Claim: US Secretary of War heading to Nigeria to meet leaders
Source: X
Verdict: False
Researched by Alfa Shaban
An X user on January 12, 2026, made a post that suggested that the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, was travelling to Nigeria to meet with top government officials.
RelatedNews
The post, captioned: “Alert: U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth heads to Nigeria to meet Nigerian leaders big moves ahead,” was accompanied by a video of Hegseth’s arrival on a tarmac where he greets and takes photos with security officers with his official jet in the background.
The video suggested that Hegseth was preparing to board the plane and head to Nigeria. The post by Sada, who identifies himself as a politician belonging to the Social Democratic Party (SDP), was subsequently reshared by smaller media portals on X (here, here).
His post has been widely interacted with, gaining over 400,000 views at the time of publication along with interaction statistics as follows: 312 comments, 772 reposts, 4.1K likes and 497 bookmarks.
FactSpace West Africa investigated the claim due to its increasing virality and because many commenters were seeking clarity from xAI’s Grok.
Fact-check
First, FactSpace West Africa observed an inscription “FRONTLINES. Powered by TPUSA” on the video shared by Sada, so we visited their X handle and found the same video had been shared.
Their caption read: “Before leaving Fort Worth, @SecWar takes a photo, and thanks local police for all their hard work. Next stop: SpaceX.” Turning Point USA (TPUSA) had shared the video at 8:59 PM while Sada shared at 10:46 PM of the same day a time gap of 1 hour and 47 minutes.
Secondly, we also visited the official social media pages of the US Department of War, the Secretary of War and Pete Hegseth’s personal pages and found that he had no itinerary of travelling to Nigeria at any point.
Further tracking of Secretary Hegseth’s activities this week per posts by the Department of War’s Rapid Response handle of X, showed that he has been on a tour dubbed ‘The Arsenal of Freedom tour 2026,’ which has seen him engage officers in Fort Worth in Texas on January 12 before meeting with Elon Musk the following day at Spacebase headquarters in Texas.
The last public engagement Hegseth had with senior Nigerian officials was his meeting with Nigeria’s National Security chief, Nuhu Ribadu in November 2025 after the US threatened to intervene militarily in Nigeria to stop persecution of Christians by jihadist terrorists.
Verdict
From the above, it is False that Hegseth was heading to Nigeria when he left Fort Worth in Texas.
