In a famous video tele-conference with governors of the United States last June, President Donald Trump was characteristically blunt. And to some people, offensive.
“Most of you are weak,” he told them.
It was in the middle of the popular protests sweeping dozens of American cities following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.
“You’ve got to arrest people,” Trump declared. And then he deployed the D-word: dominate.
“You have to dominate,” he told them, sounding like one of those third banana republic tyrants the US once despised. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate, and you have to arrest people, and you have to try people and they have to go to jail for long periods of time.”
He urged the governors to “track people…put them in jail for 10 years…” guaranteeing, “You’ll never see this stuff again. We’re doing it in Washington, D.C. We’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before.”
It was political theatre that Americans had never heard out of the White House, and several of the governors criticized it in the strongest language.
The Nigerian government was paying rapt attention. Last week, Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information and Culture, used the same style and language to scare the National Assembly into paying to formulate a national policy the executive branch seeks to control social media.
“We need a social media policy that will regulate what should be said and posted and what should not,” he told a committee of the House of Representatives. “We also need technology and resources to dominate our social media space.’’
This, of course, follows the government’s extensive trolling of Mr. Trump, from whom it got its “fake news” narrative in the first place.
Mr. Mohammed bragged: “We saw as far back as 2017 that the next epidemic that will hit Nigeria and the entire world is fake news and misinformation,” and then talked extensively about what the government has been doing on the subject since then, including launching the campaign to regulate the (sic) social media.
“If you go to China, you cannot get Google, Facebook or Instagram but you can only use your email because they have made sure that it is regulated,” he said.
But he did not tell the House that China has a population of nearly 1.4 billion, but that it is not the poverty capital of the world, Nigeria is.
He did not tell the Representatives that China transformed into the world’s most active and successful economy in one generation through the vision and action of its leadership and not by shutting up its people.
And he certainly did not tell the House that so successful have China’s leaders been that Nigerian leaders are on their knees each day begging them for crumbs allegedly to develop Nigeria. Or worse, that there is massive evidence that infrastructure development in other countries by China is curiously quicker and cheaper than in Nigeria.
I do not intend to trivialize the danger of social media manipulation. It is established, for instance, that in the US presidential election in 2016, Russia used social media as an intervention tool.
Russia is said to be doing the same in this year’s election and various US institutional mechanisms are being deployed to prevent it. Nigeria should do the same if the government finds any threats to the national interest.
But the Buhari government deliberately presents bad news as fake news, and social media as the purveyor of fake news.
But what is happening in the US, from which the Nigerian government borrows every now and every nuance but none of the commitment, is that Trump is not fighting social media: he is fighting the mainstream media. For Trump, any news that is bad or unfavorable for him personally is “fake;” in Nigeria, news that is unfavorable to Buhari’s bad government and governance is “fake.”
The National Assembly ought not to fall for this dangerous and disingenuous disinformation. The interest of the government must not be mistaken for the interest of Nigeria.
A policy that will “regulate what should be said and posted and what should not” is doublespeak for a government wanting to shut up the literate population from voicing dissent.
And what does “technology and resources to dominate our social media space” mean? It means that the Buhari government wants to spy on Nigerians and prevent them from expressing themselves.
Remember the words of the man who provides language for the Buhari government: “They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate, and you have to arrest people, and you have to try people and they have to go to jail for long periods of time.”
Mohammed used Ethiopia as his model, citing a riot there last June. “What Ethiopia did to curtail the crisis that followed was to shut down the (sic) social media for two days.”
Two days. But the Nigerian government wants the same power in perpetuity.
This clarifies exactly what is at stake: Nigerians want to be able to call on the government to earn their respect.
And so, let us stay in Ethiopia for a moment. In September, Ethiopia opened a new passenger terminal at the Addis Ababa Bole International Airport by which it became the largest gateway to Africa, overtaking Dubai. The first terminal in the world to be completed since the outbreak of the coronavirus, the airport proudly announces that it was “designed, not re-purposed, with biosafety and biosecurity in mind.”
Still in Addis Ababa: in 2018, the government announced the construction of another international airport, to open in 2024. It will have four runways and handle up to 120 million passengers annually. By comparison, our new “world class” Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport terminal in Abuja aims at handling 15 million passengers annually.
In the city of Addis, the light rail project opened to passengers in September 2015 following four years of construction and testing. On the contrary, Phase I of the Abuja light rail opened in July 2018 following 11 years of construction. Phase II has not advanced one inch since President Muhammadu Buhari departed that commissioning ceremony.
But the chaos and misery in Nigeria governance is best illustrated by the nation’s military army chief declaring last week how ready he is to turn his weapons on rioting civilians. He spoke at a time that the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) continues to grow in the northeast militarily undeterred. It is also winning hearts through provision of service.
#EndSARS has shown the possibilities before Nigeria, but the rioters who took over the streets from it confirm that governance in Buhari’s Nigeria is a hoax.
In other words, the government is far more dangerous to Nigeria than social media is. Give Nigerians something to acknowledge. Bread, not bullets. Something significant, completed. Service.
But do not substitute threats for governance. You can spank the child and forbid him from crying.
[This column welcomes rebuttals from interested government officials.]
• @Sonala.Olumhense
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