Twitter close to reaching deal with Nigeria on resuming service

Government blocked access to the social media platform in June

Twitter has met almost 70 per cent of the government’s terms and conditions to resume service, according to Nigeria's Information Minister Lai Mohammed. Lionel Bonaventure / AFP

Twitter has agreed to most of the conditions set by the Nigerian government to resume operations in the West African country, Information Minister Lai Mohammed says.

The social media giant “has met almost 70 per cent of the government’s terms and conditions, many of them quite fundamental and important,” Mr Mohammed said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Wednesday. “We are working on a few more.”

A spokesman for the San Francisco-based company declined to comment.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration blocked access to Twitter’s services in Africa’s most populous country on June 5, after the company deleted one of his tweets for violating its rules. The dispute added to other controversies Twitter has faced with government leaders, including its decision in January to ban former US President Donald Trump and a clash with Indian authorities over posts on its app.

Mr Buhari, who was briefly a military dictator during the 1980s, ran afoul of Twitter’s rules when he issued a threat to crack down on separatists he accuses of waging a rebellion in the southeast of the country.

The Nigerian government didn’t shutter Twitter because of the removal of Mr Buhari’s tweet, Mr Mohammed said. Rather, it was because of the use of the US microblogging site by the Indigenous People of Biafra, he said.

Mr Buhari’s government has proscribed IPOB, which wants to establish an independent nation in southeastern Nigeria, as a terrorist organisation and blames the group for a series of deadly attacks this year on security forces. The group’s leader, Nnamdi Kanu, was captured in June and returned to Nigeria to continue a treason trial he fled in 2017.

“Twitter became the platform of choice for a group that was targeting policemen, killing policemen, killing the military and promoting the interest of one ethnic group against another,” Mr Mohammed said. “For national security, we suspended the operations.”

IPOB maintains that it’s a self-determination movement committed to creating its own state for the Igbo ethnic group through non-violent means. It accuses the government of “abducting” Mr Kanu abroad in violation of international law.

Twitter officials last met with representatives of the Nigerian government “about a week ago,” said Mr Mohammed. “It’s been quite encouraging.”