FCT Police Debunk Obi Endorsement, Cite Manipulated Footage
The Federal Capital Territory Police Command has dismissed as fabricated a viral video suggesting that its officers endorsed Peter Obi’s presidential bid, saying the footage was manipulated to push a false political narrative and that an investigation into its origin is underway.
In a statement issued on Monday by the command’s spokesperson, Superintendent Josephine Adeh, the police said their attention had been drawn to a clip circulating on social media showing officers being addressed by Obi. The command said the video had been “altered with political campaign posters and captions to create a mischievous and false narrative suggesting a political engagement or endorsement from personnel of the Nigeria Police Force,” describing the impression as entirely false.
The command traced the original encounter to 2024. It said the interaction occurred when officers responded to a distress call reporting unrest stemming from a party leadership tussle at the Labour Party headquarters in the Utako area of Abuja. Obi, who was present, briefly addressed the deployed officers while explaining the dispute, the police said, stressing that the exchange “had no political undertone whatsoever.”
The Commissioner of Police, FCT Command, Ahmed Muhammed Sanusi, has ordered a thorough probe into the source of the doctored clip. The command described itself as “an impartial and apolitical institution,” vowing not to allow its operations or personnel to be “misrepresented or exploited for partisan propaganda.” It urged citizens to verify information through official channels before sharing.
The clarification lands at a politically sensitive moment. Obi, who finished third in the 2023 presidential election on the strength of the youth-driven Obidient Movement, has firmly returned to the national stage ahead of 2027. After a brief alliance under the African Democratic Congress coalition collapsed amid internal disputes, he moved to the Nigeria Democratic Coalition, which named him its presidential flagbearer at an Abuja convention in late May 2026. He is widely expected to face President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress and Atiku Abubakar in a rematch of familiar rivals.
That charged atmosphere is precisely why a fabricated security forces endorsement carries weight. The Nigeria Police Force, like the military, is constitutionally barred from partisan activity, and any suggestion that uniformed personnel back a candidate strikes at the perception of neutrality that elections depend on.
The episode also reflects a wider problem. Manipulated audio, doctored captions, and increasingly sophisticated synthetic media have become recurring features of Nigeria’s political discourse, with fact checking desks repeatedly flagging altered clips of prominent figures. Security agencies and the Independent National Electoral Commission have warned in recent cycles that such content can inflame tension and mislead voters, especially where footage is stripped of its original context and recycled years later, as the command says happened here.
What is likely to follow is closer scrutiny of how the clip spread and who repackaged a two year old crowd control deployment as a campaign moment. For now, the command has drawn a firm line, insisting the footage proves nothing about where its loyalties lie. As the 2027 race intensifies, observers expect more of these disputes over what is real, placing a heavier burden on both institutions and citizens to confirm before they share.