Presidential Election: Obasanjo Caught on Tape Trying to Incite Anarchy
A PRNigeria fact-check (https://prnigeria.com/2023/03/02/leaked-chat-obasanjo/) has concluded that there is a degree of authenticity in the leaked audio of two telephone conversations involving former President Olusegun Obasanjo, ex-Cross River Governor, Donald Duke, and Charly Boy.
Recalled that a leaked audio, making the round on the internet, allegedly exposed former President Olusegun Obasanjo of plotting to incite anarchy across the land.
Speaking with Nigerian entertainer, Charlie Boy and Donald Duke, in the alleged leaked audio, Obasanjo charged them to lead Nigerian youth in revolting against the country and INEC over the Presidential election result which he termed, “rigged.”
When PRNigeria could not locate the leaked audio on the official website of the source People’s Gazette, it contacted the publisher an investigative journalist, Samuel Ogundipe who confirmed that it was published on its Twitter Account.
Using speech recognition freeware, PRNigeria extracted the audio clips and compared all three voices against their publicly known voice.
While, Artificial Intelligence software can be used to mimicking any voice after a few seconds of listening to it, the Charlie Boy and Duke’s voices both returned 83% and 74% accuracy levels respectively. Obasanjo’s voice returned with 91% accuracy level when PRNigeria subjected the audio to the speech recognition test.
Further investigations by PRNigeria shows that this can be done using Microsoft’s Vall-E, a text-to-speech AI Model that can recreate and match any sample audio it’s been provided with. It can also change the tonality from happy to sad to angry.
While it may be unfathomable for either of the three persons to record themselves and leak the same to the media, it is possible for calls to be intercepted by hackers or intelligence sources.
Not satisfied with findings, PRNigeria also reviewed Charly Boy’s twitter handle, to confirm if he had started mobilising to “Occupy Nigeria” as ordered by Obasanjo in the clip but observed that there was no inciteful tweets from him ever since the conversation allegedly took place.
In fact, in one of his recent tweets, he called for calm, stating as follows: “Lovers of a New Nigeria, fellow Obidents no cause for alarm, una try well well. Am proud to belong to the progressive club. Let’s just build on our Unity. It Shall be Well.”
Based on the forensic analysis and calls PRNigeria put through to the source of the leaked phone chat,there was no sufficient evidence of manipulation or faking of the leaked chat, however, there’s also a possibility that AI could be used to mimic the voices.
PRNigeria, therefore, concludes that while there is a degree of authenticity in the leaked audio, there is no sufficient evidence for us to independently and authoritatively confirm whether the leaked chat is True or False.
