The Presidency has refuted claims circulating on social media that President Bola Tinubu conferred national honours on prominent activist Aisha Yesufu and 35 others, dismissing the report as “fake news.”
In a statement on Friday, Temitope Ajayi, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, debunked the report which was attributed to Leadership Newspaper, urging the public to disregard the viral list.
“The story on a viral list of national honours featuring the name of Aisha Yesufu and others credited to the Leadership newspaper is fake news. It should be ignored,” Ajayi wrote on Facebook.
He clarified that no new list of honourees had been released aside from the 66 names officially announced by President Tinubu during his Democracy Day address to the joint session of the National Assembly on Thursday, June 13.
The now-viral document, which contains 102 names, sparked intense debate online, particularly because it included Yesufu, a well-known government critic and key figure in the 2020 End SARS protests.
Among those officially awarded national honours were posthumous recipients such as:
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Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, former Chief of Staff
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Prof. Humphrey Nwosu, former NEC Chairman who oversaw the 1993 elections
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Kudirat Abiola, wife of MKO Abiola and martyr of the June 12 pro-democracy struggle
The Presidency emphasized its commitment to transparency and urged citizens to rely only on verified sources for national information.
