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In June 2026, a video clip showed a uniformed police officer casually raising his hand in greeting as dozens of armed men on motorcycles rode past in an orderly convoy.
The Nigeria Police Force quickly clarified that the footage was recorded along the road linking Musawa and Matazu local government areas in Katsina State.
In a statement published on its official Facebook handle, the Force explained that the armed riders were not bandits but registered members of the Vigilante Group of Nigeria (VGN) and local hunters participating in a joint security clearance operation.
But the clarification met widespread scepticism.
Thousands of online commentators (here, here, here, and here) rejected the explanation, raising doubts about the police’s account.
That instinctive disbelief did not emerge in a vacuum. Years of contradictions between official statements and subsequent evidence shaped it.
A wider crisis of trust
The public’s scepticism towards official institutions is reflected in broader national data.
The 2026 Nigeria Social Cohesion Survey by the Africa Polling Institute (API) reported that 72% of Nigerians expressed little to no trust in the government, down from 83% in 2025.
Trust was similarly low across other key institutions. 77% expressed little to no trust in the National Assembly, while 73% expressed little to no trust in the judiciary. Comparatively, 49% expressed little to no trust in religious leaders and 55% expressed little to no trust in traditional leaders.
These figures provide broader context for why official statements can face immediate resistance online.
For security agencies, the consequences can be particularly grave. If the public loses faith, official accounts, genuine warnings, clarifications and appeals for cooperation can be dismissed as misinformation.
Patterns that are hard to ignore
The memory of what happened in Kaduna State just five months earlier helps explain the public’s scepticism.
On Sunday, Jan. 18, 2026, armed bandits stormed three churches in Kurmin Wali, Kajuru Local Government Area, abducting 177 Christian worshippers during morning services.
As community members raised the alarm, the Kaduna State Police Command and local government officials pushed back, insisting that reports of mass abductions were baseless rumours designed to cause panic.
That denial began to unravel within days, as church leaders and the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) provided a list containing the names and families of the missing worshippers.
According to a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) report, only then did security forces treat the situation as an active mass-abduction incident. The operation continued for weeks, during which some of the captives escaped while the remaining victims were later released.
This pattern of denying serious allegations before later acknowledging them also happens in military affairs.
When reports suggested that the cancellation of Nigeria’s 65th Independence Anniversary parade was due to an alleged coup plot against President Bola Tinubu’s administration, defence spokespersons moved to dismiss the reports as malicious falsehoods, as reported by Daily Post.
Yet within months, authorities moved to formally inaugurate a court-martial in Abuja to try dozens of implicated officers.
A similar contradiction emerged in December 2018, when an investigation by Premium Times revealed that 167 Mobile Police (MOPOL) personnel had absconded from a counter-insurgency training camp in Buni Yadi, Yobe State, to avoid deployment to the frontline against Boko Haram.
Force Headquarters dismissed the report as fabricated and accused the news outlet of attempting to undermine troop morale.
The denial, however, lasted barely 24 hours. Commanders in the Nigerian Army intercepted several of the fleeing police officers in Damaturu, as reported by Premium Times.
For the public, such episodes create a credibility problem that goes beyond the individual incident. Once an official account is contradicted by subsequent evidence, future statements from the same institution are likely to be viewed with suspicion, even when they are accurate.
#EndSARS and Chibok
Following the shooting at the October 2020 #EndSARS protests at the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos, the Nigerian Army strongly denied that its personnel were present, while news reports and social media claims about the incident were dismissed as “fake news.”
Multiple investigations later challenged that account.
A separate Amnesty International Nigeria and CNN investigations examined video footage, bullet casings and geolocation evidence linked to military units.
At the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry, the military’s account also shifted over time, from denying that soldiers were at the scene, to acknowledging their presence while disputing the use of live ammunition, and eventually admitting that live rounds had been taken to the site.
The same communication problem dates back even further.
In April 2014, days after Boko Haram abducted schoolgirls from Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, the Defence Headquarters issued a statement claiming that soldiers had rescued nearly all of the abducted girls, leaving only eight in captivity.
The school principal, parents, and local officials challenged the claim. The military was subsequently forced to retract the statement and acknowledge that the girls remained missing, as Premium Times reported.
These episodes help explain why the public may reject official explanations even when those explanations are correct.
Expert insight
Kabir Lawanti, a communications scholar and senior lecturer in the Department of Mass Communication at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, explains that when an official denial collapses, the institutional damage extends far beyond the specific event.
“It creates what communication scholars call a credibility deficit, and the public may begin to question what else they have told us that is not true,” he said.
Security spokespersons often cite national security to justify uncommunicative postures or outright denials. However, Lawanti argues that transparency does not require exposing the identity of informants, troop movements, intelligence sources or operational strategies.
Echoing these concerns, Caleb Ijioma, Executive Director of the youth-led fact-checking organisation Roundcheck, points out that the breakdown in public trust is driven not only by official misstatements, but also by a disconnect between authorities and the public.
He emphasised that protecting tactical assets differs fundamentally from withholding basic operational accountability.
“I understand that during operations, you cannot roll out every detail—revealing specific information- but the public needs basic accountability. Why were suspects arrested? How did individuals die in custody? Who fired the shot? Agencies must be transparent with basic facts.”
The experts recommend that security institutions abandon defensive crisis-management playbooks and adopt an evidence-based approach by prioritising factual accuracy over public-relations optics, acknowledging ongoing verification rather than issuing premature, categorical denials that may later collapse.