Blogger did fake news of me posing with strippers – Osinbajo

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo (1)

Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo has said that fake news had put him in trouble with his wife recently.

Mr Osinbajo, while speaking at a BBC symposium on fake news tagged, ‘Nigeria 2019: Countering Fake News’, in Abuja on Wednesday, said a blog put up a picture depicting him posing with strippers.

The vice president said on closer inspection of the photo, he discovered that he had indeed taken a picture with the women at an entertainment event but they were fully clothed.

He said the blogger picked a photo of where the women were not fully clothed and presented it to the public wrongly.

“I got a call from my wife about three or four weeks ago and she said Yemi what are you doing with strippers and I said what do you mean by strippers? So, I read a story in a famous blog that said, ‘Osinbajo caught with strippers’.

“And there was a photograph of me sitting between two perfectly clothed ladies but underneath this picture, the same ladies were not wearing much.

“In fact-checking (I noticed that) the photographs with these two ladies at an entertainment event were taken when they were perfectly clothed but by the time the story was put out, it was as though I had taken a photo with them at the time they were not clothed at all.

“As it turns out, I wasn’t in the picture of where they were not wearing clothes but just the caption, the stories and all that gave the impression that here I was in the company of these ladies at a point when they were doing their business,” he said.

Osinbajo added that there was a need to effectively tackle fake news as it could cause violence and destroy lives.