IN SHORT: South Africa’s second largest opposition party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, called for national protests on 20 March 2023. But this viral video is not from the day – it was posted online as far back as 2020.
A video that has been widely shared online claims to show protesters in South Africa, at the “national shutdown” organised by the Economic Freedom Fighters, or EFF.
The video, which could have been taken at dawn or dusk, shows a crowd enthusiastically singing and dancing.
At first glance, the video is credible because most of the people in it are dressed in the red colours closely associated with the EFF.
“What a time to be alive #NationalShutdown #RamaphosaMustGo,” reads one caption to the video.
“South Africa protestors makes Kenyan protestors in Nairobi CBD look like we are joking,” reads another caption, this time by a user based in Kenya.
The opposition in Kenya was also protesting on 20 March for what leader Raila Odinga said was economic and electoral justice. On the day, streets in the capital Nairobi were largely deserted and security forces were highly visible.
The video has attracted a lot of attention – the two examples above together had thousands of likes and half a million views at the time of publication.
But is the video of March 2023 protests in South Africa?
Video posted by EFF leader in 2020
We ran the video through the free InVID verification tool to extract thumbnails of the video. This tool also allows you to do a reverse image search of the thumbnails.
This led us to past examples of the same video being published. EFF deputy president and member of parliament Floyd Shivambu posted it as far back as July 2020 (archived here) when he said it showed celebrations of the party’s seventh birthday. The party was established in 2013.
While we could not verify this, the video is not of #NationalShutdown protests in South Africa in March 2023.
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