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Claim: A Facebook user shared a video and claimed that it showed a warehouse in Nigeria containing a hoarded stack of newly printed naira notes in northern Nigeria.
Verdict: FALSE. The video was from a warehouse that hoarded food items in Kano State. The Public Complaint and Anti-Corruption Commission (PCAC) in Kano raided the warehouse on Feb. 13, 2024.
Full Text
Nigerians are in the midst of unprecedented economic turmoil. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed that the inflation rate in January 2024 rose to 29.90% from 28.92% in December 2023, while food inflation increased from 33.93% to 35.41% within the same period. This has greatly contributed to the hike in food prices across the country.
Also, the value of the Nigerian naira has plummeted despite the diverse economic policies introduced by the Federal government to salvage the situation recently. Still, experts say that unknown persons sabotage the currency.
Amidst all these, a Facebook user, Graceful Graceful, shared a 30-second video of people in a warehouse. The words written on the video were, “This is Nigeria. Stack of newly printed naira found in a big warehouse in northern Nigeria.”
Since it was posted on Feb. 14, 2024, it has gained more than 7,700 reactions, 1,400 comments, and over 14,000 reshares.
The language used in the video was Hausa, leading many not to believe the claim, which also makes derogatory comments about the northern region.
Benedicta Olivia said, “This heat should cause combustion in this warehouse. People are dying and crying about [being] cashless while billions of naira [are] stolen and hidden in this warehouse. God, use your heat and do something. Let the money catch fire. Let everybody rest.”
Asha Martins said, “The North is the corruption headquarters, a terrible curse to a blessed country.”
The disparity of opinions and the controversy being generated about the claim made DUBAWA fact-check the video.
Verification
We observed that the person recording the video spoke in the Hausa language, so we shared it with friends familiar with Hausa for translation. A common statement they discovered was a raid on a warehouse filled with food items like Taliya, which is noodles or spaghetti in Hausa.
With this knowledge, we searched for news of a recent raid on warehouses in a Northern Nigeria state. We found reports of the Kano State Public Complaints and Anti-corruption Commission (PCACC) confiscating 10 warehouses hoarding essential commodities in the Dawanau area of Dawakin Tofa local government on Feb. 11, 2024.
Muhuyi Magaji, the commission’s chairman who led the raid, revealed that food items like spaghetti, rice, pasta, sugar, and other food items worth over N100 million were confiscated at the warehouses in Dawanau International Grains Market, Singer Market, and Kwari Textile Market in Kano state.
Using InVid WeVerify (a video verification tool), DUBAWA conducted a video analysis to find the source of the viral video. We obtained keyframes that we shared with Google Lens for reverse search. The result led to visual reports of the warehouse search in Kano State found on Arise TV, Channels TV and TVC News, which corroborated previous findings.
Conclusion
The warehouses confiscated in Kano State were filled with essential commodities, not newly printed naira note bundles, as claimed in the viral video. Therefore, the claim is false.
