CLAIM: A video is being circulated on WhatsApp groups, with the caption “A Jeep swept away by flood along Bayelsa-Portharcout road”.
The 29-second video showed how the white Toyota Landcruiser SUV while trying to pass through a road, that had been overflown by excess water, was overpowered and washed away with the occupants.
One of the occupants opened the door, thinking he could escape, but the volume of the water was much more than the person could dare.
VERIFICATION: Apparently, 2022 flooding has been devastating in Nigeria. By mid-October, flood, arising from heavy downpours, has submerged many parts of the country, including highways such as Lokoja-Abuja and Bayelsa-Portharcout.
The situation seriously disrupted vehicular movement, thereby causing traffic gridlocks along these routes.
Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said more than 1.3 million people are displaced and 500 killed, due to this rise in sea water level.
However, a search of a thumbnail from this viral video on Yandex shows that it had been in circulation for years.
For instance, the video first appeared on YouTube in 2017 at different times, but with captions in different languages. None of these captions was in English.
In 2018, it resurfaced again with a caption in English, which read “Flood in India”.
Besides this, the language spoken by people in the video does not also sound like any of the Nigerian languages.
CONCLUSION: The viral video in WhatsApp, claiming that a white Toyota Landcruiser SUV was swept away by flood along the Bayelsa-Portharcout highway is FALSE. The video in question has been on the internet since 2017 but always recirculated whenever flood is causing havoc in any part of the world.
This fact-check was produced by BONews Service with support from Code for Africa’s PesaCheck, International Fact-Checking Network, and African Fact-Checking Alliance network.