Claim: A Twitter user has shared a video claiming that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) collected bicycles it gave out to delegates after it lost the by-election in Assin North on June 27, 2023.
Verdict: False. A Google search revealed that the incident dates back to 2020 when a New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament aspirant, Amankwah Blay, collected bicycles he gave out to delegates when he lost the primaries in Assin North.
Full Text
A Twitter user @MichaelFianyo1 has shared a video claiming that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has collected bicycles they gave out to delegates after losing the by-election on June 27 in Assin North in the Central Region of Ghana.
The July 2, 2023 tweet reads, “NPP collected the bicycles they shared in Assin North after they lost the by-election. Wow!” The 21 seconds video has received over 57,000 views, over 100 retweets, and 500 likes.
Verification
The first red flag DUBAWA noticed was that the voicer mentioned Amankwah Blay in the video. We then proceeded to find out who Amankwah Blay was. A Google search revealed that he was an NPP parliamentary aspirant who lost the NPP primaries in Assin North in 2020. DUBAWA also conducted a Google search with his name associated with the collection of bicycles.
We discovered that the video was taken in 2020. News portals such as Ghanaweb, Starr Fm, and Daily Graphic reported the incident. Online news portal Pulse.com shared the video on June 23, 2020, on its Facebook page.
Another suspicion was that most of the people in the latter part of the video were wearing nose masks. This also hinted that the video was taken during the COVID-19 pandemic era and not June 27, 2023, when the bye-election was held.
Conclusion
The video claiming that the NPP collected bicycles it shared in Assin North after the party’s candidates lost a bye-election is false.
