Misleading post uses old pictures to claim Nigerian state government failed to renovate school

A supporter of Nigerian opposition leader Peter Obi recently shared photos he alleges show the current state of a public school in Nigeria’s economic capital, Lagos. But AFP Fact Check found that the claim is misleading as the photos were taken in 2017 and 2019. The school mentioned in the claim has since been renovated by the state government. Moreover, one of the images used in the misleading post depicts an unrelated building.

“Eric Moore Junior High School, Surulere,” reads the caption of an X post that has gathered more than 1,400 shares and comments since it was published on April 26, 2024.

The post features four pictures: the two in the top row show students wearing brown checked shirts over plain brown shorts, grouped into two classes in a dilapidated outbuilding.

In the photo on the bottom left, students with the same uniforms sit on the floor holding notebooks. The fourth image shows children wearing grey and white uniforms in a roofed class with a bare floor.

Comments below the post suggest many people believed the claim.

“So pained to see that this school hasn’t changed,” wrote one user, while another called the images “an eyesore”.

The pictures were posted by a Nigerian-based account called “Ejikeme”. It regularly shares content in support of the Igbo, the largest ethnic group in Nigeria’s southeast region, as well as Obi, the Labour Party’s 2023 presidential candidate.

Ejikeme’s feed also features posts with other images of run-down schools in Lagos (like here, here and here) in response to the #TinubuLagosSchoolSeries trending topic.

The hashtag began trending last month after opposition politician Reno Omokri accused Obi of not building any schools when he was the governor of Anambra state in southeast Nigeria. He promised to gift US$10,000 to anyone who could prove otherwise.

Omokri insisted that Tinubu, who beat Obi in the elections, was a better candidate (archived here and here).

In response, Obi supporters began sharing posts highlighting the decaying public infrastructure in Lagos, where Tinubu was a governor between 1999 and 2007 (archived here).

However, the claim about the images depicting the state of Eric Moore Junior High School is misleading.

Old pictures

Using a reverse image search, AFP Fact Check found that the first three pictures were taken from a 2017 article by Nigerian news site The Guardian.

Published on May 17, 2017, the report explained that students of Eric Moore Junior High School in Surelere —a Lagos suburb — lacked basic amenities (archived here).

Two years later, former Lagos Health Commissioner Akin Abayomi attended a commissioning ceremony at the school after four blocks of classrooms and the toilets were renovated (archived here).

The Lagos State Ministry of Health released images of the school’s new structures in a thread on X in 2021.

An AFP journalist took geo-tagged pictures of Eric Moore on May 2, 2024, showing blue roofs and two-tone walls matching the health ministry photographs.

A satellite image of the school compound shows the same blue roofs, as well as a basketball court and solar panels on an adjacent building.

These features correspond with another photograph taken by AFP on May 2, 2024.

Meanwhile, photos on Google Maps from 2023 also show the renovated school, although the solar panels were not installed at the time.

A reverse image search on the fourth image revealed a local news report published on May 26, 2019, about the status of the facilities at Ojota Junior Secondary School in Lagos (archived here).

Odiri Uchenunu-Ibeh, the journalist who wrote the article, confirmed to AFP Fact Check that the picture was taken in 2019.