The Minister for Communications and Digital Economy, Professor Isa Pantami, has said that West African Digital Economy Ministers have expressed interest in adopting the Nigerian model when interacting with Twitter, which brought a level of sanity to the microblog’s contents.
Pantami revealed this while speaking to reporters at the closing of the inaugural Digital Economy Regional Conference held in Abuja.
The Minister said that his colleagues in the West African region expressed their willingness to adopt some of Nigeria’s digital economy policies and appreciated the process of formulating those policies.
“The West African digital economy ministers are keen to embrace most of our policies that we are implementing in Nigeria, they appreciated them, they praised our modest effort to produce the policies and in particular to see how we have diversified the country’s economy through of ICT. digital sector and services.
“They were asking about the way the Nigerian government deals with Twitter, so they’re willing to know how they can get a copy of some of our agreements with them (Twitter) so they can adopt as well, and they’re also looking into the possibility that even the conditions can be accepted and embraced by the African continent so that we can have more convergent efforts to address the challenges.
“Some of the areas we talked about that they are so concerned about are hate speech, fake ID where people will go online, adopt your name, create an account and start abusing your name or looking for money and many more. .
“They talked to me about our effort in partnership with Twitter, the deal we reached, and how this deal can be extended to at least the West African sub-region or within the African continent.
“It is an ongoing discussion and everyone appreciated the boldness of Nigeria as a government, we are a sovereign country and we cannot be intimidated, everyone appreciated that Nigeria was very bold in making a decisive decision.
“In the end this issue brought more understanding, today the new media company that has the best relationship with Nigeria arguably is Twitter because sometimes conflict breeds understanding,” Pantami said.
Talking about broadband coverage, the Minister said that the Starlnk service today covers all of Nigeria. He said that there is no part of Nigeria where there is no Starlink today.
Pantami further claimed that Starlink’s services cover all Nigerian benchmarks 100 percent, meaning those who own the device and subscribe to it will be able to gain access to world-class broadband coverage.
“No matter what you see as the price, we negotiated with Starlink to reduce the price by more than 50 percent compared to what you find in other places, the reduction is more than 50 percent of their facilities and services and that was including the reason for the delay.
“See, Nigeria has a huge population and most of our citizens are poor, so you have to subsidize the price.
“So what it means is that wherever you are in Nigeria today, there is Starlink coverage and they are licensed, so if you have the facilities, you can access the network and that is what broadband coverage is all about,” he noted. .
