By Saheed Ibrahim

Claim: A Facebook user posted that Nollywood actor Ramsey Nouah and Ghanaian actress Nadia Buari got married.

Verdict: Misleading. The wedding pictures were from a movie, Merry Men 3: Nemesis, released in Oct. 2023.

Full Text

Ramsey Tokunbo Nouah Jr, born 1970, is a Nigerian actor and director. He is nicknamed Nollywood Lover Boy for his roles in romantic movies. He won the Africa Movie Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 2010 for his performance in The Figurine. He made his directorial debut with the film Living in Bondage: Breaking Free in 2019 and also won the Best Director of the Year at the 2022 Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards for directing the movie Rattle Snake: The Ahanna Story.

Similarly, Nadia Buari is an actress. Born in 1982, she is a Ghanaian born to a Lebanese father and a Ghanaian mother. She premiered on Ghanaian national television with the TV series Games People Play in late 2005. Her first major film was Mummy’s Daughter, after which she starred in Beyonce: The President’s Daughter.

In 2013, she won the Pan African Actress award at the annual Nigerian Entertainment Awards (NEA Awards) in New York City. She was awarded the Special Recognition Award at the Africa Magic Viewers Choice Awards in 2014.

On March 4, 2024, a Facebook entertainment account, which claims to be Africa’s No. 1 Entertainment and News Site Naijasilver Entertainment, posted on Facebook that Ramsey Noah got married to Ghanaian female actress Nadia Buari.

As of March 8 at 8:42 pm, the Facebook post had garnered significant attention with 71,000 likes, 4,500 comments, and 224 shares.

The post, with pictures of the two acclaimed couple dressed in wedding attires, reads: “Congratulations… Love is a beautiful thing. See beautiful photos of Actors Nadia Buari and Ramsey Noah as they tie the knot together.” ‎

Most of the page’s followers who appeared to believe the assertion commented, “Congratulations.”

DUBAWA decided to fact-check the post due to its virality and potential to mislead.

Verification

A Google search using keywords and Google Lens showed that the pictures of the alleged wedding between the two artists were posted online in May 2023. New blogs such as Gistlover, Newtelegraphng, and Ghanacelebrities.com posted photos of the duo on their social media accounts and their blogs with headlines, “Nadia Buari shares her pre-wedding photos with Ramsey Nouah,” “Finally, Nadia Buari Post Her Pre-Wedding Photo With Ramsey Nouah,” “Wedding Photos of Nadia Buari and Ramsey Nouah Breaks the Internet”, respectively.

However, the researcher found that each news blog used the headlines to bait readers for traffic. In the body of their stories, they revealed that the two artists got married in a new blockbuster movie, Merry Men 3, an action-comedy film directed by Moses Inwang and produced by Darlington Abuda. The movie was later released in October 2023.

However, news websites, such as The Nation Newspaper and PremiumTimes, made it known in their headlines that the two artists got married in a movie, Merry Men 3. 

DUBAWA looked at the movie (Merry Men), released in October 2023, and found that the wedding pictures of the two artists shared by Naijasilver Entertainment were actually from the movie. In the wedding scene, Ramsey Nouah (Ayo), dressed in a white shirt and jacket on a pair of black trousers, is about to get married to Nadia Buari (Dera), dressed in a beautiful white wedding dress, before Dafe (Chidi Mokeme), a former Merry Men gang, disrupts the wedding programme.

DUBAWA visited the artists’ Instagram pages and found no posts about the purported wedding. On Nadia Buari’s Instagram page, her last post was on International Women’s Day, showing a picture of three other women in purple dresses. The majority of her recent posts were pictures of her.

On Ramsey Nouah’s Instagram page, no picture of any wedding ceremony was found, except images of him, Silent Disco, and a poster of Nigeria and Ivory Coast match for the final game of the African Cup of Nations 2023.

Ramsey Noah has also been married since 2002 to Emelia Philips. They share three children, but his marital life is usually kept away from the public. 

Conclusion

The claim by Naijasilver Entertainment that Nollywood actor Ramsey Nouah got married to Ghanaian actress Nadia Buari is misleading. The pictures shared were taken from a movie, Merry Men 3: Nemesis. 

This report is produced for the DUBAWA 2024 Kwame Karikari Fact-Checking Fellowship in partnership with The Hope Newspaper to facilitate the ethos of truth in journalism and enhance media literacy in Nigeria.