Nigeria’s Department of State Services (DSS) has warned politicians not to publish false or harmful information in the run-up to next week’s presidential election. The warning came after the ruling All Progressives Congress party’s campaign director accused the military and an opposition candidate of plotting a coup. Fact checkers are working overtime to debunk false news ahead of the February 25 elections.
The notice to politicians was contained in a statement Tuesday.
The Department of State Services said political parties and their media managers must restrain from spreading misleading information during campaigns and when issuing communiques.
The DSS said such misinformation could lead to violent reactions and disrupt peace and order.
The warning comes in the wake of the agency’s investigation of the campaign director for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
Femi Fani-Kayode alleged on Twitter that the opposition People’s Democratic Party presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, was planning a coup d’etat.
The DSS interrogated Fani-Kayode Wednesday. VOA could not immediately get comments from the service on the investigation.
Paul James, an elections program officer at YIAGA Africa, a nonprofit organization promoting democracy, says slander among political parties is not new.
“The DSS is investigating that and has called the person in for questioning, we hope to see how that would end,” said James. “From the Ondo elections in 2020, we saw things like this. The military has come out to outrightly deny that. But not just that, you need to begin to do things, the kind of communications that will inspire confidence.”
Fani-Kayode will report to the DSS every week until the investigation is over.
On Monday, he spoke to journalists in Abuja after being interrogated for five hours and said he regretted posting the tweet without confirmation from authorities.
Nigeria is seeing a heightened spread of fake news and disinformation in a push for votes ahead of the elections.
The country goes to the polls on February 25 to elect a new president, with three candidates as front runners.
A Nigerian Fact Checkers Coalition, made up of 14 newsrooms, is working to curb the spread of falsehoods.
But the coalition’s Kemi Busari says it is more challenging to keep up with the trend of misinformation these days.
“What we noticed currently is a proliferation of false information especially about the election,” said Busari. “We also see a lot of false information about the electoral process. We get a lot more false information these days. Before, I could say the average copies that come to my desk each day was about two to five, but now we’re having nothing less than 10-15 copies in a day and it’s not possible for us to fact check everything.”
Busari says the fact checkers coalition is setting up centers in Lagos and Abuja to monitor the elections and information about the voting in real time.
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