Nigeria Digital Rights Landscape Report

This report introduces findings from ten digital rights landscape country reports on Nigeria. They analyse how the openings and closings of online civic space affect citizens’ digital rights. They show that: (1) when civic space closes offline citizens often respond by opening civic space online; (2) when civic space opens online governments often take measures to close online space; and (3) the resulting reduction in digital rights makes it impossible to achieve the kind of inclusive governance defined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).


Introduction
Nigeria has witnessed a high level of adoption of digital devices and technologies in the past 20 years. Adoption of those new technologies has brought transformations to different aspects of life at the individual, group, and societal levels. Those transformations are easily observable in the civic space. What used to be private has become public and connectedness, especially via mobile telephony and social media, which now appear commonplace, were at best only imagined until recently. Thanks to digital technologies, voiceless sections of Nigerian society such as women, minority groups, and victims of violence now have a voice, which can be amplified to the extent to which they can adopt and manipulate these technologies. Political corruption has also become voiced through these technological advancements.
The disruption caused by digital technologies has also invited new laws, particularly from the Federal Government of Nigeria and its ministries and agencies: the government institutions that were not used to citizens demanding accountability from them (Bischoff 2020). All of this is happening at a time when the civic space globally has been found to be shrinking or closing. The same fate that befell Nigerian civic space in the predemocracy era of military dictatorship is fast befalling it again in the current democratic dispensation, and its effects are extending from physical spaces into digital ones.
The civic space, which is described as 'the layer between state, business, and family in which citizens organise, debate and act' (Buyse 2018: 967) is said to be shrinking or closing when there are restrictions placed on the activities of civic actors. The restrictions, which mainly come from governments, may be executed through different strategies such as 'political, administrative and extra-legal, including violence, threats, de-legitimation, the use of the law to criminalise civic activism, and stigmatisation' (Hossain et al. 2019: 6). The restrictions are characterised by denial of right of access to spaces where people express views and opinions that appear to be critical of governments, and criminalisation of actions directed at demanding accountability from constituted authorities. In the last 20 years, just as the civic space has extended from geographical spaces to cover digital spaces, so have attacks on it, especially from governments.
In recognition of digital spaces as an extension of the physical civic space, governments have introduced legislations which are capable of abridging right of access to them as they do with geographical spaces. Protest mobilisation, actual protests, and other forms of civic action have been organised on digital platforms across the world, in democratic and nondemocratic countries alike. In Nigeria, the first nationwide online protest so far with complementary offline protest took place on 2 January 2012, when individuals and groups from all the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory trended the hashtag #OccupyNigeria on Twitter and other social media (Uwalaka and Watkins 2018). The protest, which was mobilised significantly online, led to the shutdown of state capitals and major towns in the demand for the reversal of fuel subsidy removal.
Since #OccupyNigeria, online protests have become common in Nigeria. Global connectivity and the rapidness with which information flows on digital platforms especially, pitches governments against the use of digital platforms for civic action such as protests. Just like the Nigerian government has been doing in the past few years, most governments across the world have been found to have taken specific actions to stifle free speech or abridge rights to freedom of association in the digital space (Bischoff 2020). In Nigeria, civil society groups and citizens have always risen up against such measures that restrict digital rights by using the same digital technologies. Despite continuous advocacy for civil rights, violations of digital rights are growing in Nigeria.
In the internet era, digital rights are described as human rights, an extension of the equal and inalienable rights of humans (Hutt 2015). The Human Rights Council of the United Nations (2016: 3) declares that: the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, in particular freedom of expression, which is applicable regardless of frontiers and through any media of one's choice, in accordance with articles 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
This report presents an overview of digital rights in Nigeria with a view to highlighting the contextual realities that promote or constrain those rights.

The political landscape
The date of 29 May 2020 marks 21 years since Nigeria returned to democratic rule. The political context of the country has seen a lot of positive transformations, the most outstanding of them being that there has not been any extra-legal disruption to the four-year tenure of political office holders at the federal and state levels. Periodic election, which is a core element of democracy, has been upheld every four years. This stability has made political parties the primary formal machinery for seeking and acquiring political power in the country. This political development is unfolding at a time when access to the internet and adoption of diverse digital technologies are also growing. Different sections of Nigerian society have adopted digital technologies for different purposes: the government for general governance, information dissemination, and election administration; politicians and political parties for political mobilisation; and civil society groups and citizens for civic action, among other uses.
However, what has been most defining in Nigeria's political landscape is the adoption of digital technologies for election administration and management. This has so far had numerous implications for digital rights in Nigeria. Digital technology was first widely used in Nigerian elections in 2015. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) issued the electorate the Permanent Voter's Card which is to be authenticated on election day using a biometric smart card reader. However, on election days, the technology malfunctioned in many places and election officials had to resort to manual accreditation and voting procedures. There were claims and counterclaims of deliberate sabotage of the technology to rig the elections in favour of the dominant parties. The battle was intense on social media between the supporters of the All Progressive Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Former President Goodluck Jonathan lost the election which was won by Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, who also won a re-election in 2019.
Since the 2015 elections, the civic space in Nigeria has been polarised with supporters of former President Goodluck Jonathan and his PDP on the one side and supporters of the current President Muhammadu Buhari on the other side. The supporters of the former are branded in social media platforms and media discourse in general as 'wailers' while those of the former are christened 'hailers' (Ibrahim 2015). This simplistic typology of actors in the civic space, which was introduced into public discourse by Femi Adesina, Special Adviser to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity, summed up all views critical of the government as being politically motivated. In other words, to criticise the actions of the current government or to demand accountability from it is to be seen and treated as a member of the opposition party PDP. The typology regards all civil society organisations (CSOs), non-governmental organisations (NGOs), faith-based organisations (FBOs), media organisations such as newspapers, television, radio, and blogs, and even individuals that are critical of government, as not just being against the government but also in support of the ex-ruling party. This polarisation has been defining for Nigerian civic space since 2015 when President Muhammadu Buhari assumed office.

The civic space landscape
The chaos that characterised the Nigerian political context always spills over into the civic space. In fact, Nigeria's return to democracy was not achieved without the activities of vibrant civil society groups, individual activists, and public intellectuals, radio, newspapers, and news magazines that stood up to the country's military dictators. The period between the cancellation of the 12 June 1993 presidential election allegedly won by Chief MKO Abiola and the eventual military handover to the civilian government on 29 May 1999 witnessed different shades of civic activism in the country.
For example, in 1993, Tell Magazine launched guerrilla journalistic reporting after its publications were seized and its premises shut by the tyrannical military government of General Sani Abacha for exposing government secrets and calling global attention to violations of human rights in the country (Ojebode 2011). That same year, four of Tell's senior editors were arrested and detained by the government (ibid.). Activists and opposition politicians were arrested for treason and detained for months without trial even after the court dismissed the case (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada 1997). The period was characterised by the arrest, imprisonment, murder, and disappearances of those who spoke against the inhumanity of military rule in the country. Nevertheless, the end of military rule did not end such occurrences. The rest of this section presents a highlight of landmark events which had implications for the closing and opening of Nigerian civic space between 2000 and 2020. Throughout this time, Nigeria's ranking on Freedom House's Freedom Index has hovered within the 'partially free' bracket as civic space experiences a seesaw between events that partially open and close civic space (see Figure 3.1).  The information presented in Table 3.1 reveals that events and decisions that can open the Nigerian civic space and those that can further close it have been happening concurrently over the years. It is striking to note that the media landscape has become diverse and has widened to reach previously underserved sections of the country. With the commencement of community radio licensing, rural communities have gained access to information and the right to be creators of media content. An increased rate of licensing government-owned and commercial FM radio stations also has improved radio penetration across the country. All of these, coupled with the emergence of online newspapers, radio, and television, pluralise the country's information landscape, providing people with alternative information sources. As the media and journalism space widens for journalists to practise in, it also opens for citizens to consume and co-create information.
Despite that, certain actions of government are either closing or threatening to close the Nigerian media space and the civic space in general. Of particular interest among such actions is legislations (Ibezim-Ohaeri 2017) which are capable of stifling free speech, especially on digital 1 Data not available for 2010 and 2012.   (2019) 2 criminalises sharing information that can diminish public confidence in the performance of any duty or function of, or in the exercise of any power of, the Nigerian government. This is a problematic provision whose lack of specificity can be taken advantage of to silence voices that are critical of government.
The same bill also criminalises the operation of parody accounts on social media and stipulates a fine and/or a prison term for its violation. In spite of the fact that the bill has not been passed into law, the Nigerian police arrested Babatunde Olusola, a Nigerian university student, for operating on Twitter a parody account in the name of former President Goodluck Jonathan (Akinkuotu 2020 Activists and CSOs that are often critical of government are equally at risk. The chilling effects of legislations such as these ones are capable of closing the civic space. Furthermore, women and sexually non-binary people are potential victims because policymakers guard the country's hegemonic positions on issues of gender and sex. The Nigerian Senate's rejection of the Gender and Equal Opportunities Bill (2016) is a setback to the campaign for gender equality in the country. Analysts consider 2015 to be the inception of the worst era for civic actors in Nigeria since the end of military rule in 1999, in terms of government restriction of rights (Ibezim-Ohaeri 2017). As reflected in the information presented in Table 3.1, more restrictive laws were introduced between 2015 and 2020 than in the preceding 15 years. The year 2015 is significant because it marked the ascension to power of former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari as a democratic president of Nigeria. From the trend established in Table 3.1, Nigerian civic space under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari cannot be said to be thriving as it should in an ideal democracy.

The technology landscape
Nigeria has witnessed a great deal of technological transformation in the last 20 years. The most fundamental of them is the introduction of Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication in 2001. In the last two decades, the number of mobile network service providers has increased, just as their range of services has. All service providers offer call, text, and internet services and the majority of Nigerians access the internet on their mobile phones. The quality of internet service in the country varies based on service provider and user location. By 2019, all operating mobile network service providers have upgraded their services from 2G and 3G to 4G. Table 4.1 provides an overview of mobile telephone penetration in the last 20 years.  The number of internet subscribers has also been increasing in the last 20 years. It was only in 2016 when the Nigerian economy was in recession that the country recorded a decrease in the number of internet subscribers. As of May 2020, there are over 140 million internet subscribers in Nigeria and broadband penetration has also been increasing in the last 20 years. Internet broadband penetration is slower than the general internet penetration rate.

Figure 4.1 Percentage of the population with internet access in Nigeria
Source: Based on data from ITU (2020) The number of internet users in Nigeria as presented by ITU is far lower than given by the country's communications body, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC -see Table 4.2). This is understandable because NCC data are based on telecommunications services subscribers. As a result, the data do not exclude cases of multiple subscriptions by individuals -a common practice in Nigeria -and neither do they account for business and corporate subscribers. ITU data are modelled based on individuals using the internet and thus give a more realistic picture of internet penetration in the country. As shown in Figure 4.1, individual internet users in Nigeria rose from 0.064 per cent of the population in 2000, to 11.5 per cent in 2010, and to 42 per cent in 2019. Therefore, although approximately 60 per cent of Nigerians remained without internet access in 2019, one could say that it has been a near-steady climb.

Social media use in Nigeria
Nigerians across age, sex, and literacy level use social media for different purposes. However, the use of social media for civic action is popular in Nigeria. Facebook, established in 2004, was the first social media platform that became popular in Nigeria. When Twitter was established in 2006, Nigerians also adopted it in large numbers. While some migrated completely to Twitter, some keep both Facebook and Twitter accounts. It is common in the country to operate multiple social media accounts. Instagram and Individuals and groups in Nigeria have come to depend on social media for public engagement. The development is not out of place as Nigerian political leaders have also become largely visible on the various social media platforms. Facebook, with a 59.57 per cent penetration of the country's total internet users, ranks first among the social media platforms that Nigerians use for public discourse. It is followed by Twitter with a 24.54 per cent penetration of internet users (GlobalStats 2020). Both Facebook and Twitter have contributed significantly to the opening of online civic spaces in Nigeria. Users have always been on alert to protest any attempt by the government to restrict access to the platforms or to silence critical voices. Between 2012, when #OccupyNigeria trended on Twitter and Facebook, to the present, offline protests have become risky as a result of the frequent police brutalisation of protesters. Nigerians have taken to social media as alternative platforms for voicing their dissatisfaction with the government and for demanding accountability.
One advantage that online civic action has over offline is the immediacy of global attention to it without a dependence on the mainstream media. Nigerians have attracted global attention to local issues on a number of occasions. Hashtag trending is one of the major strategies employed to pursue their causes. Some of the popular hashtags are presented in Table 4.4. Led by opposition politicians, celebrities, and activists, #OccupyNigeria was a hashtag that trended in 2012 to mobilise the public against an increase in fuel prices by the government. The movement later brought people onto the streets, resulting in the complete shutdown of important cities across the country. #BringBackOurGirls called attention to the 2014 abduction of over 200 Chibok girls abducted by Boko Haram terrorists in Northern Nigeria.
The #NoToSocialMediaBill hashtag trended in 2015 (Oladapo and Ojebuyi 2017) and again in 2019 to protest bills that sought to criminalise social media use for critical political commentary in the country. #ENDSARS has been trending since 2017 to call government attention to the abuse of power by members of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad of the Nigeria Police. The BBC was behind the #SexForGrade hashtag with a documentary which exposed the sexual exploitation of students of Nigerian and Ghanaian universities for grades. The documentary drew attention to the plights of women in a Nigerian higher institution of learning where sexual predatory behaviour was common (Malaea 2019).

The government's capacity to respond
There have been speculations that the Nigerian government planned to launch spy satellites, block websites and blogs that are critical of the government and its performance, and place mobile phones under surveillance (Okunoye 2017 The foregoing revelations reveal that the Nigerian government has for a long time been developing surveillance capacity which can undermine citizens' fundamental rights. Although Section 3.3 of the Nigerian Communications Commission's (NCC) Internet Code of Practice specifically directs that no service provider can block internet access to contents, devices, and applications that are lawful except for the purpose of network management (NCC 2019a), no one can be too sure how long the government will respect this provision given its increasing appetite for citizen surveillance.
Meanwhile, as a counterinsurgency strategy, the Nigerian Army in 2013 shut down GSM services in Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe, the three states that were most affected by Boko Haram terrorism (Jacob and Akpan 2015). This suggests that the government can exploit the state of unrest around the country to implement this kind of shutdown nationwide if it serves its purpose. Also, Nigerians cannot be too sure that the government will not subject social media use in the country to overt surveillance and strict regulation. The position of the country's communications regulatory body is revealing in this regard. The NCC recommends that organisations should install social media monitoring devices or set up a monitoring team to avoid being implicated by the social media activities of their employees (NCC 2019c). This recommendation subtly reveals the stance of the NCC as positively disposed to social media monitoring. It could be argued that at the call of a government with a similar agenda, the NCC would not hesitate to deploy surveillance technology to monitor the public use of social media.
Furthermore, the Nigerian government has taken other decisions that have implications for the digital rights of citizens. One of them is SIM registration. All subscribers were directed to register their SIM card by the 30 June 2013 deadline and new SIM cards only become usable upon registration (NCC 2019b). Also, all old lines that were not registered by the stated date were deactivated. In addition, in 2015, the NCC directed that network service providers should deactivate all pre-registered SIM cards (ibid.). The latest directive on SIM card registration in 2020 makes National Identification Numbers (NINs) a mandatory requirement. The directive is likely to restrict access to mobile telephone networks in Nigeria as NIN registration services are not easily accessible (Kolawole 2020).
SIM registration raises data privacy concerns as the NCC is empowered to share subscriber data with security agencies (Olowogboyega 2020). Popular social media sites require mobile numbers for registration and SIM registration makes it all too easy for security agencies to track activists and anyone perceived to be anti-government. The NCC also allows GSM service providers to reissue mobile numbers after a period of inactivity. The practice resulted in Anthony Okolie spending ten weeks in prison for purchasing a SIM card which was previously used by Hanan, President Muhammadu Buhari's daughter (Sahara Reporters 2020). The privacy danger in this practice is high, as buying a reissued SIM card may give the buyer access to the contacts of the previous users who may still call the number, and to banking and other vital information linked to the SIM card.
It was also alleged that in 2017 President Muhammadu Buhari established a troll firm named the Buhari Media Centre (BMC), which later changed its name several times (Adebulu 2020). The trolls at the firm are said to be employed to attack the president's opponents through fake social media accounts. Prior to the 2019 presidential election as well, the Buhari Media Organisation, which is in fact the Buhari Media Centre, accused the PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar of contracting an American lobbyist Brian Ballard for US$90,000 a month to propagate fake news about the APC candidate Muhammadu Buhari (The Cable 2018). Also in 2018, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica meddled in Nigeria's 2015 presidential election to increase the winning chances of the then incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan (Ekdale and Tully 2020). All these point to the fact that the Nigerian government has been experimenting with technologies that are capable of monitoring the activities of citizens online and accessing their data without consent.
The BMC is also alleged to be behind pro-government hashtags that are trended to counter any hashtag that is critical of the government. An instance was the #ReturnOurGirls hashtag that trended counter to the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag (Aina et al. 2019). The goal of the counterhashtag was to show that the BBOG movement was wrong to demand that the government secure the release of the abducted schoolgirls. Rather, activists were asked to redirect their demand to the terrorists to return the girls they had abducted (ibid.). Nevertheless, the greatest threat to Nigerian civic space appears to be from restrictive anti-freedom legislations (Ibezim-Ohaeri 2017). Nigeria has some laws and bills being considered for law which pose a danger to the rights of freedom of speech, expression, and association, both offline and online.

Technology assessment
Since digital rights exist on digital technologies, technology capabilities define the extent to which those rights can be exercised and protected. As noted earlier, digital technologies have facilitated an overlap of spaces with the interests of the state (government), civil society, and individuals intersecting, converging, and diverging at different times. When those interests conflict, each party will be able to protect its interests to the extent that it can manipulate the technologies or defend itself from the manipulation carried out by other parties. The government appears to be at an advantage over others in terms of its enormous power to regulate the activities of individuals and civil society groups. It may be argued that the Nigerian government has a history of abusing its power, and thus individuals and civil society groups have constantly put the government under check.
As a way of checking the excesses of government, Nigerian civil society groups concentrate on efforts to ensure that citizens are empowered to hold government officials accountable. Foremost CSOs in Nigeria that are concerned about digital rights include BudgIT, Paradigm Initiative, Enough is Enough (EiE) Nigeria, and Dubawa. BudgIT has a platform for monitoring: budget implementation (Budget Access 8 ); government project implementation (Tracka 9 ); utilisation of Covid-19 funds (CovidFund Track 10 ); and natural resources extraction (Extractives 11 ). EiE Nigeria 12 promotes good governance and citizen engagement in governance and political processes while Paradigm Initiative 13 engages in digital rights advocacy. Dubawa 14 builds the capacity of journalists and other interested individuals to fact-check information online.  The information presented in Table 5.1 reveals that there is a general lack of knowledge about the technologies that are being used by the state to abridge digital rights and by non-state actors to protect these rights. It also reveals that the government is far ahead of the country's civil society in the deployment of technologies. As a result, civil society actors most likely lack the technological capacity to put government activities under watch. To measure up, CSOs will need to upgrade their technologies as well. They will be more effective in protecting the digital rights of Nigerians if they have superior technologies that can detect government surveillance and protect themselves and others from it.

The digital rights landscape
The state of digital rights in Nigeria is defined by uncertainty with presidential assent withheld from the Digital Rights and Freedom Bill (2019) 15 already passed by the National Assembly. The current government of President Muhammadu Buhari does not disguise its animosity to digital rights and freedom with its support for legislations that are capable of abridging those rights. The legislations in this category, as presented in Table 3.1, include the Hate Speech Bill (2019) and the Protection from Internet Falsehoods and Manipulations and Other Related Matters Bill (2019). All of these, coupled with the government's use of Chinese AI technology for monitoring activities on digital platforms and devices, and a history of military shutdown of GSM services as counterinsurgency strategy, suggests that there is a lot to worry about with regard to digital rights in Nigeria. Confirming these ominous signals, CIVICUS downgraded the state of Nigeria's civic space from obstructed to repressed (CIVICUS 2019). This means that Nigeria's civic space is just one step from becoming closed, a situation that can only be imagined under a democratic government.

Digital rights in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought a lot of change to personal and public life in Nigeria. The most fundamental was the government lockdown of entire states and a restriction on inter-state movement except for essential services. Despite this emergency situation in which the government made binding pronouncements to abridge citizens' rights, the Nigerian government did not make any attempt to restrict internet use during this period. Government responses to the explosion of fake news and conspiracy theories about Covid-19 were limited to advisories about fact-checking and seeking information only from trustworthy sources.
Nevertheless, the Control of Infectious Diseases Bill 2020 introduced in the Federal House of Representatives contains some injurious provisions. For instance, it empowers the Director General of the National Centre for Diseases Control (NCDC) to forcefully access and seize information based on personal judgement (Onaleye 2020). This provision puts journalists and others in possession of vital information at risk (Chinda 2020). A similar bill titled the National Health Emergency Bill 2020 introduced in the Senate also grants farreaching powers to government agents at the expense of the citizens (Umoru 2020). The two bills are still before the National Assembly for consideration. Again, all of this suggests that the Nigerian government is ready to take advantage of an emergency situation such as the Covid-19 pandemic to undermine fundamental rights, especially those that thrive on digital technologies.

Conclusion and recommendations
For many years, the political space in Nigeria has generated conflicts whose ripples polarise the civic space. The government in power has often taken advantage of this polarisation to propose legislations which summarily categorise all views that are critical of it as hate speech punishable by fines, or life or death sentences. These legislations have been a source of fear to users of digital technologies for civic actions. The situation is worse for CSOs, NGOs, FBOs, media organisations, and activists that are critical of the government because the government is far ahead of them in terms of technology capabilities. With the government's AI surveillance technology, it can pry into what those civil actors do on digital platforms and deploy legislations against them. All of this indicates that Nigeria's repressed civic space is not far from outright closing.
Therefore, the future of digital rights in Nigeria hangs mostly on efforts to discourage politicians' penchant for anti-freedom laws. The existing laws in Nigeria are enough to discourage civic actions online while the proposed ones are even more ominous. Should those bills be passed into law, digital rights in Nigeria will be negatively affected. To forestall such development, individuals and groups working on or interested in digital rights need to make the discourse a prominent part of the political process, such that the protection of digital rights becomes prominent on the political agenda.
In addition, civic actors in Nigeria need to develop urgent technology capabilities to withstand the government surveillance of digital platforms. Since Nigeria's Data Protection Regulation (2019) 16 forbids unauthorised access to personal and organisational data, the right of the Nigerian government to deploy AI technology to monitor digital platforms is unknown to law. Nigerian civic actors need urgent knowledge of anti-surveillance technology if digital rights are to continue to thrive in the country. Also, further research into the national security implications of digital technology use in Nigeria is of utmost importance. The findings of such research can uncover positive alternatives to restrictive legislations as measures for ensuring the positive use of digital technologies. They can also inform policies that will preserve digital rights without compromising national security.