A Damaging Claim, Swiftly Debunked
A video purporting to show Christians in northern Nigeria being massacred and sold into slavery has been exposed as a deliberate misrepresentation. The footage has no connection to Nigeria whatsoever — it originates from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it was first published in May 2026.
The clip, shared by Instagram user @Apostleamosngosha, shows a column of men and women with their hands bound behind their backs, visibly distressed, being escorted along a muddy road by armed men in unidentified uniforms. The caption attached to it was incendiary: “This is what’s happening in Nigeria. Christians are being massacred, and many of them are being sold into slavery. Did you know Islam started slavery when they captured North Africa?”
By 28 June 2026, the post had gathered over 59 likes and 22 comments on Instagram alone. The same content spread rapidly across X and Facebook, accumulating thousands of additional views. X user @globalrevival91 amplified the claim using identical wording. One sceptical voice cut through the noise: a user named Prince Robinson asked directly, “Are police officers now kidnappers because I saw a police officer with a long gun in front of these innocent people?”
How Fact-Checkers Traced the Footage
No Nigerian News Trail
Fact-checkers at DUBAWA began with a straightforward keyword search. They found no Nigerian news reports — from any outlet, in any language — linked to the events shown in the video. That absence alone was telling.
Reverse Image Search Points to the DRC
A reverse image search on keyframes from the footage led investigators to earlier versions of the same video, published in May 2026 — weeks before the Nigeria-linked claim began circulating. The account @KivuMorningPost (Kivumorningpost.cd) had already identified the footage as showing hundreds of civilians from South Kivu who were detained in the Kunda region of Ituri province in the DRC.
Radio Okapi Confirms the Real Story
That discovery prompted a further search, which surfaced a report published on 14 May 2026 by Radio Okapi — the United Nations-backed radio station operating inside the DRC. Reviewed through Google Translate, the French-language report confirmed that security sources identified the detained individuals as mostly young people from South Kivu. Their presence in the Kunda area had been flagged as suspicious by local security forces, though sources indicated the group had arrived gradually to engage in agricultural work and artisanal gold mining.
What the Video Actually Shows
The incident is a security detention in the eastern DRC, not a religious massacre in Nigeria. There is no evidence of enslavement, no Nigerian location, and no religious targeting. The armed escorts visible in the footage are consistent with security forces conducting a civilian detention — not the orchestrated persecution the caption describes.
The false narrative attached to this footage is calculated. It exploits genuine anxieties around religious violence and Christian-Muslim tensions in Nigeria to lend credibility to a story that is entirely fabricated. The video was stripped of its original context, relabelled, and deployed across multiple platforms to maximise emotional impact.
Why This Matters Beyond a Single Hoax
Nigeria’s religious and security landscape is already volatile enough without manufactured crises being injected into public discourse. Misinformation of this kind does real harm — it inflames communal tensions, distorts public understanding of where genuine threats exist, and makes it harder for citizens to hold the actual perpetrators of violence to account.
The speed with which this clip spread — thousands of views across Instagram, X and Facebook before any correction gained traction — is a reminder that platforms remain poorly equipped to contain coordinated disinformation, particularly when it targets African audiences.
Separately, and worth noting in the same breath, the Katsina state government has maintained conspicuous silence following the arrest of suspected terrorist leaders at an airport after the Hajj pilgrimage. The Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, confirmed that seven ISWAP and Boko Haram commanders were arrested and handed to the Department of State Services. Katsina’s refusal to comment has drawn public criticism, with many observers pointing to a troubling pattern of opacity on security matters from state governments in the north. That silence, unlike the Congo video, is a Nigerian story worth pursuing.