The column argues that dismissing a viral video allegedly showing Senator Adams Oshiomhole on a private jet as “AI-generated” without verifiable evidence reflects a troubling trend of using technology as a convenient alibi to evade accountability in Nigeria’s political culture.
By Sonala Olumhense
Nine years ago, I wrote that Adams Oshiomhole could be Nigeria’s wildcard, a rare figure who might carry the insurgent moral energy of labour into the antiseptic corridors of power and still keep his hands clean.
In that piece, I warned that politics can be an illness: the way a man can catch a fever he does not recognise until the heat has rewritten his character.
I called it Adams’ Fever, an ailment that “assaults below the soil to kill or cure.”
Today, the fever has found a new costume: AI.
A viral video shows a man resembling Senator Oshiomhole aboard what appears to be a private jet, with a woman’s feet on his lap, as he massages them and chats casually.
The Senator’s camp has responded not with verifiable proof, but with a familiar incantation: it is fake… it is AI-generated.
Nigeria is not short of miracles. But it is tired of magic tricks.
Because here is the inconvenient point: independent fact-checking, including two by me, that applied multiple deepfake detection tools report no evidence the clip is AI-generated, and conclude that the “AI” claim is false.
And the file-level forensic traits of the circulating social-media copy are consistent with ordinary platform re-encoding and reposting, not the fingerprints of a synthetic fabrication.
That does not mean every caption attached to the clip is automatically true. Nigeria’s information battlefield is littered with miscaptioned videos, real footage, and false labels. But it does mean this: the wild, weightless “AI” alibi is not a substitute for evidence. And the higher the office, the heavier the burden of proof.
Treat the video as authentic unless new contradictory forensic evidence emerges.
If you want Nigerians to believe you, Senator Oshiomhole, treat them like citizens, not like an audience.
Produce real proof. Publish verifiable facts. Offer the flight details, the timeline, the context, whatever clears your name by daylight rather than by slogan.
If the clip is doctored, show the seams. If it is misrepresented, establish the correct circumstances. If it is neither, then stop hiding behind the fashionable superstition of our time.
Because “AI” is rapidly becoming the new “unknown gunmen”, a convenient, generic explanation that absolves the powerful from the tedious obligation of accountability.
And accountability is precisely what this episode is about.
Not foot massage.
Not romance.
Not morality-policing.
Accountability.
A private jet is not merely transport; it is a political symbol. In a country where hospitals run like mortuaries on rationed electricity, where mothers die in childbirth for lack of basic care, where workers are told to endure hunger as patriotism, the private jet is a flying ballot paper stamped with a single word: distance.
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