Massive flooding has displaced tens of thousands of people in various regions of Nigeria in recent months. A video on social media claims a building collapses after heavy flooding in the north of the country. However, the claim is incorrect: the footage was recorded in July 2023 in the Great Himalayan Park in India.
A video on Facebook with an audio track in Hausa claimed that a building had collapsed in Gusau, the capital of Zamfara, a state in northwestern Nigeria.
“This video shows the flooding in Gusau, what are you going to say about it?” says the narrator.
Many comments under the video contained prayers and condolences for the victims.
The video has been shared nearly 300 times since it was posted on November 26, 2024.
It was published by an account called Kannywood Celebrities, which regularly shares unusual videos with its 77,000 followers.
The film industry in northern Nigeria is called Kannywood.
The clip shows a green building falling apart due to the heavy currents of a flood.
Screenshot of the fake Facebook post taken on December 12, 2024
Several locations in northern Nigeria have been affected by flooding in recent months (archived here).
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), more than 70,000 people have been affected by the floods in Zamfara, including more than 17,600 displaced persons (archived here).
However, the video was not shot in Nigeria.
Floods in India in 2023
AFP Fact Check extracted keyframes from the video and performed reverse image searches on it using the InVid WeVerify tool.
The results led to a video shared on Facebook on August 7, 2024 (archived here).
“The Sainj Valley flood last year, July 10, 2023,” the caption reads.
Sainj Valley is one of three valleys in the Great Himalayan National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in India (archived here).
The area is a popular tourist spot with resorts and hotels to accommodate visitors.
Using satellite images from Google Earth, we traced the location of the flooding incident to Summer Hill Riverview Homestay in Sainj Valley.
The buildings are painted green with red trim to match the collapsed structure in the video.
Photos taken by visitors to the resort, uploaded in April 2023, show the exact building before it collapsed during the flood three months later.
The structure can be seen in a visitors photo, with the same iron bar on the roof with red trim and iron balustrades on the side.
On the left, a screenshot of satellite images showing the building before it collapsed with its iron bar (circled in blue), roof with red edges (circled in black), iron railings (circled in orange); on the right the collapsed building with the same characteristics
In July 2023, AFP reported that at least 66 people were killed and several foreigners were stranded after monsoon rains caused heavy flooding in the Himalayas, where the Sainj Valley is located (archived here).
AFP Fact Check has debunked several climate-related claims here.
