Lt. A.M. Yerima is not the son of Gen. M.M. Yerima, By Farooq Kperogi

A social media contact familiar with Lt. A.M. Yerima reached out to me after my last update to say that the young man is not, as I had suggested, the scion of an upper-crust military family. His evidence was convincing.

Yet many claims, including those circulated by popular AI chatbots such as Google’s Gemini, assert that he is the son of retired Major General M.M. Yerima. The claims initially seemed plausible because both men hail from Yobe State.

This morning, however, I asked a retired general who knows Major General M.M. Yerima intimately whether Lt. A.M. Yerima was indeed his son. He said they aren’t even related.

I learned again from a contact close to the Yobe State governor that Major General M.M. Yerima is from Bade Local Government Area, the same as former Senate President Ahmed Lawan.

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A.M. Yerima, on the other hand, is from Gujba Local Government Area, where the current state governor, Mai Mala Buni, is from.

Interestingly, A.M. Yerima was born in Port Harcourt to a businessman father, my initial contact told me. When Wike remarked that A.M. Yerima was in primary school when he “finished school,” he didn’t realize that the young man had actually been in the same geographic space as he was.

When Wike graduated from the Rivers State University of Science and Technology in 1997 with a Bachelor of Laws degree, Yerima was five years old, likely attending primary school in Port Harcourt. It’s not clear when Yerima’s family relocated to Kaduna.

The larger informational lesson for me in all this is that AI chatbots are only as reliable as the information humans circulate.

Many people insist that A.M. Yerima is the son of retired Major General M.M. Yerima simply because of the superficial similarity in their surnames. Google’s AI merely recycled the deluge of inaccurate social-media claims affirming this nonexistent relationship.

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.