Ideas & Debate

Fake news spread faster than the truth

fake

Winston Churchill is remembered for many things, and for wordsmiths like me, he is a great source of priceless witticisms. One of his very best is extremely apt in this era of fake news: “A lie will get halfway round the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.” A few weeks ago I was in Kampala on assignment and got into a heated discussion with colleagues about an orchestrated social media campaign against a very well-respected chief executive officer (CEO) of a top tier Ugandan bank.

The CEO had a personal savings account at a different bank and a staff member had mischievously released details of the account including cash withdrawals that ran into the hundreds of thousands and, in a few cases, millions. The aim was to debase the CEO and make him look corrupt. The alleged statement appeared to be on genuine letterhead. But here is the catch: the account was purportedly a dollar account. The alleged statement was for a period covering March and April 2016 and purportedly started off with a balance of $40 million and ended with a balance of $30 million. It went totally viral as you can only imagine because a gossip-hungry public consumes disparaging news as voraciously as a shark on day three of the keto diet. As stories go viral, no one wants to ask the hard questions like how does one withdraw a million US dollars at one go without the bank having to import such an amount of hard currency from New York? Why would a customer want to essentially raise a flag at the multiple points that have to be touched for such a transaction to occur?

As our heated discussion unfolded, a colleague pointed out that it was quite apparent that the perpetrators of the statement leakage, had simply added the words “In Dollar USD” to what was a Ugandan shilling account. But what had added fuel to the fire that was the alleged statement was the press release by the bank with the allegedly offensive account shortly after the story went viral. Here goes:

“…Management carried out an extensive investigation and established that one of the staff was compromised to access (CEO’s) accounts. Confidential details relating to the accounts were leaked to the outsiders and apparently used to create distorted allegations about (CEO’s) account details.”

So here is the clincher: The bank clearly confirmed that the details about the accounts were true but they were also distorted. Hmm. Which fed into my colleague’s assertion that it was likely a genuine Ugandan shilling account that had been renamed a USD account, which numbers make for fantastical reading. But the danger here is that significant damage was being done to the CEO’s reputation on a real-time basis. The damage continued to be aided in part by the verification from the bank with the rogue officer which bank confirmed that the details were true but distorted, leaving oceans of space open for speculation as to where the truth ended and the distortion began.

There were multiple theories as to the reason for the release of the damaging statements, with one theory being that the CEO had overseen the purchase of the assets and liabilities of a troubled bank. The owners of the troubled bank were fighting back tooth and nail by allegedly dragging the CEO’s name through the mud.

Prior to this, the CEO was credited with turning around the bank, tripling its balance sheet and building it to almost a million customers during his eleven-year tenure.

A few weeks after this story broke on social media, the CEO’s retirement was announced. Now it is very likely that the retirement was in the works already, especially since his replacement was announced simultanously with the retirement announcement. It would be hard to recruit a CEO within the four or so weeks that it took from the breaking fake story to the retirement announcement, is what the reasonable man on the Ongata Rongai matatu would say.

The point here is this: timing is everything. The retirement announcement within four weeks of a bank saying that an incendiary bank account statement is the distorted truth does not make for good optics. It makes the perpetrators of the incendiary statement dizzily drunk with the perceived victory of their dastardly act. If the retirement was in the pipeline, it may have been useful to kick that can down the road for another few months to let the dust settle. If it was not in the pipeline, then the act itself only served to validate the fake claims. Either way, it must have been a tough decision for the CEO’s board: damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t.