A Fake Voice Note Hours Before the Polls
On the eve of Nigeria's 2023 presidential election, a doctored audio recording spread online purporting to capture opposition candidate Atiku Abubakar plotting to rig the vote. Nigerian fact-checkers traced the clip and found it had been fabricated from spliced speeches.
Hours before Nigerians went to the polls on 25 February 2023, an audio recording circulated on WhatsApp, Facebook and other platforms that appeared to catch three senior opposition figures scheming to steal the presidential election. In it, voices resembling those of the Peoples Democratic Party candidate, Atiku Abubakar, his running mate, Delta State governor Ifeanyi Okowa, and his campaign director-general, Sokoto State governor Aminu Tambuwal, were said to be discussing how to manipulate the result.
The Centre for Democracy and Development, a fact-checking organisation, reported that the clip surfaced on 24 February 2023, the day before the vote, with users claiming it showed the three men “strategising on how to rig the elections,” including talk of disabling voter-verification machines and bribing officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission, according to CDD Fact Check. The organisation said it ran the recording through Deepware, a synthetic-media detection tool, which returned a result of “97% fake,” and concluded the audio was “an ensemble of various audio files containing the voices of the persons in question, falsely edited.”
A separate review reached the same verdict. TheCable, a Nigerian fact-checking newspaper, found that “clips from previously recorded speeches were cut and joined to create the recording,” and noted that the word “rig” heard in the audio “was not the voice of any of the subjects” supposedly speaking, according to TheCable's fact-check. It also ran the clip through Deepware and reached a verdict that the audio was fake. Abubakar's camp dismissed the recording as fabricated.
A test case for AI-manipulated media
The Atiku audio has since become one of the most cited examples of manipulated media in an African election. Hannah Ajakaiye, a Nigerian journalist who founded the fact-checking initiative FactsMatterNG and is now a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, described the clip in an interview with the Institute for Security and Technology. “Another deepfake that made the rounds a few hours to the voting was a manipulated audio of another candidate, Nigeria's former vice president Atiku Abubakar, discussing plans to rig the election,” she said, in the March 2024 Q&A. “That was a deepfake audio that had some impact on people's perceptions, judging by the audio's viral spread.”
Ajakaiye noted that fact-checkers could not always pin down which tools produced the fakes. “There is no visibility of the particular deepfake tools that were used,” she said, according to the same interview. “The fact checks generally mentioned that they were created with AI.”
The wider disinformation economy
The doctored audio did not appear in a vacuum. A BBC investigation published before the 2023 vote found that Nigerian political parties were secretly paying social-media influencers to spread disinformation about opponents, a practice one source described as “an industry,” with payments of up to 20 million naira — about $45,000 — for delivering a result, according to the BBC's Global Disinformation Team. The BBC reported that while hiring influencers is not itself illegal in Nigeria, spreading disinformation online breaches the country's laws.
Researchers who study election manipulation say fabricated audio is especially potent when it lands in the final hours of a campaign, when there is little time for a correction to reach the same audience. Fact-checkers debunked the Atiku clip within a day, but the recording had already spread widely by then.
Why last-minute fakes are hard to contain
The pattern in Nigeria mirrors concerns raised in other democracies: manipulated recordings are cheap to produce, travel quickly on encrypted messaging apps, and are difficult to trace once shared. Analysts monitoring West African elections have warned that the volume and sophistication of synthetic media are likely to grow, placing pressure on fact-checking outfits and electoral bodies to respond faster than a false clip can circulate. In Nigeria's case, the debunking held, but the episode remains a reference point for how a single fabricated voice note can seed doubt about a vote at the moment it matters most.