Lagos has a new information war on its hands.
Hundreds of pensioners arrived at Alausa on Monday demanding pension adjustments, wage awards and other benefits they said were overdue. By Tuesday, the dispute had acquired a second life online: did police tear-gas elderly protesters, or did a fake AI photograph manufacture an outrage that never happened?
The Lagos Police Command says the answer is unequivocal.
No tear gas was fired.
SP Abimbola Adebisi said the allegation was “false and misleading” and declared that “not a single canister of tear gas was fired throughout the duration of the protest”.
Then came the more explosive claim: the photograph spreading across social media allegedly showing retirees engulfed in tear gas was, according to police, AI-generated.
But there is a problem.
Before that police denial, credible Nigerian news organisations had already published reports saying pensioners were tear-gassed at the Lagos House. Vanguard and Premium Times reported the alleged use of tear gas, while The Guardian reported that protesting pensioners were eventually tear-gassed.
CDHR subsequently condemned the alleged action as “inhumane, unacceptable and a serious affront to human dignity”.
So Nigeria now has two competing narratives.
One says elderly citizens were dispersed with chemical irritant.
The other says the central visual evidence was fabricated by artificial intelligence.
Both cannot be true in the way they have been publicly presented.
And that is precisely why the matter deserves investigation rather than hashtags.
The police say the pensioners held a peaceful protest, met the Governor’s Chief of Staff, proceeded into a meeting at the Governor’s Conference Hall and dispersed peacefully at about 4:30pm.
The pensioners, meanwhile, were not protesting for publicity. They were protesting because they say their retirement benefits remain unresolved.
The dispute had been brewing for weeks. Pensioners had issued an August 31 deadline and threatened what they called the “mother of all protests” over pension enhancement and wage awards.
PenCom has now entered the picture, opening discussions with Lagos authorities over the delayed implementation of pension increases and wage awards under the Contributory Pension Scheme.
That is the real story beneath the viral photograph.
An elderly population says it is waiting for money.
A government says it has spent billions on retirees and introduced significant pension interventions.
A rights group says elderly protesters were mistreated.
Police say they did nothing of the sort.
And social media has supplied an image that police now say never happened.
This is no longer merely a pension story.
It is a test of whether government, police, activists, journalists and citizens can establish truth when the picture itself can be manufactured.
Nigeria should not choose sides based on whichever image is more emotionally powerful.
The answer must come from evidence.
And if the photograph is fake, whoever created and distributed it should be held accountable.
But if tear gas was used despite the denial, the public deserves to know which officers authorised it, why it was used, whether the response was proportionate and what safeguards protected elderly protesters exercising a constitutional right to peaceful assembly. Nigeria’s Section 40 expressly protects peaceful assembly and association.
The uncomfortable truth is that both allegations are serious.
A fabricated image designed to inflame public anger is dangerous.
So is the unjustified use of force against pensioners.
The answer cannot be another viral post.
It has to be evidence.
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