How Buhari’s speech was leaked on WhatsApp

About an hour before President Muhammadu Buhari addressed Nigerians on Monday, April 27, 2020 on the coronavirus outbreak in the country, a draft copy of his speech was leaked to the social media space and on messaging platforms like WhatsApp.

The draft contained alterations, notes, line edits and the entire works.

The media often gets an advance copy of the president’s speech minutes before a broadcast or minutes into it, but this was different and embarrassing.

Social media users discussed the snafu all night long and wondered how the leak was allowed to happen.

The president’s Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, tells TVC that he knows how the leak occurred.

“There is just one authentic copy of the broadcast, which is the one released from the media office. But then, I recognised that a couple of hours before the broadcast itself, a copy of the purported speech had been circulating particularly on WhatsApp. If you compare the two, yes there are some similarities but then, there are also wide differences,” Adesina was quoted as saying by Linda Ikeji’s blog, which monitored his chat with TVC.

“You have just mentioned the effective day particularly of the gradual easing of the lockdown. What happened was that somebody got hold of the initial draft of the broadcast and played hanky panky with it by releasing it through social media.

President Muhammadu Buhari and Femi Adesina ece-auto-gen

“If you know the processes that a broadcast goes through before it gets recorded – the script will originate from the relevant government agency, department, parastatal of ministry, whoever heads that agency, ministry or parastatal sign up on it and then they send it to the presidential office.

“When it gets to the presidential office, it gets through a number of hands again, because the president’s thoughts must be infused and injected into that draft. There are some things that may be in it that the president may completely not agree with.

“Finally, it comes to the media office, and I sign on it, which I also did yesterday before the broadcast was recorded – I signed on the final copy before the broadcast was recorded.

“So some hours before the recording was played back, I saw something circulating on social media, I knew that that was not the copy that I signed off on. Then we began to investigate. It has been found out that the original script from inception was what somebody laid hands-on and released to the social media.

President Muhammadu Buhari. [Twitter/BashirAhmaad] Pulse Nigeria

“Well, mainstream media knows how we release our statements – whatever documents that we are releasing. They should know how to authenticate it. It comes from the media office.

“So, if any mainstream media is now taking its information from the social media, that mainstream media is to be blamed because we duly released the authentic copy of that broadcast by 8:06 PM. So the mainstream media should not have depended on a leaked copy which turns out to have many discrepancies compared with the original and final copy,” Adesina said.

In his speech, Buhari extended a month-long lockdown imposed in Lagos, Abuja and Ogun by another week, and declared an indefinite nationwide predawn curfew which commences from May 4, within the hours of 8pm to 6am, in a bid to curb the spread of the coronavirus disease.

Nigeria has reported 1,532 COVID-19 cases as of April 28.