War going on in every part of Nigeria -Chido Onumah, rights activist

It’s unfortunate and it shows the lack of seriousness and creativity of government because how can you just wake up and ban something that you don’t have control over? You don’t own the technology, you don’t own the medium and you think you can just wake up and with the stroke of a pen, and plan a ban that you cannot even enforce. It makes a mockery of the whole thing. And the attorney-general is also saying people who are using the VPN process should be prosecuted. Is it that they will be going from door to door to ask if you are maintaining a Twitter account? I don’t know how they are going to do that. But it has also reflected the desperation of the administration- they are in a hole and you keep digging. Somebody has tweeted that of all the problems of Nigeria – the civil war that is going, the banditry, terrorism – across the length and breadth of the country and you have a government in place, but no serious action has been taken to curb that. But look at the swift response when the President tweeted and people told him that this is not a reasonable tweet and Twitter took action. Then, you ask yourself if the President can be this swift, but has failed to take action on many problems in the land – insecurity, economy, the naira whose value is falling like rotten mangoes – why are they not focusing on that but rather than an issue like this? It’s sad and unfortunate that this is the situation we found ourselves.

Yes, I think so. Interestingly, it is nothing new. They have tried to regulate social media, directly and indirectly, sponsoring bills at the National Assembly and Lai Mohammed coming out to make statements about shrinking the civic and media space in Nigeria. We held a conference in November 2019 to call attention to that. So, it’s not something new. This just provides the opportunity to go forward on that retrogressive step that they have toed over time. But it’s a dangerous move. The media, civil society groups need to be on alert. What we are even talking about is not even about press freedom. It is about the larger question of freedom of expression because the media is the platform through which citizens express themselves. So, if you curtail press freedom, you are not just curtailing the right of journalists to express themselves, you are also curtailing the right of citizens. That means we should look at it from the broader perspective of freedom of speech, expression, rather than an attack on press freedom. So, when you attack the press, you are indirectly attacking the citizens. Just like in the days of Babangida and Abacha – when you shut media houses – the government closed TheNews, Tempo, Vanguard, The Guardian and co, people won’t be able to write, contribute and that’s the danger we all face now. It is a serious attack on the rights of Nigerians to express themselves, the right to hold an opinion and so on and that’s how it should be looked at.

That cannot be a justification, but that also tells you that we are dealing with an unserious government. If it’s a serious government, why didn’t they petition Twitter as a government and say, ‘please, we do not think this thing meets your standard, it is not in the interest of Nigeria, can you take it down?’ Secondly, this is something that is happening now and you have to ask yourself if banning Twitter is the solution. Twitter didn’t even ban the President, they just removed that particular tweet, it is not that the platform said he cannot tweet again. So, I don’t know what is responsible for the hyper reaction. Why referring to Nnamdi Kanu’s tweet while you have made up your mind to ban Twitter? Is the government in competition with Nnamdi Kanu – ‘your tweet is more dangerous than mine’ is that the kind of situation that we are dealing with? They should just have made a case for themselves and say ‘this is what the President tweeted, there was no intention of malice or any attempt to target any particular group, but we have a situation in which one particular group has been involved in this and you have not taken any action. I hope we are not dealing with a case of double standard and so on’ – engage them in a conversation and watch what Twitter says and how they respond, if you appeal your case they could provide justification or they could even go back and now deal with Nnamdi Kanu’s case.   Nnamdi Kanu is not even the president of the country and, unfortunately, Lai Mohammed and his cohorts are dragging the Nigerian president in the mud. How does the President tweet an ignominious and dangerous tweet and Twitter called him out and the best you can do is now is to compare your tweet to that of an ordinary citizen somewhere in a different part of the world? You are talking about the President of the most populated country in the continent, the country that ought to be leading the black race and you are called out for a terrible tweet you tweeted and your response was to say ‘so, so and so person tweeted this and you didn’t do anything we are going to ban you.’ It is really sad and unfortunate.

Again, it is tragic. What it tells you is a complete breakdown of law and order and the institutions of the state. The state and its institutions have collapsed – police, armed forces cannot defend citizens. Governors are calling on citizens to carry machete to go out and you wonder what that is meant to achieve. The first responsibility of the state is the maintenance of law and order, the protection of citizens and their property. And if that can’t happen, nothing else can happen. People cannot go for their businesses, farms, schools and so on. Citizens are resorting to self-help, arming themselves to provide security. It is a combination of factors – when you ask some people, they will say it is because herdsmen are attacking us and we can’t get the security institution to take action and, therefore, we need to protect ourselves. Then, over time, the whole country has been awash with small arms as a result of crazy trade in arms and corruption, and that has led to a situation in which we have illegal arms all over the place. And once you have that kind of situation, what is going on now is an inevitable outcome because you don’t eat a gun. If people acquire guns through any dubious illegal means, they will have to put them into use and that is to kill people. Guns are used to kill people, nothing else. So, young people who have no job, who see no future, no hope, but have guns feel emboldened to take on the world. And you can see the swagger with which they walk, brandishing their guns, even feeling that if you shoot, you cannot kill them because they own a gun. This is just the result of a breakdown of law and order, lack of leadership in the country- the President is not saying anything. The Governors are waiting for directives from Abuja and even the military -I don’t know how effective their control process is- you expect them to engage citizens, using the best internationally recognized mode of engagement, because even in a war situation, you still have rules of engagement. But you see all sorts of atrocities being committed by soldiers, state officials, security officials, shooting at people – so many allegations of extrajudicial killings. We are just dealing with anarchy. People are killed, but you don’t know who is responsible- whether the so-called unknown gunmen or security operatives, vigilantes, armed robbers or criminal elements. So, it is not just a breakdown in law and order, the intelligence network has also collapsed. You don’t even know who is committing these crimes. It’s a free-for-all situation and that’s the danger. If you know that these crimes are being committed by a certain dissident or militant group, you can say let’s go after them, let’s engage them.

The title of that book is important, but the subtitle, which people understandably don’t focus or pay attention to is also very important. The main title of the book, ‘We Are All Biafrans’ is saying that look, this country belongs to all of us and there are people in different parts of the country who have issues with Nigeria; it is not just about the Biafran agitators alone. Some people still have grievances from June 12, from the civil war or people who have suffered attacks from Boko Haram, bandits and so on. Let’s all come to the table and bring our grievances and see how to deal with them. In that sense, I used the word Biafra as a metaphor. But the subtitle of the book is ‘A participant observance intervention in a country sleepwalking to disaster.’  I observed the country; we closed our eyes and we are walking to danger disaster. Unfortunately, we have now entered into that disaster. But we can get out of it. We just need leadership – we need the governors, the president if he is available- unfortunately, I don’t think so because you see our friend, Garba Shehu every two minutes, he is issuing a press statement, attributing it to the Presidency. And you ask yourself, ‘who is the Presidency?’ We didn’t elect the Presidency – people elected Muhammadu Buhari as the president and Yemi Osinbajo as the vice president. Who is this Presidency that Garba Shehu keeps referencing?  We do not run a collegiate presidency in Nigeria. We have an elected executive president who is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Why can’t he address the nation? Why can’t they attribute things to him? He doesn’t speak on any issue. But he just issued a meaningless statement and attributes it to the Presidency. That tells you that there is a big problem with the leadership of this country – that the Presidency is in turmoil while this country is heading into disaster. So, what we need to do and that can be done quickly – is for us to be sincere about this process. If the president can take charge – he ought to be having conference calls, at least, every 48 hours, if he can’t do physical meetings with all the governors, the service chiefs because we are more or less in a state of emergency – though I don’t want to use the term that will be giving them the funny feeling that all they need to do is to introduce martial laws into the country. But the truth is that we are witnessing civil wars across the country. There is the war with Boko Haram in the Northeast, there is the war going on now with the groups in the Southeast, there is the war with bandits in the Northwest, the war with the militants in the Niger Delta, there is the war with some people in the Southwest agitating or pushing for the Yoruba Nation. So, everywhere you turn in the country, there is a war going on, the intensity may be different. I don’t know how many countries in the world can survive this kind of numerous attacks on different fronts at the same time. All we need to deal with the situation is for the president, the governors to step up, people rely on them. They are the ones that are supposed to take responsibility. All they need is to step up and take action – who are these groups? Do we need to discuss this with them? What do you want? What are the issues? You can’t do this, this is criminal and people arrested will be prosecuted. It a challenging situation, but it is not insurmountable. It is something that with the right kind of rhetoric, the right kind of intervention by the government, states and at the federal level, we can pull the country back from the brink and then continue to have this conversation which has started with the constitution review and so on.

Sincerely, I don’t think anything good will come out of it. We need a new constitution that will emanate from a serious discussion with different interest groups in Nigeria. We know how this constitution came about – it was just a military decree, even those who took over the government in 1999 – Obasanjo and co, they didn’t see the constitution that they swore to uphold, it was after the fact that the constitution was presented to them. There are several things wrong with the constitution – whether it is revenue allocation, the disparity in powers granted to the state and the federal government, issues around what should constitute items on the exclusive list and the residual list for state governments and so on. We don’t need a bogus, 200-page constitution, we just need a small, clear, people-oriented constitution that speaks to the unity of the country, the rights of the citizens, effective management of resources and importantly, guarantees freedom and rights to citizens. That’s all you need. Every other thing could be subjected to interpretation by the law courts. And once you have an effective judicial process, as you have in a place like the United States, it will take care of these things. Our constitution is just bogus; it contains everything in this world, yet it contains nothing. But I don’t have faith in the ongoing process, I think it is another jamboree, an opportunity to make money and make some noise. Nothing is going to come out of it. The kind of vested interest at play will also ensure that nothing comes out of it. I think the citizens have to engage, to see how best we can arrive at a process that will help us arrive at a new conversation around a new constitution.