Bayo Onanuga Confirmed, Man Behind President Tinubu Ai Generated Voice Note Has Been Arrested
Using his verified X account, presidential spokesperson Bayo Onanuga announced Dennis’ arrest on Thursday.
A man named Ifechukwu Dennis has been detained by the Nigeria Police Force on suspicion of being the creator of a contentious AI-generated voice message that was widely shared on social media and mistakenly attributed to President Bola Tinubu.
Days prior to the arrest, the president was criticized for first focusing attention on social media activist Martins Vincent Otse, also known as VeryDarkMan (VDM), due to the altered recording.
Dennis was arrested on Thursday, according to Presidential spokesperson Bayo Onanuga’s verified X account.
Ifechukwu Dennis, the creator of the phony voice that he pretended to be President Tinubu and passed on to his credulous targets, has been apprehended by the IGP crack team. In Benin, Dennis was taken into custody. Onanuga wrote, “The police will make an official statement.
This is a major development in a controversy that began on May 27, 2026, when a video purportedly featuring President Tinubu’s voice went viral online.
A voice that sounded like the president is said to have made a number of provocative and politically sensitive statements in the recording, such as saying that insecurity in Nigeria’s South-East was intentional, claiming that he forced Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi to drop out of the 2023 election, and implying that he didn’t care about the suffering of Nigerians.
Before investigations by several media outlets and digital verification specialists allegedly proved that the audio was artificially produced using artificial intelligence technology, the recording caused a great deal of indignation and political controversy.
Contrary to initial claims made online, later research revealed that the altered clip did not come from VeryDarkMan.
An unidentified person allegedly took video from one of VDM’s original Instagram videos, superimposed the AI-generated audio, and then shared the modified content on social media, according to investigators.
The presidency had previously demanded action against VDM in spite of those findings.
At the height of the controversy, Onanuga called the incident “a clear case of egregious abuse of the social media platform,” which drew criticism from fact-checkers and media observers who noted that the activist’s original video did not include any of the fake audio.
Claims that the altered recording came from somewhere else now seem to be supported by Dennis’s arrest.
Digital forensic analysis, according to social media commentator AJE with the X handle @Riddwane, assisted in locating the purported source of the viral content.
“A tech expert has just traced the origin of the fake AI voice note attributed to President Tinubu and revealed the true identity of the suspected mastermind of the fake voice note: Ifechukwu Dennis,” he posted on X.
The Nigeria Police Force had not yet issued an official statement outlining the specific criminal charges Dennis might face, the circumstances surrounding his arrest, or the evidence connecting him to the AI-generated recording as of the time this report was filed.
As Nigeria struggles with an increasing number of cases of digital misinformation and deepfake manipulation capable of influencing public perception and political discourse, the incident has once again brought attention to growing concerns about the misuse of artificial intelligence technologies to create deceptive political content.
The controversy also raises new concerns about how quickly public authorities assign blame for content that goes viral online before forensic verification is finished.
