Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari would like voters to know that he is not dead — and has not even been cloned.
At a roundtable with Nigerian expats in Poland, the Nigerian leader jokingly responded to a conspiracy theory that has circulated online for months that he had passed away and been replaced by a body-double. The rumours emerged after Mr Buhari, who has long been dogged by questions about his health, spent months in the UK last year seeking medical treatment for an undisclosed ailment. In a clip on Mr Buhari’s official Twitter account on Sunday, he addressed what he jokingly referred to as an “important question” about whether he was cloned. “A lot of people had hoped that l was dead,” he said. “It’s [the] real me, I assure you. I will soon celebrate my 76th birthday and I am still [going] strong.” Mr Buhari was in Poland for the UN’s COP24 climate change conference. His comments come as campaigning heats up ahead of elections in February in Africa’s most populous nation. Mr Buhari faces a tougher-than-expected race against former vice-president Atiku Abubakar, who reportedly recently joked about conspiracy theory at a party conference.
The president said he felt sorry for his vice-president Yemi Osinbajo, who had been courted for jobs by people presuming he had ascended to the presidency after Mr Buhari’s death. “That embarrassed him a lot; we discussed it when he visited me while I was convalescing.” The government’s reluctance to say anything about Mr Buhari’s medical status has helped fuel rumours about the president’s condition.
Diplomats and executives in Lagos and Abuja say that he is clearly in much better shape than he was before he started medical treatment in London in 2016, when he appeared gaunt and frail. Conspiracy theorists have argued that Mr Buhari was cloned before he died in London or replaced by a lookalike known online as “Jubril from Sudan”. Former government minister Femi Fani Kayode, a strong critic of the president, has postulated that a satanic ritual was involved. In April, he wrote on Twitter: “Buhari is dead and he never came back from London. Only his body did. They invoked the spirit of Jubril and placed it in Buharis body. It is a common ritual among satanists.” An AFP fact check of the rumour published last week traced it to a Twitter post from September 2017 of a video of Biafran separatist leader Nnamdi Kanu telling supporters Mr Buhari had died and been replaced by Jubril.
