The woman stripped and beaten is not the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s elections commissioner. All she did was cast an unpopular vote.

MARY ALEXANDER • 5 FEBRUARY 2024

Warning: This report fact-checks a violent and distressing video.

A video of a woman being stripped naked and repeatedly beaten by a group of men is doing the rounds online with the claim she’s the chair of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) elections commission, punished for announcing “fake and rigged results”.*

The DRC, in central Africa, has a history of disputed elections. Its most recent polls started on 20 December 2023. They were so shambolic voting was extended for a second day and, in some areas, for more than a week.

The claim about the video began to circulate on social media on 31 December, when the DRC’s Independent National Electoral Commission declared incumbent president Félix Tshisekedi the winner of the presidential vote.

It’s mainly been posted on social media in Nigeria with comments about that country’s recent election disputes.

A typical caption reads:

DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) Election Commission Chair humiliated after announcing fake and rigged results. If INEC and Co was afraid of something even a little bit like this, our fortunes today will be much better.

Inec is Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission.

The claim can also be seen here, here, here, here, here and here.

But is the woman being assaulted really the chair of the DRC’s elections commission?

‘Because she voted for Katumbi’

Reverse image searches of screenshots from the video led us to two tweets posted on X/Twitter on 22 December.

Both say the woman was assaulted because she voted for Moïse Katumbi, an opposition presidential candidate. The attack was reportedly in the DRC’s Kasai province.

Tshisekedi’s fraudulent election was nothing but a Fiasco, making things worse in #DRCongo. His talk during the campaign divided people, and now it led to a terrible thing—a woman got beaten up in Kasai because she voted for Katumbi.
This horrible act shows how hate and division… pic.twitter.com/pj4nQ5WOei

— Gideon Kitheka Snr (@Gideon_Kitheka) December 22, 2023

It’s also mentioned in a New York Review of Books op-ed on the DRC poll, A Simulacrum of Elections. Describing the election chaos, Nicolas Niarchos writes: “Videos circulated online showing soldiers firing at voters, polling stations ransacked, and a woman stripped of her clothes and beaten because she voted for Katumbi.”

The chair of the DRC’s elections commission is Denis Kadima, a man. And the video first appeared online more than a week before the country’s election results – “fake and rigged” or not – were announced.

* Some Facebook and Instagram users may have deleted their posts after Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program rated their claims as untrue.

Published by Africa Check on 7 February 2024