A viral clip altered with AI-generated voice notes and presented as remarks by President Bola Tinubu was traced back to footage taken from an Instagram post by Vdm, and the circulation of the fake audio prompted public calls for prosecution on Wednesday, 27 May 2026.
Bayo Onanuga quoted an X handle that posted the manipulated video and urged legal action, saying, "Dis VDM need to face di weight of di law as e dey share fake audio of President Tinubu." The presidency also said VeryDarkMan need to face the weight of the law for sharing a fake audio of President Tinubu.
Premium Times found that the viral clip did not originate from VeryDarkMan’s original Instagram video and reported that the altered clip was created after someone extracted footage from VeryDarkMan’s original video and inserted AI-generated voice notes resembling Tinubu’s voice. In the original Instagram video, posted on Monday, 25 May 2026, VeryDarkMan showed a video of King Mitchy and then played an old video of President Tinubu; the old Tinubu clip showed him promising that Nigerians would get electricity.
The AI-generated audio layered into the extracted footage falsely said President Tinubu would win the election and did not care what happened; it also falsely claimed that Tinubu called Peter Obi to step down but he refused, and that Tinubu would make insecurity affect the south-east more. Those claims do not appear in the original Instagram clip and were added after someone extracted the footage, according to the report.
VeryDarkMan’s own words in the original post undercut the altered narrative: "You see dis next video wey I wan play, I go come know weda dem don cook your mind, una wey wan support Bola Tinubu." The original Tinubu clip included a campaign promise about power, quoted in full: "Whichever way, by all means necessary, you must have electricity, and you won’t pay for estimated bills anymore. A promise made will be a promise kept. If I don’t keep my promise and I run for a second term, don’t vote for me. That’s the truth,"
The timeline is short: VeryDarkMan posted the Instagram video on Monday, 25 May 2026; after that post, an unidentified person extracted footage, added the AI-generated voice notes, and circulated the manipulated clip online. The manipulated clip then spread widely on social media and was picked up by an X account that Onanuga quoted two days later, on Wednesday, 27 May 2026, prompting his call for prosecution.
This episode sits against broader anxieties about AI-generated misinformation and manipulated political content in Nigeria. The country continues to confront serious insecurity—school kidnappings, worshippers’ abductions, and attacks on farmers—which has already made political rhetoric and social media claims highly combustible. The use of a real campaign clip about electricity, repurposed with fabricated commentary about the 2023 presidential election and a possible second term, shows how quickly old footage can be turned into new allegations.
The friction in the story is stark: the presidency and Bayo Onanuga singled out VeryDarkMan for sharing a fake audio, yet investigative reporting found the fake audio was not part of VeryDarkMan’s original post and was added later by an unidentified actor. That gap matters because it separates the person who posted the original footage from whoever manufactured the false remarks—and it complicates calls for legal action focused solely on the original poster.
Given the evidence that the altered clip was created after footage was taken from VeryDarkMan’s Instagram post, the facts support targeting those who manufactured and circulated the AI-generated audio rather than only the user who shared the original video. Accountability in this case depends on finding and prosecuting the person or network that extracted footage, inserted the AI voice notes, and pushed the manipulated clip into circulation—the sequence that turned a reposted campaign promise about electricity into a false political attack.
