According to FIJ, no fewer than 50 accounts operated by influencers have been engaged to promote Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, Nigeria’s Minister of Interior, on social media.
Since taking up a ministerial role in the government of President Bola Tinubu in August 2023, Tunji-Ojo has made frequent appearances in the media, discussing his efforts to ease international passport registration and collection for Nigerians.
His public image in the media remained spotless until a contract scandal involving a company he personally founded became public knowledge in the first week of January.
Evidence emerged on January 7 that Tunji-Ojo’s New Planet Project Limited obtained a consultancy project from the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, then headed by the troubled suspended minister Betta Edu. The scandal left him dusting his files to find a Corporate Affairs Commission’s (CAC) filing showing that he had resigned his directorship from the company since 2019, but the CAC did not reflect the change on its public portal. Nevertheless, he remains a shareholder in the organisation.
The discovery prompted calls for his suspension and investigation just like Edu, but these calls were swiftly countered by an army of social media influencers and some self-acclaimed civil society groups with no digital footprints until the scandal.
According to indings by FIJ, Tunji-Ojo runs a well-oiled social media campaign, particularly on X, executed by a supervised network of hired influencers.
MODE OF OPERATION
Their operational mode is consistent with established social media coordinated campaign trends. Unlike what many might believe, most of the posts about the minister are not from spontaneous or self-motivated X users. In understanding how they work, FIJ looked at the timing and semantics of the posts, and the general behaviour of the accounts.
FIJ observed that once Tunji-Ojo posted, these influencers took it up and crafted their own contents around the subject, quoting his statements as they deemed fit or as determined in their central operation chambers.
As hired influence operators, they reposted and quoted tweets by the minister. They also curated their own content as a strategy to increase the likelihood of a greater reach — the higher the visibility, the more the strength of dominance the minister enjoyed on the platform.
