Former President Olusegun Obasanjo, has described as ridiculous the rumour that once spread that President Muhammadu Buhari died and was replaced by a clone called Jubril from Sudan.
Obasanjo claimed that social media was responsible for the spread of the rumour.
The former President explained in a video, how he was approached by a very important person, who asked him about the truth about Buhari’s rumoured death.
According to him, the person told him that the information had gone viral on the social media.
He wondered how Buhari could have died and be replaced with someone from Sudan without him knowing about it.
“Somebody came to me, a very high hub person, saying tell me about this talk of Buhari not being Buhari.
“I said ‘do you believe them?’ He said, ‘well, it is in the social media’. I said ‘how will Buhari die and we will not know that Buhari has died and they will bring us somebody from Sudan to be Buhari?’
“It’s ridiculous to the extreme. But you have it in the social media and you see people believing it,” Obasanjo expressed concern.
While accepting the fact that the social media is good, Obasanjo, however, regretted that it is being abused.
He advocated teaching the youths and the children about the dangers inherent in abusing the social media.
“Social media is good, but it can be abused. We have to train our youths and our children about the dangers of the social media,” he submitted.
Watch Video below:
The Nigerian government has in recent times agitated for the regulation of social media, citing its ability to cause mass misinformation within a short time.
But the calls for regulation of social media has frequetly stirred outrage among Nigerians who say it is a move to stifle free speech in the country,
On June 4th, the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed announced the indefinite suspension of Twitter operations in the country claiming that the microblogging platform is a threat to the corporate existence of the country.
Although the suspension remains till date, Nigerians are however using Virtual Private Network (VPN) to bypass the ban.
