On August 9, a Facebook user identified as Asare Obed posted a video showing people using ropes to cross a river after a bridge collapsed.
In the video, a woman can be seen holding tightly to a rope and gliding across, while some men enter the river to move steel storage drums through the water.
The narrator in the video claimed that the incident happened in Nigeria without mentioning the part of the country where it occurred.
“Here, people risk their lives just to cross this river,” the video was captioned.
“This is not a scene from a movie. This is the harsh reality of Nigeria. Every day, people cross this river, risking their lives. There is no bridge, only a weak rope to support them,” the narrator said in the video.
“The situation is so bad that to get from the village to the city, one must hang onto that rope, which swings between hope and death. If it is a log or something heavy. People themselves get into the river and fight the strong current to take them to the other side.”
The video has generated over a million views, 1,000 comments, and 2,000 shares.
The video was also posted by one Facebook user identified as Halima Kiponda.
VERIFICATION
When CableCheck analysed keyframes of the video on Google Lens, a video of the same incident posted by a Facebook user identified as Gadora media in September 2024 appeared in the results.
The video was captioned in Arabic, but Facebook translated it as “The suffering of a man #Darfur in autumn”. Darfur is a region in Sudan.
CableCheck further conducted a Google search to determine if there had been a bridge collapse in Darfur. One of the results revealed a post published by the Sudan International Human Rights Organisation (SIHRO) in September 2024 about a collapsed bridge in the region of Sudan.
The post was published alongside a video showing people crossing the river with ropes. SIHRO indicated that the bridge is the Morni bridge, which connects south and middle Darfur in Sudan.
The bridge was said to have collapsed due to heavy flooding. Relief Web also confirmed the incident.
VERDICT
The video showing people using ropes to cross a river is from Sudan, NOT Nigeria.
