A pop music tune rose from the small courtyard tucked away down an alley in Gwale, a working-class neighborhood in the large Muslim city of Kano in northern Nigeria. It was still early on that December morning in 2022, but Mubarak Muhammad and his two brothers were already hunched over their mixing boards. Music production is one of the many activities of the hyperactive 25-year-old on the internet.
“I am also a comedian, video director and creator of humorous content,” he listed. His bedroom and adjoining courtyard serve as the backdrop for the sketches he regularly posts on social media under the pseudonym Unique Pikin. With his gentle gaze under his traditional Hausa hat, it was hard to imagine that his jokes recently landed him in jail.
“It was a video we posted on TikTok five years ago that got us into trouble,” said Mr. Muhammad, who has more than 830,000 followers on the social media platform. In the incriminating sketch, Unique Pikin and his friend Nazifi Muhammad suggested that the local governor, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, was monopolizing land in the region and reselling it at high prices. But faced with a deluge of negative comments, they removed the video only “one or two minutes after posting it.” But it was too late. It already went viral and was still circulating until recently, as local and presidential elections loom.
Those who dare to step out of line
Summoned by the police on October 26, the two acolytes were detained for several days before being brought before a judge. They were found guilty of defaming the governor of Kano State, fined 20,000 naira (€42) for disturbing the peace and given 20 strokes of the cane, which were administered on the spot.
For human rights lawyer Abba Hikima, who regularly collaborates with Amnesty International in Kano, “This trial was held in an atmosphere that was not conducive to the smooth running of justice.” Among other things, he denounced the “intimidation” suffered by Unique Pikin and his friend, a lack of legal representation and the absence of a medical certificate confirming that they were fit to receive corporal punishment.
In the conservative North of Nigeria, social media users do not hesitate to denounce and harass those who dare to step out of line. When he tried to support Unique Pikin, the “tiktoker” Ali Nuradeen, a.k.a. Badoo, was met with a flood of hateful comments that quickly forced him to back down. Despite his glibness and his 5 million followers on the Chinese social media platform, Badoo avoids political comments to focus on light and wordless skits.
“There is a real cultural and generational gap. Here, the real influencers are the mullahs and ministers!” he said. Anxious to preserve his reputation and income, the almost 30-year-old also chose to abandon Twitter altogether after facing accusations of blasphemy on the platform, which is a crime punishable by death in the Muslim state of Kano.
‘Vulnerability of the population’
For Mr. Hikima, the lawyer, “The lack of education and a particularly low literacy rate” in this part of the country explain the vulnerability of the population, which “never has the reflex to defend itself in the event of abuse.” This observation is shared by Baba Azare, whose 23-year-old nephew was arrested a few months after publishing a derogatory tweet targeting the first lady of Nigeria, Aisha Buhari, who is a Hausa from the North of the country, like the head of state, Muhammadu Buhari.
In June, in the midst of a university strike, Aminu Mohamed posted a photo of the president’s wife with this comment in Hausa: “Mama gained weight by eating the money of the poor.” On November 18, 2022, he was arrested by the secret police at his student residence at the University of Jigawa, a neighboring state to Kano. “He was then taken directly to the presidential palace in Aso Rock, Abuja, without his family being informed,” Mr. Azare said. On November 27, Amnesty International demanded the release of the young man, who was abused during his “illegal detention” according to the NGO. The Nigerian press soon revealed that Ms. Buhari filed a complaint for defamation and that she even participated in his caning in person.
‘In the North, we are guided by Islamic principles of decency, respect for elders and tradition.’
A solidarity movement was then organized on social media, where thousands of users relayed in English the message that led to the arrest of Mr. Mohamed and his indictment. “On closer inspection, it was mainly people from the South who stepped up to defend him,” said lawyer Mr. Hikima. The case quickly took a more political turn, however, as one of the country’s main student unions launched a call for national mobilization to demand the release of the young man. Faced with these increasingly concrete threats, Ms. Buhari finally withdrew her complaint on December 1.
Perhaps the first lady remembered that it was on Twitter that the #EndSARS movement against police violence and bad governance in Nigeria began a little over two years ago. This historic youth mobilization spread to cities across the country, before being bloodily suppressed by security forces, who shot at a peaceful rally on October 20, 2020, in Lagos.
‘The variable is religion’
In his office in the Faculty of Communication at Bayero University in Kano, Professor Uba Abdallah Adamu was finalizing a presentation on the use of social media in Islamic culture. “The variable is religion,” he said at the outset. “In the North, we are guided by Islamic principles of decency, respect for elders and tradition. Of course we accept technology! Of course our young people can go on the internet. But they still have to comply with Islamic law, which includes respecting mothers, like Aisha Buhari.”
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Professor Adamu also defends the suspension of Twitter in Nigeria between June and November 2021, when access to social media was blocked shortly after the deletion of two tweets by President Muhammadu Buhari. The head of state – whose second term is coming to an end – threatened to “deal with a language they understand” those responsible for violence in southeastern Nigeria, reviving memories of the Biafran War, which killed a million people in the country in the late 1960s.
It was a message that Twitter considered a call to hatred, and therefore removed it. “They did not take into account the context,” said Mr. Adamu, who believes the suspension did not go against the freedom of expression of Nigerians, but rather “aimed to protect the country against the excesses of social media.”