The federal government has provided an update following negotiations with Twitter.

Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed has said ban on Twitter will be lifted in a matter of days or in a few weeks time.

Mohammed, gave this update after the week’s virtual Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting presided over by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo (SAN) at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Providing updates on the government’s negotiation with the micro-blogging site, the Minister gave more details of the conditions given to the platform, saying most of them have been accepted.

He said the areas still pending such as Twitter setting up an office and having a Twitter staff of management cadre that will serve as the country representative, were being discussed.

Mohammed revealed in the area of a Nigerian office, even though Twitter has agreed to the condition, it is however maintaining the earliest it can establish it is 2022.

The Minister expressed confidence everything will be hammered out with Twitter within a few days or weeks, noting the anxiety shown by Nigerians.

He said the Federal Government’s committee negotiating with Twitter will meet on the agreement soon to make recommendations.

Meanwhile, some twitter users have observed that the microblog has been accessible at night without the use of Virtual Private Network, VPN.

Recall that the Buhari administration banned on Twitter in Nigeria in June 2021. The ban was also combined with proposals within Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) to allow the federal government to establish a “code of conduct” for Nigeria’s media to counter, among other things, “fake news,” rightly sets off alarm bells within the human rights community.

According to Council on Foreign Relations, Nigeria is challenged on multiple fronts: a jihadi insurrection in the North East and increasingly in the North West; quarrels over water and land, especially in the Middle Belt; separatism in the South West and the South East; and kidnapping nearly everywhere.

The growing perception among many in Nigeria is that the country does not meet the first condition of statehood: the provision of security for its citizens. This is the context for a drift to authoritarianism by a government under siege.

As one observer writes in Foreign Policy, the Twitter ban is “another sign that dictatorship is back” in Nigeria. Such reactions draw on a well of suspicion—based on Buhari’s 1983–85 tenure as military chief of state—that the now-civilian president remains, at heart, an authoritarian.

While at present these concerns are overstated—institutional security-service weakness makes authoritarianism difficulty to implement—they are cause for concern and require close monitoring.

Quartz Africa, in a publication said that Nigeria’s shutdown of Twitter, which came into effect on June 5, has become a multimillion dollar economic headache for the country, impacting businesses of all sizes, from banks to startups, who use social media for activities like customer service and dispute resolution.

The ban has also hit entrepreneurs and vendors who are able to gain visibility through social media campaigns and viral tweets, and the content creators, and marketers who have built a career out of running those campaigns.

British firm Top10VPN estimates that the ban has affected around 104.4 million internet users in the country, and cost the country around $366.9 million.

The firm made the calculations using a tool developed by internet governance watchdog organization Netblocks, and Internet Society, a US advocacy nonprofit.  The tool is based on similar methodologies used by organizations such as the Brookings Institution, a US research organization.

The Nigerian government has not said anything about the lifting of the ban. Meanwhile, twitter users in Nigeria have started accessing the microblog without virtual private network, VPN.

 

 


By Editor

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