The Media Team of the President candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has raised alarm on the existence of a website that has been dishing out falsehood for the purpose of discrediting Tinubu.
In a statement today, February 18, the Director of the Presidential Campaign Council (PCC), Bayo Onanuga, alleged that the website, igbotimesmagazine.online has been created with link to the Labour Party (LP) for the sole purpose of discrediting the APC presidential candidate.
He recounted some of the fake narrations the website has engaged in against Tinubu, recalling the recent one that alleged President Muhammadu Buhari directing the Department of State Service (DSS) to search Tinubu’s residence in Abuja where the sum of N400 million was found.
Full text of the APC statement is reproduced hereunder:
The All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Council has just stumbled on a rogue website, www. Igbotimesmagazine.online, out to disseminate false and malicious information about Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress.
In its latest false news, the site claimed that some EFCC operatives, on the order of President Muhammadu Buhari raided the “underground home” of Tinubu. It claimed that N400 billion of the new notes was recovered from there. The story, which notably lacked the essential “when, where and how” ingredients of any news story, went viral.
The EFCC has since issued a formal statement on the purported raid by its men as a fake story the public should disregard.
The dubious website, in its fake story, claimed investigations are still ongoing as to which bank manager made such money available to Tinubu, it then admitted its own absurdity when it wrote that “the money recovered in Tinubu’s “underground house” is equivalent of “the entire money printed for the whole Nigeria” by the CBN.
So, if Tinubu alone has all the money printed by Godwin Emefiele’s CBN, how do you account for the billions distributed by the apex bank to all the banks, including operators of POS?
The site, which on Twitter and Facebook appears to have links with the Labour Party, went further, in another post, to claim that President Muhammadu has ordered the arrest of the bank manager that made the phantom money available to the APC candidate.
In a previous post two weeks ago, the site had claimed that ‘an angry mob blocked N3 billion of new notes heading to Tinubu’s house’.
Other fake news on the site included one that claimed the Federal Government planned to borrow money from kidnappers in Kaduna because they have more money than our country. It credited the misleading news to Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information and Culture.
We want to warn Nigerians to be wary of every piece of news emanating from the site, and its social media handles.
There will be many of such sites as some candidates become desperate to win at all costs, in fulfilment of some rogue and rigged opinion polls by ANAP Foundation and Nextier, shunning all decent norms and rules.
The igbotimesmagazine.online, with its affiliated social media handles exists for no good of our country.
It is out to misinform and mislead our people and disseminate malicious information on Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in the run up to the 25 February election, which the opposition candidates, including Peter Obi of Labour Party, are bound to lose.
We are not surprised that the opposition has embarked on sponsoring a website and social media handles, whose owners are unknown and which lacks physical address or even an email.
We urge the authorities to fish out the people behind the site, that is recklessly dishing out fake news, before more damage is done to our polity.
