 The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission asked bank executives to submit asset declaration forms. The top bankers have until the end of June to do so, or risk jilt-hand. We'll be talking about this today. The academic staff union of universities threatened to go on another strike over unpaid salaries and check of dues. The union says more than a thousand lecturers have been owed 13 months' wages. And the Social Economic Rights and Accountability Project sues the federal government and the Minister of Information Lai Mohamed over the ban on Twitter by broadcasters. And with that we say good morning and welcome to the breakfast here on Plus TV Africa. Thanks for joining us on another very bright and beautiful Monday morning. We hope the weather stays clear today, like what it was across the Lagos yesterday. Good morning Aneta. Good morning, good to see you after... Thank you very much. ...about five million years. We miss you. Still not 100%, but strong enough to kick off the week. Yes, good morning to you. So our top trending stories this morning. Beginning first of all with what is very sad, seeing how much division that will come into experience here in the country between the north and the south. And moving on we see that it was a case of Nigerians versus Nigerians over the weekend when a move was made to get the entertainment app Iroco TV off Google Play Store. Now it was started by some northern Nigerians who said it was in retaliation for the deletion of Adam Ogaba's crawl app. And this led to a flood of negative reviews on the app on the Play Store. Soon enough there was a counter campaign started by another group of Nigerians, mostly from the southeast, who still started giving Iroco TV a five star rating. Now the app currently has about 4.8 star rating from 31,000 reviews. And you know that stubborn trend I mentioned is ethnic bigotry. We know how Adam Ogaba's app was deleted from Google Play Store. That's because there were lots of negative reviews because of the style of the app. Just how people said you had access to your contacts, you know, it just required a lot of permissions that were not necessary for your social media app, how the logo seemed occultic and dark and mysterious. So there was a lot of complaints regarding that. Lots of Nigerians reported it, gave it negative reviews, said it had connotations of terrorism and it was taken off Google Play Store. So it's, you know, it became very worrisome to see that youths from northern Nigeria decided to retaliate and they began to attack, you know, an application owned by a Nigerian businessman from the southeast by the person of Jason Unjoko, owner of Baroko TV. You know, so good thing that he was saved by the bell, so to speak. But the issue of ethnic division still remains very visible. Yeah, but so I'll start by saying it's not new and it's not the first time that I'm seeing. I mean, for everyone who has been social media active for the last couple of years, maybe the last, you know, 8, 10 years, you know, there's been obvious divisions. Maybe it has become worse over time. There's also, you know, certain accounts on social media that are known for some level of bigotry and that's what, you know, they sell themselves with and that's, you know, whatever they, of course, put out information or, you know, messages. It always, you know, most of the time has a lot of, you know, some level of bigotry attached to it and with that, you know, they grow a crowd, you know, who think alike, who think the same way. So that has always existed. The Damugaba app, of course, everyone who has been following that story knows the reason it was deleted. Also knows the background towards, you know, why, you know, it was eventually deleted. Yes, there might be arguments that it wasn't just because of its Spotify infringement. It wasn't also just because of, you know, some of the parts of the app that show that it, you know, it could take, you know, personal information and some of all of that. It is also maybe because of Nigerian's reaction or, you know, the reaction of Nigerians to his views concerning the Ansar's protest and his views concerning the banning of Twitter in Nigeria. A lot of people saw that, you know, he was trying to, out of his own selfish interest, promote his own app and, you know, with that allow for the infringement of the rights of Nigerians across the country and he didn't care about how many rights were infringed upon or how many, you know, lives were affected by the moves, exactly the moves of the federal government because of his own selfish interest. And, you know, those might have been some of the reasons why it got those bad reviews and eventually was deleted. But the big challenge is when that happened. And, you know, there's something that we always forget. The same way that I, you know, had said a couple of weeks ago that when, you know, the federal government, whoever it is, you know, found Nandikhanus or whoever else's, you know, Twitter page or handle offensive, they stood, you know, and they, you know, have the right to report. And as long as you report, there will be action taken. As long as you report it, Twitter will take action and if it finds it actually offensive, it will be deleted. But when you stand aloof and, you know, when, you know, the Warren Street was eventually reported and deleted, then they cry foul, it makes no sense. And so when the Adam Ogaba campaign started, you know, when people started putting on bad reviews and all of that, they had an opportunity at that time to put up their own good reviews, give it five-star ratings, do whatever you can. But they didn't. And eventually it was deleted. But now here's the challenge. Why is it that whenever something happens to someone from anywhere in Northern Nigeria, the response is not to applications in any other part of the country, but the Southeast? That's where the target always goes to and that's the bigotry that I'm talking about. So whoever it is that started that campaign is not angry with Nigerians for reporting at the Adam Ogaba's app. The precedent is targeting Igbo businesses and Igbo apps on social media. That's where the biggest challenge is because they have not been able to free themselves from the imagination or the ideologies or the bigotry that makes them always go against Southeast and against Igbo. That's where, for me, the biggest challenge is. I saw that tweet. I saw it in person explaining some nonsense about how these people have supported Nsars and people from the Southeast, the ones that are giving alms to Boko Haram and some total nonsense like that. So the challenge is whenever there's many other apps, many other platforms by Nigerians from every other part of the country, but the only ones that they had issues with and the ones that they thought that they maybe should give bad ratings or whatever attack was the ones from people in the Southeast. And it's terrible because Iroco app, Iroco TV app is a great innovation that we will call our own indigenous Netflix. He's taking the movie streaming business locally. He's made it ours. So Nigerians can watch Nigerian movies, African movies on that platform. And that's something we should all be supporting. Just like how we mentioned Uba Boat, those are all apps by foreigners. And then we're talking about Micab and these are the apps that Nigerians have. There's too many of them. Exactly, and Nigerians have come up with just to counter that price and whatever challenge they had. We talked about this on the breakfast. So I feel that we should begin to support Nigerian-owned businesses. We should ignore wherever south or north. I think these things don't matter and I think it's very scary to see where this is leading because we're talking about elections just around the corner. We're talking about all the agitations and clamoring for presidential voting to the Southeast. If that happens, are we going to see voter apathy from Northerners? So these are questions we need to ask because they really border on a national unity. You know, if Northerners versus Southerners are taking out their ethnic frustrations on businesses online. It's still a huge responsibility. We need to move to talk about something else now but it's still a huge responsibility of the current administration to ensure that Nigerians are better united by their moves, by their actions, by whatever steps, by their conversations, by statements that they make. You said it also, if we can use, if we've seen examples of people like Adolf Hitler use propaganda to divide, then it shows that we can use information to unite. But the sad thing is we're not getting that information as we should from the people in power. But I feel that's one of the steps forward. If we're having, you know, administrative information that, you know, you can see from their body language and from all their campaigns preaching unity in the country. I feel it will be, it will be, you know, a long way off, you know? Not just word of mouth. Exactly, a lot to say about this but let's leave it at this. And also, we know that the social economic rights and accountability project CERAP has sued the federal government and the Minister of Information and Culture over the directive to broadcast stations to stop sweetening the suits at the Federal High Court. And Abouja alleges that the move is unconstitutional and unlawful. Osage, I don't think we can see the end of this Twitter ban discussion because we know that CERAP had actually threatened to sue the federal government, sue the Minister of Information. They've actually followed through on the award that they have sued. And part of the things they're asking for is they're asking the government or they're asking the court to declare that the rules of the NBC, you know, that allowed the federal government to do this and make a law to say that broadcast stations should stop tweeting is it's basically, it doesn't go with other international laws regarding free speech, right? They also want the court to declare that the NBC and Line Mohammed lack the power and authority to unlawfully impose penalties such as fines and other sanctions on any journalists and broadcast stations for using Twitter. And this is obvious, right? We usually mention Twitter as part of our handles for, you know, encouraging our followers to, or an audience to follow, to interact with us. But like Plus TV Africa, many other stations have now been forced to scrap Twitter from the list of all its social media platforms that it uses to engage with its audience. So Serap is saying this is unlawful, this is unconstitutional, and more so they lack the authority to do so. Do you think the courts would actually, you know, follow this through in their favor? Seeing that the clamor for judicial authority and independence is still a big debate. I don't, to be honest, I don't know how this will turn out. Serap has sued us, you know, taking the federal government to court a billion times. I'm not sure, you know, how effective it has been, you know, and every time that there is a big issue in the country, you always see Serap stepping in and saying, we're going to sue, which they eventually do, but, you know, where or how it eventually turns out, you know, nobody, you know, is sure. And of course, it's within their rights to of course go to court, you know, to challenge certain decisions by the federal government. You know, I would still go back to, you know, the fact that all of this is, you know, has been and from day one has been totally unnecessary, you know, to start with. You know, where in 2021, there's many other conversations we should be having and the giant of Africa should not be having conversations about whether, you know, to ban Twitter or suspend Twitter's use in Nigeria, ignoring the usefulness that it has, you know, had across, you know, Nigeria for a long time. There's thousands, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians who do business on Twitter, they're basically business on online business on Twitter. What do you want them to do? You know, seeing the level of unemployment that, you know, exists in Nigeria today. What do you want those people to do? And how does the federal government not even care about the lives that it would, that, you know, affected by these things? How does the federal government not even care about crimes that have been solved on Twitter? How does the federal government not care about the instant response, you know, that people are able to get just by sharing one tweet, saving lives, getting crowdfunding for hospital bills and getting campaigns. So, so, so, so much. All the crimes of, you know, of excesses of the police officers in Nigeria, most of them, you know, get shared on Twitter and, you know, get exposed on Twitter. So how does the federal government not care about things like that? Especially... What is the alternative, you know, if you say, okay, stop using Twitter, what's the alternative? And, you know, I think another thing where people point out and say, this is just hypocrisy from the government, is when they say that it was on platforms like Twitter, social media platforms that this administration was able to rally people around, you know, use influencers to basically get votes. True to false. I mean, it was on social media that you'd see all these campaigns. It just pops up, sponsored posts, things like that. Influences, Twitter, people with, you know, large following. So it's, you know, just like many analysts on Plus TV Africa would say, you know, when you make policies, you need to think about how these policies would turn around and affect you, when you're out of power. Yeah, absolutely. And you can also tell, you know, from the initial reasons that were given, you know, where the anger came from. You can also tell that it's a personal thing and it has nothing to do with, you know, affecting Nigeria's existence or like, however I was lying, Mohammed has started it. He started, first of all, with, you know, how can they, you know, how dare they delete the president's tweet and some of all of that. And then after that, you know, then they're talking about the messages that nobody, you know, complained or that they didn't delete it. Go straight to Nigeria's territory and, you know, existence and some of all of that. But you can tell that it is somehow, someway personal. I hope, you know, that Seraph's case gets to court. I hope that actually there is a ruling that favours the majority of Nigerians and, of course, you know, Nigeria's, the majority of Nigerians. Yes, you know, I understand the talk about threatened Nigeria's security and safety and all of that, but there's a social media app and there are many, many other ways that you can attack some of all these things that you see as concerns. If you feel like there are certain handles on the app that are threatening Nigeria's security and are threatening Nigeria's security agencies and asking people to go kill Nigerian policemen, then those things can be reported and they can be taken down as quickly as possible. Why, you know, don't we take that route? Why are we going to shut down the whole app, you know, entirely? It's tiring anyway, but I would love to serve up and I hope that they get a judgment, you know, that favours the majority of the people, because we're in a democracy. Exactly. Up next is of the press, with Tunde Kolaoli to stay with us.