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Rufai Oseni, a news anchor and TV presenter at Arise Television, has corrected his tweet after reading DUBAWA’s fact check.
On Tuesday, May 13, 2025, five days after the release of the self-acclaimed activist Martins Otse, also known as VeryDarkMan (VDM), Rufai shared a viral EFCC mugshot of VeryDarkMan, which shows charges brought against him.
He accompanied the tweet with the caption, “These pictures were published in Thisday newspaper today.”
Although Rufai did not explicitly imply a narrative in the post, some of his followers took it as a criticism of the anti-graft agency.
However, hours later, Rufai made a series of tweets, correcting himself. In one of the tweets, he referenced DUBAWA’s fact check as evidence of his correction.
He wrote, “ The picture of VeryDarkMan (VDM) holding a sign at the EFCC headquarters is not authentic. Fact-checking by Dubawa confirmed it was manipulated from a 2023 Instagram post, showing inconsistencies like a misspelled name and VDM smiling. The EFCC did not release such an image, and VDM warned against its use. While his arrest on May 2, 2025, for cyberstalking and financial crimes is verified, the picture is fabricated and not part of official reports.”
Background
On May 5, 2025, three days after the EFCC arrested VeryDarkMan without a stated reason, Rufai tweeted that the EFCC had said, “VeryDarkMan was taken into custody following complaints from several petitioners on the allegation of cyberstalking.”
However, the EFCC flagged Rufai’s tweet as “fake news.”
In his defence, the TV presenter said he only quoted BBC Pidgin’s report and that “all media houses carried the same story.” In another tweet, Rufai said he “personally verified the story from the EFCC sources” and had facts to support his claims.
Around this period, people posted different unconfirmed reasons for VDM’s arrest. Several X and Facebook users shared an EFCC mugshot detailing VDM’s offences.
A few days before VDM’s release, the EFCC published an official statement explaining that he was arrested over multiple petitions of alleged financial crimes. But after he was finally released, Rufai, not knowing that the mugshot he saw was manipulated, tweeted the image as a justification for his May 5th tweet, which the EFCC earlier debunked.
This tweet immediately provoked backlash from several X users, who questioned the authenticity of the image he just shared. However, Rufai responded that the picture was published by the ThisDay newspaper.
DUBAWA confirmed the publication on the newspaper’s website (archived here).
This Day newspaper publication featuring VDM’s manipulated mugshot published on May 13, 2025.
DUBAWA, however, had debunked the mugshot as manipulated in this article. Hours later, Rufai returned to correct his previous tweets referencing DUBAWA’s fact-check.
Rufai has also posted a corrigendum to his earlier tweets, saying that the EFCC did not release an official mugshot of VDM and that his tweets were incorrect.
