We Have Work to Do

The Nigerian government is threatening to arrest its citizens, for tweeting. Two weeks ago, via Twitter, the Ministry of Information and Culture announced the ‘indefinite suspension’ of the social media platform. Attorney-General Abubakar Malami doubled down by announcing the next day that he intended to enforce the ban through the ‘immediate prosecution of offenders’.

How did we get here? Sunday, 30 May was Biafran Remembrance Day, a holiday—not recognized by the federal government but celebrated in various parts of the South East—that memorializes the casualties of the Biafran War. The day of remembrance has taken on greater significance recently, as secessionist groups have grown in popularity and revived calls for an independent Biafran state. The government has alleged that these groups have turned to violent tactics to further their cause, blaming a recent prison break in Owerri and the assassination of several police officers on the Eastern Security Network (ESN), a paramilitary unit of the Indigenous People of Biafra or ‘IPOB’. For its part, IPOB has denied these allegations through their official spokeswoman, insisting that ESN focuses on ‘fighting terrorists in the bush’. President Buhari, via his official Twitter account, issued a public statement: ‘Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Nigerian Civil War. Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand.’ Twitter users interpreted the tweet as a veiled threat to revive the brutal tactics used by the Nigerian Army during the civil war. Several users reported the tweet to Twitter, and Twitter deleted it.

Subsequently, the government protested. Minister of information, Lai Mohammed, accused Twitter of bias, pointing to the platform’s failure to delete threatening tweets by Nnamdi Kanu, the IPOB’s leader. Mohammed also accused Twitter of having a ‘very suspect’ mission in Nigeria, likely referencing the platform’s use in facilitating #ENDSARS protests of 2020. Then, he announced the Twitter ban.

In many ways, the Twitter ban perfectly encapsulates the contradictions of the Buhari administration. This administration is acutely sensitive to public opinion, so much so that the gleeful response to Twitter’s decision angered them. And yet, the Buhari administration refuses to court public approval by enacting popular policies. They are reactionary enough to issue a heavy-handed response yet cannot create a ban that citizens will not easily avoid with Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Now that the ban has proven unpopular, the government is attempting to backtrack, claiming that the policy is motivated by a desire to clamp down on violence caused by fake news and is temporary. But the Buhari administration’s ineffectual response to a rising tide of violence by herdsmen, a spate of child kidnappings, and increasingly graphic reports of sexual violence on women and girls disproves their case. In response to this tide of insecurity, the president has not even taken questions at a press conference. Where he saw fit to take decisive and swift action was in responding to an apparent snub—(while Facebook reached out to the government to provide an opportunity to edit this statement on its platform, Twitter moved immediately to delete it. In other words, this is policymaking by petty pageantry. It’s another unfortunate incident in a long line of reasons to be pessimistic about the state of the county: rising inflation, high unemployment, low growth, violent conflict on multiple fronts, government censorship, and a citizenry demobilized and depressed by the failure of last year’s protests to end SARS. Despite this bleak picture, we can draw five lessons from the Twitter ban for future political organizing.