This Facebook post claiming that Nigerian President Bola Tinubu ordered the immediate re-opening of all borders is FALSE.

The post proclaims: “Breaking news! President Tinubu orders immediate reopening of all Nigeria borders.”

In 2019, former President Muhammadu Buhari shut all land borders as part of efforts to curtail illegal importation of goods and to boost rice production. In December 2020, Buhari issued orders to reopen four land borders. Four others were reopened in April 2022.

Tinubu, who was sworn in as Nigeria’s Head of State on 29 May 2023, has not issued any orders to re-open all the borders.

On 11 July 2023, Nigeria Customs Service Comptroller General Adewale Adeniyi dismissed the claim, clarifying that only selected strategic borders have been re-opened.

“Well, it is not true that all Nigerian borders have been opened … If you remember that the borders were completely shut down in 2018 up until 2021–22 when some selected strategic borders were reopened, that is still the situation as we speak,” Adenyi said during a media briefing.

“Four of them were initially re-opened and two more were opened after that and that is still the situation. There are ongoing processes to review this situation against the objective of the border closure itself and the processes are not yet completed, and of course when borders are reopened it will not be subject of rumour in any way,” the comptroller general added.

PesaCheck has looked into a Facebook post claiming that Nigerian President Bola Tinubu had ordered the immediate re-opening of all borders and finds it to be FALSE.

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 Peris Gachahi 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 editor Doreen 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 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.