Visual illustration of armed men. Image source: Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ).
|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Claim: A Facebook user shared a video showing bandits condemning the narrative that bandits are destroying Nigeria and blaming corrupt politicians.
Verdict: Misleading. While the video shared by the Facebook user contains realistic images and scenes from an actual incident, DUBAWA found that AI was used to alter the bandit’s original speech.
Full Text
Amid attacks and abductions by bandits, one major trend has been the use of social media by the perpetrators to showcase images and videos of the ransom they collect, the victims they kidnapped, and some of their activities in the bush.
Recently, a Facebook user @Obie Wiliam shared a video showing a bandit criticising the narrative that bandits are destroying Nigeria. In the video (archived here), the “bandit” argued that corrupt politicians who loot public funds cause greater damage to the country’s future.
The video caption reads, “Right now, almost 200 million kids are out of school, not because of any pandemic. It’s because politicians embezzled the funds meant for education. We all complain about bandits, but we never look at corrupt politicians.”
The 15-second footage showed a group of armed men on the left side of the screen standing over a crowd of men, women, and children sitting on the floor.
The armed man said, “My dear fellow Nigerians, you say bandits destroy the country. Yes, but corrupt politicians who loot the money destroy the future more. If they did not embezzle, maybe there would be no bandits. A hungry man steals to eat, but a politician steals from the future. Bandits are bad, but corrupt politicians are the worst.”
As of Aug. 14, 2026, the clip amassed 78,000 likes, 2,600 likes, over 8,000 shares, and 5 million views.
DUBAWA checked comments on the post to gauge users’ thoughts about the claim.
@Afolabi Adebayo said, “Two wrongs can never make a right.”
@Mandela Kalu replied, “Then attack politicians, not innocent people.”
@Atawal Ayuba Mike responded, “Oga bandit, so you know that politicians loot from us, and instead of going after them, you come around to destroy our today. You all are birds of the same feather. Yes, politicians have stolen from the future, but bandits are stealing our today. So if we do not survive today, who cares about the future? So bandits and politicians are birds of the same feather.”
We found that other Facebook users also shared the claim here, here, and here.
The high engagement and responses showing that many people believed the claim prompted DUBAWA to investigate it, as it concerns security and could mislead the public if false.
Verification
DUBAWA broke the video into keyframes using InVID, a video verification tool, and conducted reverse image searches on keyframes. Our search led us to a broadcast video by Daily Trust, shared on its official YouTube page, which featured a similar setting.
According to the report, bandits released 40 abducted residents of Faskari Local Government Area in Katsina State. The release, according to the report, came after negotiations between the bandits and community representatives.
As the report progressed, it reached the identical scene, showing the same setting as the video shared by the claimant, including the same bandit, whom the report referred to as the bandit leader.
In this video, he was heard saying, “You are seeing that these people were released because of the promises we made during the peace pact in Faskari Local Government. Altogether, there were 72. We were neither threatened nor overpowered before we released them. We released them because of the promises we made.”
The bandit leader proceeded to accuse security operatives of carrying out a deadly raid, which he claimed killed his men and some other citizens and led to the seizure of their motorcycles and other properties. He said this could harm the fragile truce they had reached during and after the negotiations.
Throughout his speech, he did not say anything that related to the statement shared in the Facebook claim.
We also found other reports carrying the same image here, here, and here, and none of them mentioned the alleged statement in the footage shared on Facebook.
Beyond the inconsistencies between the narrative in the original report and the Facebook claim, we also noticed that the bandit’s voice in the news broadcast differed from the voice in the Facebook post. The latter had a stilted pace, unnatural pauses between words, and body movements that appeared fabricated.
So we used Hive, an AI detection tool, to analyse the video. The result showed a score of 99.8%, indicating that the footage is AI-generated.
Result from Hive.ai
DUBAWA also analysed the video with the Zhuque AI Detector, which returned a 95.14% probability score, indicating the video was AI-generated.
Result from Zhuque AI Detector.
Overall, this shows that the video was manipulated using Artificial Intelligence.
Conclusion
The claim that the video shows a bandit condemning the narrative that bandits are destroying Nigeria and criticising corrupt politicians is misleading. DUBAWA found that the video was manipulated using AI.
