a reverse image search traced the image to a 1946 portrait of Churchill, which confirmed it was fabricated rather than drawn from any real recording. The claim is false.