Recently a photo of what is portrayed as a newspaper publication of the New Democrat Newspaper in 2011 has surfaced online. The purported story carries the photo Unity Party Presidential Candidate with the headline that the former Vice President called the “Mandingoes Strangers”.
The photo was shared by many Facebook users including Shine Liberia — a blog page with over 182, 000 followers.
To fact check the viral photo, we checked the New Democrat Newspaper website up to the date on the purported story but did not see any publication of such.
We also reviewed the 2011 calendar and found that April 2, 2011, the date the purported newspaper story was published but found that April 2, 2011 was a Saturday and not Tuesday as claimed in the viral image.
We also checked the other story on the same page which features a story about “Ivorian children finding temporary homes in Liberia” and found that the same story was published by the Guardian Online Newspaper on June 29, 2011 and not April 2, 2011 as claimed by the image.
Conclusion
Based on these facts, we conclude that the viral image of what is purported to be a news publication of the New Democrat Newspaper that the Unity Party Residential candidate referred to people of the Mandingo Tribe as Strangers is fake.
There is no proof that Mr. Boakai made the statement or that the New Democrat Newspaper published any article on April 2, 2011.
Similarly, photos of purported newspaper publications from the New Republic and FrontPage Africa have also been shared on social media but both papers have denied ever publishing such article about the former Vice President making hate messages at a particular tribe.
We therefore conclude that the publication is fake and misleading. There is no evidence to support the claim that Boakai made the statement attributed to him.
This report was developed with the support of Internews through the USAID Media Activity project. The funder has no say in the editorial decision leading to the production of this content.
