A forensic investigation of viral footage and images reveals that Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf’s photograph was digitally superimposed onto underwear originally used in a political protest — not distributed as government gifts.
Claim: A viral post circulating on Facebook, TikTok, and Hausa-language blog sites alleges that the Kano State Government — under Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf — distributed red women’s underwear bearing the governor’s photograph as either campaign material or an empowerment gift to women.

Background: Several versions of the post carry captions such as “Kano State Governor Distributes Pants as part of campaign material” and “Kano Government Distributes pants empowerment,” and the accompanying images show women holding the underwear with what appears to be the governor’s face printed on the fabric.

Posts making this claim were widely shared, including on these platforms:
Facebook caption: “Kano State Governor Distributes Pants as part of campaign empowerment” as seen here and here
Hausa blog post making a similar claim here and additional similar claims: here and here.
The posts gained significant traction across Northern Nigerian social media communities, with some versions accumulating hundreds of shares and comments expressing outrage at the alleged government action. The claim carries potent political and cultural undertones: underwear distribution would be considered deeply inappropriate and insulting in the predominantly Muslim society of Kano, and the suggestion that a sitting governor would authorise such a gesture as women’s empowerment was designed to provoke maximum reputational damage.

VERIFICATION
Step 1: Tracing the Original Source
PRNigeria’s fact-checking desk began by searching for the earliest known iteration of the footage. The original video was traced to a TikTok post published on 24 April 2024 by an influencer known as Teemah Cool, a prominent figure in the Gida-Gida TikTok community. The post can be accessed here: Original TikTok video

From there, the footage migrated to Facebook, where a user with close to 700,000 followers shared both the primary clip (view here) and a variation (view here). Subsequent wide sharing occurred across multiple accounts, including this post, this post, this post, this post, and this post.

Step 2: Frame-by-Frame Analysis of Original Footage
Using a third-party video downloader, the original TikTok video was extracted and submitted to InVID — a widely trusted open-source verification extension used by professional fact-checkers globally. The tool split both the 27-second and the 44-second clips into dozens of individual frames at regular intervals.

The result was unambiguous with no single frame in either original clip showed any item of underwear bearing Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf’s photograph, campaign logo, or any government branding. The red underwear visible in the footage was plain — no insignia, no imagery, no political imprint of any kind.
Step 3: Digital Forensic Authentication
To confirm that the Teemah Cool TikTok video was genuinely the first and unaltered version, the clip was run through a digital forensics verification process. The analysis confirmed that the original video showed no signs of post-production manipulation — its metadata, compression patterns, and pixel-level consistency were all consistent with an unedited mobile recording.

An AI-detection tool was also applied to rule out the possibility that the original footage was synthetically generated. The tool returned a clear negative result: the video is authentic and was not produced by artificial intelligence.
Step 4: Forensic Analysis of Doctored Versions
The same InVID verification tool was then applied to later versions of the footage — specifically, the versions in which the governor’s image appears to have been printed on the underwear. The forensic analysis returned a digital manipulation confidence score of approximately 98 percent, meaning the tool found near-conclusive evidence that the governor’s image had been superimposed onto the underwear in post-production.

Step 5: Error Level Analysis (ELA)
The investigation further applied Error Level Analysis — a forensic imaging technique used to detect whether portions of a digital image have been added, altered, or composited from different sources. ELA works by re-saving an image at a known compression level and then comparing the resulting error levels across the image. Authentic, unedited regions of a photograph compress and degrade uniformly. Areas that have been digitally manipulated — such as a newly inserted logo or face — will exhibit a markedly different error level from the surrounding image, because they have a different compression history.

When ELA was applied to the versions showing the governor’s photograph on the underwear, the analysis produced a visible discrepancy: the area containing the governor’s image registered error levels sharply inconsistent with the rest of the fabric. This differential is diagnostic of a cut-and-paste composite — an image element grafted onto a background from a different source file. No such anomaly was present in the original footage.

Taken together, the frame analysis, digital forensics, AI detection, and ELA all converge on the same conclusion: the original video was altered specifically to insert a fabricated imprint of Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, creating the false impression that the underwear was government-branded campaign or empowerment material.

Step 6: What the Original Video Actually Shows
Deeper contextual research established what was actually happening in the footage. The video was recorded during the official visit of Nigeria’s First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, to Kano. In the clip, a group of APC supporters — not government officials — is seen gathered in front of the Kano Government House, brandishing red underwear and chanting songs directed at opposition figure Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso.

The chants repeatedly featured the phrase “Dan kamfan tsula” — loosely translated as “Tsula’s pants.” The word tsula is a Hausa term for a small monkey, widely used as a derogatory political label for Kwankwaso by his opponents. The phrase was popularised in political discourse through the music of APC praise singer Dauda Kahutu Rarara, whose 2023 song “Tsula Ya Sallama” generated fierce controversy. Kwankwaso’s supporters, members of the Kwankwasiyya movement, condemned the song as deeply disrespectful toward their leader. The use of red underwear in the video is therefore a piece of calculated, physical political theatre — a group of partisans mocking the opposition in front of the Government House, not a government distribution exercise of any kind.

Conclusion: The viral claim is the product of a two-stage information operation. In the first stage, genuine footage of a partisan political protest was stripped of its context and uploaded without explanation. In the second stage, that footage was digitally manipulated — the governor’s photograph was superimposed onto the underwear — to transform a scene of political mockery directed at the opposition into apparent evidence of governmental misconduct.

The original footage contains no evidence of any government branding. Later versions show manipulation levels approaching 98 percent, confirmed by both automated forensic tools and Error Level Analysis. The claim that the Kano State Government distributed underwear as empowerment or campaign material is without factual basis.

VERDICT: False!