Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

You have to be better than your critics

It seems that one of Nigerian President Jonathan's advisors made a clumsy attempt to smear one of Jonathan's opponents. I guess he hasn't learned that if you really have to be be more technologically sophisticated than the opposition if you're going to make things like this work. The unmasking of the culprit was actually pretty simple.

The mysterious case of Wendell Simlin

A team of online sleuths claim to have exposed an attempt to smear the former governor of Nigeria's central bank.

Lamido Sanusi - who is widely respected in the international community - was suspended from the bank last month after accusing the government of corruption.

A few days later, a number of journalists were surprised to receive an email from an unknown man, Wendell Simlin, which linked Sanusi with the militant Islamist group Boko Haram. The group is believed to have killed thousands of people in a string of brutal attacks since 2009. But a handful of digital activists who obtained the email say it was actually written by one of the president's aides, after they found his name in a Word document attached. Reno Omokri - social media advisor to President Goodluck Jonathan - is listed as its author in the document properties.

"We just did a simple right click on the document and looked at the 'properties'," says Feyi Fawehinmi, one of the team who carried out the investigation. They also contacted a newspaper to cross reference the email with previous messages sent from Omokri himself, and the metadata seems to be a perfect match, they say…

Sanusi was suspended from the bank by the president after alleging that $20bn (£12bn) in revenue had gone missing from the state oil firm, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.

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