By Ebi Dressman
Millions of Nigerians struggled on Saturday to access Twitter, a day after Nigerian authorities suspended the service in response to the company’s deletion of a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari for violating its terms of service.
Yes, everyone has his or her own opinion when it comes to public issues. But to me, President Buhari recent ban of Twitter in Nigeria is a gag against the media, to repress the civic space and to undermine human rights of the people.
The Nigerian Constitution guarantees Nigerians free speech and freedom of association. Yes, the Government can regulate these media platforms to reduce their negative impact on our society like fake news, inciting the public etc, but outrightly stopping the usage of these platforms is like gaging against the existentiality of democracy and is never a good one for our nascent democracy.
A robust mass media and a vigorously active civil society are two important ingredients in a strong and healthy democracy that can curtail corruption from the society even without the political backbones. Without free media and an active civil society, there is space for enormous and unchecked political power leading to corruption and anti-democratic behavior by government functionaries.
This is to tell that independent media played a vital role in improving governance and reducing corruption, increasing economic efficiency and stability, and creating positive social and environmental change.
In the US, it was Twitter that banned Donald Trump, and it deleted all his tweets while he was still the President of the United States, he never banned or indefinitely suspended access to twitter usage in the U.S.
To those of us who are now supporting the recent #twitter ban by the Nigerian Government because people are freely using it against the Government of the day we are supporting. We should never forgot how we used this same social media platforms in the past in criticising past Government policies.
Even up to this very moment, some of us are still using other social media platforms in criticising our state government policies but we are supporting Federal Government for banning Twitter.
What is good for the goose is also good for the gander.
We must put political party aside on certain issues that affect the general public. Stop calling spade a machete. We must call a spade by its name.
