By Dr Austin Maho

Hon. Rimamnde Shawulu Kwewum PDP-Taraba State while presenting a motion before the house plenary on the need to investigate the illicit trade on human organs recently, knowingly or unknowingly referenced a fake story about Chinese officials seizing a vessel from Nigeria carrying 7200 penises!

He said that about two weeks earlier, acting on the information provided by an anonymous source, “Chinese Authorities seized a cargo ship that sailed from Nigeria with 7,200 refrigerated penises, which were found in 36 boxes labeled as plantain on the ship that harbored at the Shanghai port called Red Market.
According to him, “the Chinese General Administration of Customs had alerted that an increasingly large number of armed groups in Africa use organs which are harvested in unsanitary conditions to finance their nefarious activities.
The lawmaker added that the increasing cases of missing persons, ritual killings and trafficking of persons out of the country may be linked to the Red Market which can be attributed to the trafficking of young men and women who end up being victims of organ harvesting and the increased banditry, kidnappings and spiraling violence in several parts of the country today making those parts of the country vulnerable and provide safe havens and ready supply of human organs.

He further expressed concerned that perpetrators of the illicit trade generate between 600 million to 1.2 billion dollars profit annually and have been encouraged by the country’s poor security situations to use the third world as the major suppliers.

The fact of the matter is that the story is fake news from the pit of hell carefully crafted to defame a sovereign nation and its people and to cause acrimony between China and Nigeria.

Chinese authorities had at no time whatsoever made any seizure of 7,200 human penises in a vessel from Nigeria!

It is ridiculous for anyone to have even believed such tale in the first place and more ridiculous that it got mentioned on the floor of the Nigerian House of Representatives.

In an age of social media where misinformation has become very rampant, media education has become key so no one is caught pants down by the antics of information manipulators and sponsored propagandists.

The lawmaker failed to do due diligence on the story he referenced and that none of the lawmakers in plenary that day called him to order is equally unbelievable!

Notably however is that the original website that published the story is called World News Daily, WNDR. The website makes no pretenses over what it stands for and the raison d’etre for its existence. It is intentionally and deliberately a satirical website designed to produce exaggerated fake news and fictional tale to feed the imagination of its audience.

To this end the website copiously places a disclaimer at the bottom of its home page: “World News Daily Report assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or undead, is purely a miracle.”

If Honourable Kwewum Had done due diligence I am sure he would have saved himself the embarrassment of relying on a news story originating from a fake news site as the basis of his motion

About a week earlier before the motion Agence France-Presse ( AFP) and Punch newspaper had repudiated the story through independent fact check and returned a verdict that the story was false

AFP Nigeria on 13 April 2021 published a fact check on the story and concluded the claim that 7200 penises of Nigerian origin was intercepted by Chinese ports officials was false, noting that although the photo used in the fictitious article was taken in China, it is unrelated to the story’s purported seizure as revealed by reverse image search.
It concluded that the entire story was a fabrication a ruse.

Similarly on April 14 2020 the Punch newspaper did a fact check on the story noting that the Social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle had shown that the article was first published by the satirical site World News Daily Report on March 19, 2021.

It also said former Nigeria’s Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, inadvertently gave life to the story by sharing and tweeting it.
Fani- Kayode had tweeted:

“What do the Chinese do with these penises and why are they obsessed with Nigerian ones in particular? This is not a joke but a serious question.

“The Chinese should leave our penises alone and those that procure them for them in Nigeria should be regarded as terrorists and eliminated.”

The punch investigation also concluded that the story was FALSE.

Yet a Nigerian lawmaker relied on it to present a motion on the floor of the house.

It is however not surprising, it is a season of Chinese bashing and everything that demonizes the Chinese and its global interest is news worthy. It is all part of the global conspiracy against any country that stands as a bulwalk against western hegemony. This has been the fate of Russia and China for many years.

The west does not shy away from using its control of the global media to launch a campaign of misinformation against perceived enemies it seeks to destroy.
The Biden administration has decided to follow the obnoxious and disastrous policies of the Trump era against China by delving into issues that are purely the internal affairs of China.
America under Biden has been railing over Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South China sea unabated in recent weeks bringing Sino American relationship to a low and disturbing level.
The western media largely owned and controlled by America is unrelentingly spinning and sponsoring conspiracy theories against China at every opportunity and sponsoring others to do same.
Curiously it would also be recalled that at about this time last year there were wild report circulated in some media outlets that the Rwanda president had ordered 18 Chinese nationals to leave his country
According to a Facebook post published by a page called “CNN Zambia”, 18 Chinese nationals were “sent packing back to China” on May 27, 2020, after President Paul Kagame allegedly discovered that they were mistreating Rwandan workers and grabbing their land.

The post also included a long quote attributed to Kagame, which reads, in part: “This country is for Africans and those who mean well for us. I’m instructing those 18 Chinese nationals to go back and never return back!”

The transparency section of the Facebook page revealed that it was first created on May 2, 2020, under the name Bally News, then changed to CNN Zambia on May 23, 2020.
The story was widely shared across social media platforms. However an AFP fact check was to discover that the report was False. Purely fake news. It noted that there was no public record of such an order, and representatives of both the Rwandan and Chinese governments said this never happened.
“There are no reports from any reputable media organisations of Kagame making such a statement” . A Rwandan government spokesperson told AFP Fact Check the claim was “fake news”.
On June 3, 2020, the foreign affairs ministry of Rwanda also issued a statement on Twitter asking the public to ignore the claims.

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation would like to inform the public that there has been fake news circulating on various social media platforms stating that 18 Chinese citizens were expelled from Rwanda; no such thing happened. Please ignore,”

The Chinese embassy in Rwanda confirmed to AFP Fact Check that claims about the deportation were, indeed, wrong. “Chinese embassy didn’t receive any info about this fabricated deportation. Total fake news”, a representative of the Chinese embassy in Rwanda wrote.

This has been the trend, in spite of growing evidence of attempts to malign and discredit China by the western controlled global media, many people are still quick to be sucked- in by media propaganda against China. Western media are ready to jettison ethics and professionalism when reporting China.

Some sections of the Nigeria media have unfortunately allowed themselves to fall into this global conspiracy and manipulation.

While the Chinese government and institutions operating in the country have done so much to advance the course of Nigeria’s development and and Sino-Nigeria relationship, some sections of the Nigeria media have chosen to toe the line of western propaganda against China hook line and sinker.
They have chosen to delegitimize the amazing contributions of China to the development of Africa and other developing countries around the world. The infrastructural revolution the Chinese are recording in several fronts in Nigeria especially the railway revolution and industrialization through Chinese technology are silenced.

Many Nigeria media have also turned a blind eye to the massive social investment and humanitarian assistance the Chinese have rendered to the country especially at the heights of the Covid-19 pandemic. The dominant tendency has been to pull China down following the narratives of the west. Often the media screams blue murder when anything negative about China and Chinese nationals is involved but keep mute when it is positive.

This is worrisome and raises questions about media independence. The specter of media imperialism is still much with us if after 60 years of independence and the endless media tools available in the information age some Nigerian media outfits still lacks the ability to do independent verification of news items before publication but are still aping stories from online and mostly western media conglomerates. This has allowed for the unusual media focus on western media led doomsday prediction about debt trap, loss of sovereign immunity and a host of other even when the evidence suggests the contrary.

Such negative and fictional media reports only feed the pleasure palettes and wild imagination of those who feel that the Chinese are the global bogeymen with a sinister agenda. However the truth is that West is afraid of a rising China and its own irreversible decline

The Nigerian media should be circumspect and not allow itself to fall into this global conspiracy against China and the Chinese.

Only recently Nigeria and China celebrated 50 years of diplomatic relationship. A relationship that has been built on win-win, mutual benefit and a shared future with solid achievements on ground to point to. Unlike other relationships in the past that were based on servant /master, slavery, colonialism and exploitation, China’s foreign relations is based on partnership, mutual respect, non-interference and win-win

It is time the Nigerian media begin to examine China and get firsthand information about China themselves rather than relying on third party narrative design to smear and defame China.