Must The DSS Disgrace Tinubu? -By Abimbola Adelakun

Apparently, the Department of State Security did not learn anything from the case of Mrs Aisha Buhari, the ex-first lady, who had a random social media user arrested and detained for body shaming her. When the news broke, Mrs Buhari suffered a terrible blowback for her imprudence. Under the guise of commenting on the case, virtually everyone assigned themselves the license to run their tongues all over her body. The same thing is happening now with the DSS hounding news publisher and gadfly Omoyele Sowore for referring to President Bola Tinubu as a “criminal” on his social media posts. Except this time, the DSS did not keep the shame local. They have purportedly written to social media corporations, such as Twitter (now called X) and Meta (Facebook), to punish his intransigence by deactivating his account.

If I were Tinubu, I would fire the DG of the DSS for this indiscretion. Even if the instruction to pursue Sowore came directly from my table at Aso Rock, I would still fire him to save face and because he failed to display the virtue of a freeborn while running a slave errand. If there is a lesson these people fail to learn, it is that you do not throw around a weight you have yet to acquire. When dealing with powerful transnational corporations that can ignore you without any consequences, you must carefully weigh the cost of any public tussle with them, so you do not disgrace yourself. It was this type of self-overestimation that drove Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to ban Twitter in 2021 for deleting the President’s tweet. They thought they could bring the corporation to heel, but they received a valuable lesson about the limits of their power in the age of technological efficiency.

That was not the only time Nigeria would try negotiating with a more powerful party from a position of weakness. They tried a similar tactic with Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange company they had accused of causing disruption to the local currency and not remitting taxes for businesses conducted in Nigeria. They even went to the extent of abducting two of their executives just to force the company’s hand, but those ones made it clear to them that they were inconsequential in the global economic order by simply suspending all operations within the country. With all the noise they made during the Binance affair, what came out of it? Nothing. In February, they sued Binance for $81.5bn. Good luck with that. Now they are back with opening their rump for the world to not only see, but to even capture with their smartphones.

First, I am genuinely curious to know who the recipient of the DSS petition might be within those social media organisations. Did they send the letter through NIPOST or email it to those companies’ legal departments? There is no indication of anyone who was meant to receive and act on the petition, and I suspect the DSS issued that notice just to flex. They just wanted to be seen as doing something. The result is that they look unserious, unintelligent, and in fact, weak. In case the DSS has not noticed, what these social media organisations sell is chatter. In fact, the quicker the chatter devolves into rage and feral exchanges, the more urgently their cash register rings. So, why would they care about your petty Nigerian dramas if it does not hurt their bottom line?

The lack of thought demonstrated by the DSS is attributable to their flimsy understanding of the modern democratic principles that shape these corporations’ characters. You cannot write to an organisation domiciled in a country that prides itself on being the bastion of free speech and ask them to help you censor an individual because they insulted a politician. Some 13 years ago, Muslims in countries like Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, and Libya protested an incendiary video about their prophet that had been posted on YouTube. In Libya, they burnt down the US Embassy and even killed the US ambassador. Did YouTube remove the video from YouTube to placate the rioters? No! They stood on their principled ground. If they had done that at the time, they would have created a precedent for every self-important person to make such requests. If they can stare down Muslim fundamentalists, what is the DSS that they cannot ignore?

Meanwhile, these are US companies. If there is something that Americans do as a matter of national duty, it is insulting their own president. Whoever thought it was a good idea to petition a corporation based in a country where people routinely call their own president a “felon” and expect them to be taken seriously? If they have not done that for their own president, why should Tinubu’s hurt feelings concern them? Any president too thin-skinned to absorb insults is free to resign and hibernate in their privacy.

This is, of course, not to say that these companies do not respond to petitions. They do, and the takedown of the late Prophet TB Joshua’s YouTube account because of his so-called deliverance of gay people is a good example. They took that decision after the company’s internal review deemed what he was doing in those videos harmful to the people involved. Outside the considerations of harm to individual(s), they are not likely to oblige. You cannot prove that either the president or the institution is harmed by insults. It is a fundamental democratic principle that while the state can harm an individual, the individual cannot harm the state likewise. That is why it is the individual who is generally protected from the state, and not the other way round.

As to the substance of the insult itself, even a rookie lawyer will defeat the DSS in court if they are properly armed with a dictionary. The word “criminal” does not necessarily mean “felony”, nor does it suggest that Tinubu has yet been charged with any crime. It also means “unethical”, “deplorable”, “depraved”, “objectionable” and even “foolish”. Even if Sowore meant “criminal” as “crook”, the DSS will have a hard time in court proving that a man with no visible means of livelihood yet boasted he was richer than Osun state is beyond being described using any of those words. It would have remained within the realm of common sense for the DSS and the APC caterwaulers not to fixate on what anyone calls Tinubu. What shameful names has he not been called over the years? If Meta and X decide to investigate Tinubu’s character using his family background, educational/ professional trajectory, source of wealth, and FBI records, the shadiness of his person will make them approbate Sowore for his daring forthrightness.

Now, my favourite part of the DSS petition is their warning to those corporations. They said failure to comply with their demands would force them to “explore all lawful means” to protect national security and public order. And what exactly will they do? Ban Facebook and X again? If they want to repeat that action, I plead that they extend the ban until 2027. That way, their paid apologists, in compliance with the ban, will take themselves out of the social media space during the election season. By the time they return online, the rest of us will have hopefully had the time and space to address issues regarding the future of our country.