In early June, the Nigerian government announced that it had banned the use of Twitter in the country. This followed the media platform’s ...
In early June, the Nigerian government announced that it had banned the use of Twitter in the country. This followed the media platform’s decision to delete a tweet by the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, on the grounds that it violated the platform’s rules.
The Attorney General of Nigeria, Abubakar Malami, vowed to prosecute violators of the ban, a threat that he later recanted.
This raises the question of whether the ban is legal. In my view, it is not. Under the current constitutional dispensation, the Nigerian government lacks the legal competence to unilaterally ban Twitter or prosecute violators of the ban.
It is possible for the Twitter ban to be pressed into one or two of the permissible grounds of limitation under section 45 of the Nigerian Constitution. However, examination of the facts surrounding the ban shows that, at the very least, the ban fails the test of legality.
For one, it was announced by the country’s Minister of Information at a press conference rather than being effected through a law of general application as required by Section 45 of the 1999 Constitution.
In this article, I interrogate the limit of governments’ regulation of border-less technology companies in Nigeria. I discuss the legal issues arising out of the ban. I also set out the...
