Nigeria’s Twitter Rebuke
The problem for him was context: Mohammed was focused exclusively, and wrongly, on people saying negative things about their country. Foreigners do not use a people’s praise and joy about their country to condemn it.
Lai Mohammed
Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture Lai Mohammed is right: “It is what the insiders say about their country that the outsider will use to judge and condemn the country.”
He was commenting on Thursday about Twitter having chosen Ghana for its headquarters in Africa.
The problem for him was context: Mohammed was focused exclusively, and wrongly, on people saying negative things about their country. Foreigners do not use a people’s praise and joy about their country to condemn it.
Making its announcement three days earlier, Twitter had said, “As a champion for democracy, Ghana is a supporter of free speech, online freedom, and the Open Internet, of which Twitter is also an advocate. Furthermore, Ghana’s recent appointment to host The Secretariat of the African Continental Free Trade Area aligns with our overarching goal to establish a presence in the region that will support our efforts to improve and tailor our service across Africa.”
Embracing the development, a happy President Nana Akufo-Addo said: “The government and Ghanaians welcome very much this announcement and the confidence reposed in our country. As I indicated in our virtual meeting of April 7, 2021, this is the start of a beautiful partnership between Twitter and Ghana, which is critical for the development of Ghana’s hugely important tech sector. These are exciting times to be in, and to do business in Ghana.”
Observe the things that Mr. Akufo-Addo addressed in that brief statement: confidence in his country; business partnerships; a vital economic sector; being in Ghana; and business in Ghana.
If the Ghanaian leader was trying to market his country, it was a wonderful job in 64 words, and it was a copy he could have used with any world or business leader. Many African-Americans, notably the superstar musician Stevie Wonder, have responded and chosen to live in Ghana.
As Twitter drives its stake into the soil in Ghana, its pioneer staff will work remotely, the organization announced, with staff recruitment commencing.
In Abuja, Minister Mohammed was in regret mode, not commending Ghana. “You can imagine the kind of job opportunities that citing that headquarters in Nigeria would have generated, the kind of visibility it would have given Nigeria, but we destroyed it.”
It is evident that the Buhari government is considerably embarrassed by the business decision of the American company, and it should be. But by “we destroyed it,” the Minister was not taking ownership of his government’s reprehensible mismanagement of the economy and its opportunities in the past six years.
To begin with, the government forgets, characteristically, that throughout its tenure, it has suffered the same fate each time it came face to face with big American businesses.
Remember August 2016? That was when one of the world’s wealthiest men was seen jogging on the streets of Lagos. Unknown to Abuja, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had arrived to take the pulse of the country’s tech sector.
The 32-year-old visited several startups, but he did not have Aso Rock on his schedule, and they had to hurriedly ferry him back from Kenya for a photo opportunity in Abuja to make the powers-that-be appear to be alive and alert. What has the government done with Facebook since then? Nothing.
It was also in 2016 that Buhari himself announced on National Day that America’s General Electric would invest $2.2bn concession in Nigeria Railways. That statement was disowned by the company within two days, its top official in Africa telling Reuters that it would invest $150m in Nigeria.
And then in November 2018, GE mysteriously pulled out, never returned, never explained, and never apologized. To use Mohammed’s analogy, the government destroyed that relationship.
What about Bill Gates? In 2018, he was invited to Abuja for what was said to be an expanded National Economic Council meeting. He is a desirable man, Mr. Gates is, for he is not only wealthy but is rather kind-hearted. He had been intervening in Nigeria for over 10 years, and his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was spending about $1.6billion on various programmes in the country. Earlier that year, it had also paid off $76 million Nigeria owed Japan since 2014 over polio.
In Abuja, Gates delivered a public shock, in words to this effect: Your economic policies are terrible, he told the Buhari government, and you will achieve nothing until you invest in young people.
He would later explain on CNN: “I was very direct…I really think that of all the countries I have seen, [Nigeria] really hangs in the balance. If they can get health and education right, they can be an engine of growth, not just for themselves but for all of Africa.”
What the Buhari government has done with Gates’ advice in the past three years is illustratable by the fact that while Akufo-Addo was reaching agreement in Accra on behalf of Ghana, Buhari was in London providing for Buhari.
But according to Mohammed, Nigerians are to blame for daring to call the Buhari government by name.
“This is what you get when you de-market your country,” he said. “The media is more to blame for this which most times exaggerate the challenges in the country. At no time was this worse than during the #EndSARS protest when Nigerian journalists both traditional and new media were trying to outdo themselves in painting Nigeria as a hell where nobody should live.”
Worse still, the Minister said, “They all conspired to vilify not just the government but the people of Nigeria.”
Really, Minister? I humbly number among those who have criticized bad governance in Nigeria for over 40 years, and I believe that were there to be a photo of “atrocious governance” in the dictionary, it would be that of Buhari’s. The natural response to such atrocities, as the All Progressives Congress itself demonstrated loudly in 2014 and 2015, is for the guilty government to be criticized until it either changes or is kicked out of office.
But to criticize a bad government is not to vilify its people, as Mohammed suggests. The Nigerian people are the offended, not the offenders; the victims, not the victimizer. The Buhari government serves its own will, not that of the people who voted for it. That is why it cannot obtain the acclaim it craves.
And this is evidently what Twitter meant when it cast its vote for Ghana, calling it a “champion for democracy…a supporter of free speech, online freedom, and the Open Internet…”
The first question is whether Nigeria faults Twitter’s position that Ghana champions democracy and supports various freedoms. If it does, Nigeria ought to applaud Ghana’s accomplishment, and learn from it.
The second question is: what does Nigeria, under Buhari, support? Mediocrity? Nepotism? Incompetence? Because these are what #EndSARS was about.
Sadly, even after six years, the Buhari government fails to understand that every government functions under an increasingly big microscope and cannot lie its way into respectability.
But let us not forget the real issue. The location of Twitter’s Africa HQ is not the biggest question confronting Nigeria. But it is another unveiling of what constitutes governance: words or work.
The truth is that words don’t work.
This column welcomes rebuttals from interested government officials.
• @Sonala.Olumhense