This screen grab on Facebook with a tweet purportedly from Kogi State Governor Yahaya Bello is FAKE.

The 4 June 2023-dated tweet claims Bello castigated Nigerian President Bola Tinubu and cautioned the newly elected leader against interfering with the state’s upcoming gubernatorial contest.

Bello was first elected Kogi governor in 2015 and re-elected in 2019. The governor is expected to vacate office in November 2023 when a new governor will be elected.

But is the tweet authentic? We checked Bello’s verified Twitter account to ascertain if such a tweet was posted on 4 June 2023, but there was none.

On 5 July 2023, the governor published this statement disowning the tweet. A similar post was published on the politician’s verified Facebook page.

A keyword search established that no credible publication has covered any news item on the purported tweet.

PesaCheck examined a screenshot on Facebook with a tweet purportedly from Kogi State Governor Yahaya Bello and found it to be FAKE.

This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.

By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.

Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.

This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Rodgers Omondi and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Cédrick Irakoze and acting chief copy editor Francis Mwaniki.

The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck managing editorDoreen Wainainah.

PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape the government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visitpesacheck.org.

PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.