Politics
Unpatriotic Nigerians responsible for Twitter snub —Lai Mohammed
The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, believes unpatriotic Nigerians are to blame for social networking service provider, Twitter, snubbing Nigeria to make Ghana its African headquaters.
The Minister, while fielding questions from newsmen in Abuja on Thursday, said the stance of Nigerians de-marketing the country on social media made Twitter choose Ghana ahead of Nigeria even with the high number of users in the country.
“The natural expectation would have been for Nigeria to be the hub for Twitter especially in this part of Africa, even with the fact that we have 25.4 million Twitter users in Nigeria, against eight million users in Accra,” Mohammed said in response to the question.
Continuing, he said:
“Clearly, the decision was not a commercial and business one.
“But I think Twitter has the prerogative and the exclusive right as to where to site its headquarters. But I hope that this will serve as a lesson to Nigerians.
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“Unpatriotic Nigerians have continued to project the image of the country negatively on social media platforms including Twitter, especially during the #EndSARS protests last October.
“If you recall, the #EndSARS protest started on Twitter before physical mobilisation on the streets.
“The reasons cited by Twitter for siting the headquarters in Accra, Ghana, is that Accra is a champion of democracy and there is rule of law in Accra, among other reasons.
“This is what you get when you de-market your own country. This will teach a lot of us a lesson that we have no country than Nigeria.
“We are not saying that you should not criticise the country but be fair and patriotic. When you destroy your own house, where are you going to live?
“You can imagine the kind of job opportunities that siting that headquarters in Nigeria would have created, the kind of visibility it would have given Nigeria, but we destroyed it.
“It is what the insiders say about their country that the outsider will use to judge and condemn the country.”
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