Political campaigns are high-stakes, emotional, and heavily choreographed. A rally is never just a rally in Nigerian politics. It is a public show of strength, a test of popularity, and a moment the television cameras and social media feeds will replay for weeks. That is why, according to the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Council, the opposition is determined to sabotage the APC’s presidential campaign flag-off in Kaduna before the event even unfolds. In an official statement, council spokesman Dele Alake said the APC had uncovered a well-orchestrated, devious plan by former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and the African Democratic Congress to discredit the rally. The council claims that Atiku and the ADC are using what it calls subterfuge and mindless propaganda to mislead the Nigerian public. The plan supposedly includes fake news operations, artificial intelligence, deepfake videos, and counterfeit documents, all designed to manipulate public opinion and plant false stories in both mainstream media and social media. The stated goal, according to the statement, is to embarrass the APC, undermine President Bola Tinubu, humiliate Governor Uba Sani, and cast doubt on the party’s leadership in the eyes of voters. But the larger message is more urgent: the APC believes that citizens will be flooded with deliberately engineered content and that the only way to protect the truth is to be suspicious, careful, and ready to ask questions before sharing anything dramatic or negative about the Kaduna event.
The first sign of the alleged plot, the APC says, appeared in the 24 hours before the rally. It began with something as ordinary as a photograph. Picture the scene: a security vehicle on routine patrol, parked innocently at a junction near one of the APC’s many campaign billboards in Kaduna metropolis. To any reasonable person, it is just a patrol car sitting on a road. Security vehicles are parked all over the city on any given day. But the APC says Atiku and the ADC propaganda machinery looked at that harmless image and turned it into a sinister story. They claimed the security agents were there to protect the APC billboards. That would imply that the ruling party was using state security for partisan purposes, which is exactly the kind of accusation that angers people. The next step, according to the statement, was to plant that distorted story in a national newspaper known for its anti-government and anti-APC editorial stance. Once the newspaper published the misleading account, Atiku Abubakar reportedly latched onto it and shared it on his official social media handles to generate traffic, rage, and trending topics. The APC argues that this sequence was not a coincidence but a carefully choreographed cycle of misinformation: create a false interpretation, hand it to a friendly platform, then amplify it through a powerful voice. For ordinary Nigerians who saw the photograph and the resulting headlines, the obvious question was whether the security vehicle meant anything at all. The APC’s answer is no, and it uses this example to show how even the most innocent image can be weaponized to create political damage.
Then the APC says the opposition moved to what it calls an even more absurd lie. Agents of disinformation released a fake letter online, purported to be from Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani and addressed to Senator Abdulaziz Yari, the Director-General of the APC Presidential Campaign Council. The letter claimed that the Kaduna State Government had released N2.3 trillion to host the APC rally. That claim, the APC says, defies logic and basic common sense. The council points out that N2.3 trillion is more than Kaduna State’s entire annual budget for three years combined. Let’s look at the numbers: Kaduna’s budget was N458.271 billion in 2024, N790.439 billion in 2025, and N985.9 billion in 2026. If you add all three of those budgets together, the total is still less than the alleged N2.3 trillion. In other words, a single political rally would supposedly cost more than the total public spending of an entire state for three straight years. That is not just improbable; it is openly laughable. Yet the fake letter was circulated online, probably because someone hoped that people would be too angry to do the arithmetic. The APC describes this as a senseless, utterly baseless lie that no rational person could believe. But the purpose of such a lie is not necessarily to be accepted at face value. It is to create confusion, suspicion, and noise. Even if only a small percentage of people see the headline and feel angry or resentful, the opposition has succeeded in shaping the narrative around the rally. The APC wants Nigerians to see through the trick: no state government would or could spend that kind of money on a political gathering, and the letter itself is a piece of fiction designed for digital manipulation.
The APC also warns that the worst part of the plot is still to come. In a statement that feels almost preemptive, the council says that Atiku and ADC supporters have perfected plans to circulate old, doctored, and deepfake videos as the rally gets underway later today. These videos are intended to show purported resentment from the people. They might show small crowds, angry faces, or scenes of rejection, but the APC says they will not be genuine. Some of those videos may be pulled from completely different events in the past. Others may be edited to make the APC look unpopular or chaotic. Still others may be generated with artificial intelligence, producing images and sounds so realistic that most viewers will not be able to tell the difference. This is the new battlefield of politics: not just rallies and speeches, but synthetic media, cloned voices, and manipulated clips that spread across WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms within minutes. The APC calls this plan malicious and ignoble, and it is asking the public to be aware that such content will be coming. The council is not just issuing a warning for its own benefit. It is asking Nigerians to verify before they share. If a video shows violence at the rally, ask where it was filmed. If a voice sounds strange, ask whether it could have been digitally cloned. If a screenshot looks too damning to be true, look for the original source. The intention of these planned videos is to make the APC rally look like a failure in real time, before the true story can be told. But in the age of deepfakes, seeing should not always mean believing.
Why would any political group go to such extraordinary lengths? The APC does not leave that question unanswered. The campaign council says that Atiku Abubakar and the ADC are simply incapable of winning an election on their own merits. According to the statement, they do not have the popular support, policy appeal, or track record to defeat the APC, so they are desperate to grab power at all costs. They will pull any string, no matter how despicable and atrocious, to stay afloat. The statement goes further and calls the ADC Atiku’s special-purpose vehicle, meaning a political platform created not to offer serious governance but to serve one man’s ambition. That is a harsh accusation, but it is also a common strategy in political warfare: when you cannot win with facts, you try to destroy the other side with fiction. The APC wants Nigerians to understand these attacks as signs of weakness, not strength. A confident opposition, the council argues, would outline its own vision, present its own ideas, and face the voters with honesty. Instead, it is choosing to manufacture lies, spread fake documents, and rely on artificial intelligence to mislead the public. This is the behavior of a campaign in panic, not a campaign with a message. The council’s message to voters is emotional as well as rational: do not reward political sabotage. Do not allow yourself to be used as a tool by people who are willing to tear down the country’s institutions simply to win power.
In the end, the APC is asking Nigerians to do something that sounds simple but is increasingly difficult: be vigilant. Before sharing that explosive video, ask where it came from and why it appeared at that exact moment. Before getting angry at a screenshot of an official document, find out whether the document is real. Before believing that a state spent trillions on a political rally, compare the figure to the state’s published budget. Before seeing a security patrol car as evidence of a conspiracy, remember that patrol cars park in hundreds of places every day. The APC is not asking Nigerians to blindly trust the party. It is asking them to demand proof, to practice media literacy, and to refuse to be pawns in a disinformation game. The statement says Nigerians should reject the machinations of Atiku Abubakar and the ADC and should judge the Kaduna rally by what they actually see and experience, not by fake stories manufactured in hidden rooms. There is a broader lesson in this for everyone, regardless of political affiliation: the information environment is fragile, anger is easy to provoke, and the small pause between seeing something shocking and sharing it can determine whether lies go viral or die quietly. The APC has made its position public. The opposition will almost certainly deny the allegations and tell a very different story. But in a democracy, the public holds the final power. And the public’s best protection is not loyalty to any one party, but the willingness to think carefully, verify facts, and refuse to be manipulated by anyone who treats the truth as just another casualty of political ambition.