The minister of state for labour and employment and member of the committee involved in the dialogue with Twitter, Mr. Festus Keyamo, has said that the ban on the operations of Twitter in Nigeria would be lifted as soon as few conditions were met.
Recall that the operation of the micro-blogging platform in Nigeria was suspended on June 4, two days after it deleted a controversial tweet from President Muhammadu Buhari.
Speaking yesterday (Sunday) in an interview on Channels Television programme, ‘Politics Today’ Keyamo disclosed that Twitter had agreed to all the Nigerian government’s conditions but singled out “timelines” as the only hiccup.
“It was Twitter, just to put it in context that reached out to the federal government to say they want to know what they can do to straighten up the relationship with the federal government. And so we’ve gone far.
“I may not at this forum, let out a lot, but we give them a lot of conditions (and) they have agreed to all those conditions. What is left now are the timelines to fulfill those conditions.
“Once those timelines come and they fulfill those conditions, Twitter will be back to business in Nigeria. They know exactly what we want. And these are things that are extremely altruistic,” Keyamo said.
He added that Twitter had agreed to pay taxes to the Nigerian government as well as setting up a physical office in Nigeria where users can take their complaints to.
“So, they’ve agreed to taxation, they’ve agreed to open an office in Nigeria so that there can be some, you know, face to face complaints so that we don’t have to be going through algorithms to complain about activities of certain persons who use Twitter to subvert the government of the day.
“There are certain lines that people should not cross when sending out messages, or tweeting things that are capable of tearing us apart. For instance, things are not capable of setting this country on fire, you know, but to use those platforms to promote and propagate some of these ideas,” he said.
Besides, he said the technical committee set up to interface with Twitter, was working on a code of conduct not only to control the mode of engagement on the platform but also on other social media platforms.
