Incident 1032: Reported Doctored Video of Nigerian President Bola Tinubu Claims Naira Will Be Replaced by U.S. Dollar

Description: A reported viral video circulated in Nigeria in the late summer and early fall of 2023 falsely claiming that President Bola Tinubu announced plans to replace the naira with the U.S. dollar. The video, reportedly styled as a news segment from Arise News, was allegedly digitally altered using AI-generated audio and lip-sync manipulation. Arise News publicly denounced the clip as a deepfake, and no legitimate media sources corroborated the claim. The video appeared amid public anxiety over Nigeria's ongoing currency crisis.

Editor Notes: Timeline notes: The earliest remaining Facebook URL (that is currently known) is dated August 29, 2023. Africa Check performed its fact check on this video on October 16, 2023. The incident was included in the database on April 21, 2025. For another incident involving naira misinformation, see also Incident 1049: AI Tools Reportedly Used to Fabricate Image of 5,000-Naira Nigerian Banknote Featuring President Bola Tinubu.

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Alleged: Unknown voice cloning technology developer and Unknown deepfake technology developer developed an AI system deployed by Unknown actors, which harmed Media integrity , General public of Nigeria and Bola Tinubu.

Alleged implicated AI systems: Unknown voice cloning technology and Unknown deepfake technology apps

Incident Stats

Incident ID

1032

Report Count

Incident Date

2023-08-29

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Nigeria's president Bola Tinubu didn't scrap the naira and replace it with dollar, viral video doctored

africacheck.org

africacheck.org · 2023

IN SHORT: In 2023, Nigeria's currency faced several crises, from the shortage of the national currency to its drop at the international market. But claims that president Bola Tinubu replaced the naira with the dollar are false.

In 2022, the…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.