Verdict: False

Claim: A circulated picture showing Peter Obi bowing and shaking hands with President Bola Tinubu on a visit to Aso Rock.

 
Full Story: A picture of Peter Obi bowing and shaking hands with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu became viral on WhatsApp recently and was sent to Nigerian democratic Report (NDR) by a user for verification. The picture had a caption written in Nigerian pidgin thus:

 
‘If you like Get sense. If you like, let politics spoil your family life, future, and friendship. For your pocket. Na your Obi be that today.

 
Mr. Peter Obi was a serious presidential contender in the just concluded 2023 general elections in Nigeria which went in favour of the current President, having been declared winner by the Independent National Electoral Commission.

 
Following this declaration and having been dissatisfied with the outcome of the election, Peter Obi and his party, Labour Party are currently challenging the results of the election at the Presidential Electoral Petition Tribunal in Abuja.

 
However, there have been series of manipulated and misleading claims from different quarters to dissuade the opposition from forging ahead with the petition including other false claims saying tribunal  judges have resigned over pressure to rule against Peter Obi.

Recently, a viral photograph was making the round showing Peter Obi visited the President in Aso Rock, bowing and exchanging pleasantries with the his rival. Is this true? We verify.

 
Verification: 

We subjected the photograph to Google image reverse search, and it returned with a similar picture of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the Chairman Dangote Group of Company Aliko Dangote.

The result obviously showed the original picture showing the president and Mr. Aliko Dangote and had already been published by legit.ng  on May 12th, 2023 at 11:23AM, in a story which highlighted the visit of the Billionaire businessman, Alhaji Aliko Dangote to the Nigeria’s then president-elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, ahead of the May 29 inauguration.

 
See the picture below:

This same story has also being published via other news platforms here, and here.

In further search to know where the picture first emerged, we discovered a tweet shared on April 26th, 2023 by the special Assistant to President with the user name: @DOlusegun tweeted:

 
‘President Elect BAT receives Alhaji Aliko Dangote who paid a courtesy visit on the President Elect at his private residence’

In establishing the fact behind the two photographs, we resulted to analysing the pictures by naming them as follows:

 
Frame 1:  Picture of Peter Obi bowing and shaking hand with Tinubu.

Frame 2: Picture of Dangote shaking hand with Tinubu

Analysis:

 
Frame 1: Checks show that Dangote’s image has been cropped out and replaced with Obi’s image in the photo. To insinuate some level of credibility, a portrait of the president behind is made to appear behind the doctored image. This is the second red flag.

 
Frame 2: A close look also shows that the picture doesn’t have the portrait of the President behind him unlike the first image.

Meanwhile, a further search eventually led us to the originator of the fake image LUCA BRASI – 5.0 with the user name @donortez, in a tweet captioned: This can be seen on the 19th August, 2023, with a caption:

 
See the caption on the tweet below:

Conclusion:

Critical analysis shows that the image of Obi shaking and bowing to President Tinubu is Photoshopped.