Twitter Ban: “You could have handled it a lot better” – Sanwo-Olu tells FG

Governor of Lagos state, Babajide Sanwoolu has expressed his views on the current suspension of twitter’s activities in Nigeria by the Nigerian government.

Sanwo-Olu, in a recent interview with Arise TV, explained that dialoguing with Twitter would have been better than an outright ban because of the economic implications of the move. In his words;

“The Federal government can handle this a lot better. Because of the number of eCommerce, the number of youths doing digital stuff on the internet, and we cannot throw that away and say it’s not happening.

“I believe there could be a lot of restraint and better management from both sides,”

It will be recalled that last week, the Nigerian government through its Minister of information, Lai Mohammed ordered the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC to order all telcos to block access to Twitter. The directive was issued a day after the social media giant deleted President Muhammadu Buhari’s tweet citing ‘genocidal’ violence against the Igbos.

Sanwo-Olu further argued; “On both sides, there are issues that can be resolved between Twitter and the government and I think what they’ve done is not a ban but a suspension like they said, so in the period of suspension let us sit down.”

“If we have 40 million users of that micro-blogger and another country has five million and they chose to take their investment to a country that  have five million compared to a country with 40 million. It speaks to the reason we need to have that conversation with them.” he said.