President Bola Tinubu marked his first year in office on May 29, and the day sparked different conversations about the general welfare of Nigerians under his administration.

In assessing the performance of Tinubu, Tanko Yunusa, the spokesman for Peter Obi, Labour Party‘s candidate in the 2023 presidential election, remarked that there was no scorecard about the Tinubu-led administration for him to assess, saying the president kicked off his administration by playing to the gallery.

He, however, littered some of his remarks with claims that were not supported with facts. One was that there were no armed robbery cases under Obi as Anambra State governor.

Yunusa had joined Kasim Afegbua, a member of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), on Mic On Podcast, an online interactive political show moderated by Seun Okinbaloye, a broadcast journalist with Channels Television, to exchange perspectives on the state of the nation. The podcast was streamed live on YouTube on Saturday.

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Speaking on the government’s policy implementations, Yunusa said that Obi would have done far better than Tinubu if he was the president. Judging from his antecedents, Yunusa said, Obi had the capacity to do better than Tinubu’s current performance.

CLAIM: There was no single armed robbery incident under Obi as the governor of Anambra State.

“Throughout his tenure as governor, there was no single armed robbery in the state,” said Yunusa.

VERIFICATION: FIJ found that reliable data disproves Yunusa’s claim.

Obi governed the state for eight years. In his first four years, from 2006 to 2010, a series of armed robbery incidents, including attacks on financial institutions, took place.

Between 2007 and 2010, armed robbery cases reported to the police in the state were 499, according to a 2012 Annual Abstract of Statistics published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), Nigeria’s official data custodian.

2007 alone recorded 96 cases. There were 69 cases in 2008, 240 in 2009, and 94 in 2010. Compared to other states in the southeast, Anambra had the second highest reported cases of armed robberies after Abia State within the period under consideration.

One example of an armed attack was the Oba-Nnewi ‘bullion’ van attack in April 2009 in Anambra State. About 30 people were shot dead during this incident alone.

In July of the same year, a robbery group unsuccessfully attempted to attack a Spring Bank branch in the state. The ensuing panic caused banks in the area to close their operations for the day.

Admitting the increasing rate of armed robbery and kidnapping on his watch, Obi told journalists in 2009 that he was taking steps with other stakeholders to effectively curb the crime.

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“Following the increasing incidence of kidnapping and robbery in the state, the state government held a meeting with the heads of administration in the 21 local government areas on the best way to handle the situation. During one of the meetings, they agreed to purchase two vehicles each for the police and another set of Kia Optima cars for local government liaison officers who would be monitoring government projects in their areas,” Vanguard quoted Obi as saying in 2009.

CONCLUSION: Yunusa’s claim is false.