₦airaland Forum

Pakistan-Afghanistan border fence, a step in the right direction


The border barrier will decrease the number of cross-border attacks, but more needs to be done to secure the region.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByUF9YBxk8Q

Pakistan is about to reach a new milestone in its fight against terrorism. The fence barrier it is building on the Durand Line, the 2,640km (1,640-mile) land border between Afghanistan and Pakistan that passes through rugged mountains, densely forested valleys and narrow rock passages, is nearing completion.

Islamabad started fencing its porous border with Afghanistan in March 2017, after facing a spate of deadly attacks from Afghanistan-based Pakistani militant groups in the previous year. Despite a slow-performing economy, disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and a volatile security environment, the work on the border continued mostly uninterrupted in the last four years. So far, 85 percent of the border has been fenced, and the remaining work is expected to be completed by April 2021.

The border barrier consists of two sets of chain-link fences, separated by a 2-metre (6-foot) space filled with concertina wire coils. The double-fence, which is 3.6 metres high (11 feet) on the Pakistani side and 4 metres high (13 feet) on the Afghan side, is fitted with surveillance cameras and infrared detectors. Moreover, nearly 1,000 forts are also being constructed along the border to increase security. Cross-border movement will only be allowed through 16 formally designated crossing points after the completion of the project, which is expected to cost more than $500m in total.

For the last two decades, the regions surrounding the Durand Line have been used by armed groups, such as the Haqqani Network, al-Qaeda and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), to conduct attacks both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Kabul has long accused Pakistan of providing sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban. Islamabad, on the other hand, has raised similar concerns about TTP’s presence in Afghanistan.

Indeed, both Pakistan and Afghanistan have repeatedly found prominent criminals they are seeking to capture and eliminate in each other’s backyards in recent years. In 2016, for example, Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Manor was killed by a US drone attack in Pakistan’s Balochistan region. Two years later, in 2018, TTP leader Mullah Fazhlullah was killed by another US drone attack in Afghanistan’s Kunar province.

Pakistan says its border barrier will extensively increase security in restive border areas and put to rest the tensions it experienced with its neighbour over cross-border militant attacks. Critics of the project, however, argue that while the fence will likely deter Afghanistan-based anti-Pakistan militants from conducting cross-border attacks, the Afghan Taliban will continue to cross the border at will, with a wink and a nod from Pakistan.

Pakistan is also hoping that the border barrier will prevent any future turmoil in Afghanistan from spilling into its territory. Indeed, if Afghanistan once again descends into chaos in the coming years, the wall will help curtail the refugee influx from Afghanistan into Pakistan. In 1989, when Russia withdrew from Afghanistan, the ensuing civil war resulted in the migration of millions of Afghan refugees into Pakistan.

Further, the fence will help curb the cross-border smuggling of narcotics and weapons that helps sustain terror groups in the region. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan is the source of 80 to 90 percent of the world’s opium supply. About 45 percent of Afghan opium, which is used in the production of heroin, is trafficked through Pakistan to the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

Pakistan’s reasons for embarking on this massive fencing project, however, are not only increasing border security and preventing smuggling. The fence will also help Pakistan politically by cementing the Durand Line as the permanent border between the sovereign territories of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Afghanistan disputes the border drawn by British colonial officials, with the agreement of then-Afghan leader Amir Abdul Rehman, in 1893. It argues that the border is a “colonial imposition” that divides the ancestral homelands of Pashtun tribes between two countries, and claims sovereignty over the Pashtun territories on the Pakistani side of the border that comprise the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and parts of North West Frontier Province. Kabul also argues that the agreement between British officials and Rehman had a 100-year time limit, which expired in 1993.

Pakistan, on the other hand, considers the border it inherited from the British after its independence as legal and final. And it hopes that its ambitious border barrier project will put the dispute over the Durand Line to rest for good.


Even before its completion, the border barrier provided Pakistan with visible benefits.

Since 2007, Pakistan has carried out numerous kinetic operations, including Zarb-e-Azb and Radd-ul- Fasaad, to root out terror groups from the former FATA. However, the de-facto open border between Afghanistan and Pakistan undermined the security gains made through these operations. It allowed militants to avoid capture by escaping into Afghanistan. These militants, after recovering and regrouping within Afghanistan, later launched new attacks on Pakistan. But since Pakistan’s fencing project began, these same militants started to find it a lot harder to move between the two countries and evade the Pakistani government’s efforts to prevent their attacks. The number of cross-border terror attacks from Afghanistan has fallen from 82 in 2019 to just 11 in 2020.

The fencing of the border, however, has also presented Pakistan with new challenges. The fence adversely affected the daily lives of families who have relatives on both sides of the border. Similarly, it harmed subsistence farmers whose lands straddle the border. The situation has already compelled several farmers to sell their lands at throwaway prices. Traders who made a living by exporting food items and other goods from Pakistan into Afghanistan and vice versa have also been affected as they now need to acquire visas to cross the border and pay customs fees for the produce they bring over.

Pakistan is already working to mitigate the negative impact the border barrier had on the lives of civilians living in the area. It has reached an agreement with Afghanistan to establish joint trade markets along the border and discussions are ongoing about exactly where these markets should be established and what items should be traded within them. It is also planning to financially compensate the farmers who have lands on both sides of the border. For the families living across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, Islamabad will issue long-term passes.

The fencing of the Pak-Afghan border is a necessary step towards curbing militancy in the border areas and bringing stability to the former FATA. But on its own, it will not solve the region’s myriad problems. The border barrier will undoubtedly provide a tactical respite for Pakistan and reduce the number of cross-border attacks. But until sustainable peace is achieved in Afghanistan, and the grievances of the Pashtun tribes living near the border are resolved, no barrier will successfully bring peace, stability and long term security to the region.

Ref:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/2/25/the-pak-afghan-border-fence-is-a-step-in-the-right-direction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arbcLLlqzoA


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxAkK8oCewM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DPndCZ1o3Q

nograv:
My Naija people and defensiveness sha..

Mtcheww... Does any part of Naija look like Britain or Singapore for that matter..?

Come on now..

Ok, my mistake, I thought this thread was about train derailment in Nigeria and how train derailment happens nowhere in the world except Nigeria and that consequently Nigeria is a Joke, shit hole and the rest of it. Also while I support the idea of fencing off railway lines ( in fact I go further by suggesting we not only fence off as much railway line as possible we landscape too) it isn't true that all train lines are fenced off in the UK or US.

https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/GTY_amtrak_crash_2002_washington_jef_160929_16x9_992.jpg

Amtrak train 3 traveling from Chicago to Washington, D.C.,

https://www.kentonline.co.uk/_media/img/750x0/57NSKMIBWD7N6NHL2IML.jpg


Southeastern train travelling between Chilham and Wye derails after hitting cattle

nograv:
Sure, in Britain railway fences are common in built up urban areas to protect the public and railway infrastructure.

https://www.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/polegate-240519-platform-1-ce-1024x647.jpg

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/T7T38F/roadway-and-large-fence-by-the-railway-T7T38F.jpg

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/720x405/p08ngtjt.jpg
Where did this take place?

https://theloadstar.com/wp-content/uploads/GBRf-rail-derailment-Coventry-Live-1-680x0-c-default.jpg
and this one?

As long as Dangote works with Indians he's bleeped

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Sjf6z881o
Older FSD, 9 months ago Lombard Street challenge drive




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ltLwRPz6p4

Latest FSD, 2 Days ago Lombard Street challenge drive

Originally built to speed up calculations, a machine-learning system is now making shocking progress at the frontiers of experimental quantum physics

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/aBSs4o7eAJupCvRQGcvgET-320-80.jpg

Quantum physicist Mario Krenn remembers sitting in a café in Vienna in early 2016, poring over computer printouts, trying to make sense of what MELVIN had found. MELVIN was a machine-learning algorithm Krenn had built, a kind of artificial intelligence. Its job was to mix and match the building blocks of standard quantum experiments and find solutions to new problems. And it did find many interesting ones. But there was one that made no sense.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘My program has a bug, because the solution cannot exist,’” Krenn says. MELVIN had seemingly solved the problem of creating highly complex entangled states involving multiple photons (entangled states being those that once made Albert Einstein invoke the specter of “spooky action at a distance”). Krenn, Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna and their colleagues had not explicitly provided MELVIN the rules needed to generate such complex states, yet it had found a way. Eventually, he realized that the algorithm had rediscovered a type of experimental arrangement that had been devised in the early 1990s. But those experiments had been much simpler. MELVIN had cracked a far more complex puzzle.

“When we understood what was going on, we were immediately able to generalize [the solution],” says Krenn, who is now at the University of Toronto. Since then, other teams have started performing the experiments identified by MELVIN, allowing them to test the conceptual underpinnings of quantum mechanics in new ways. Meanwhile Krenn, working with colleagues in Toronto, has refined their machine-learning algorithms. Their latest effort, an AI called THESEUS, has upped the ante: it is orders of magnitude faster than MELVIN, and humans can readily parse its output. While it would take Krenn and his colleagues days or even weeks to understand MELVIN’s meanderings, they can almost immediately figure out what THESEUS is saying.

“It is amazing work,” says theoretical quantum physicist Renato Renner of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, who reviewed a 2020 study about THESEUS but was not directly involved in these efforts.

Krenn stumbled on this entire research program somewhat by accident when he and his colleagues were trying to figure out how to experimentally create quantum states of photons entangled in a very particular manner: When two photons interact, they become entangled, and both can only be mathematically described using a single shared quantum state. If you measure the state of one photon, the measurement instantly fixes the state of the other even if the two are kilometers apart (hence Einstein’s derisive comments on entanglement being “spooky”).

In 1989 three physicists—Daniel Greenberger, the late Michael Horne and Zeilinger—described an entangled state that came to be known as “GHZ” (after their initials). It involved four photons, each of which could be in a quantum superposition of, say, two states, 0 and 1 (a quantum state called a qubit). In their paper, the GHZ state involved entangling four qubits such that the entire system was in a two-dimensional quantum superposition of states 0000 and 1111. If you measured one of the photons and found it in state 0, the superposition would collapse, and the other photons would also be in state 0. The same went for state 1. In the late 1990s Zeilinger and his colleagues experimentally observed GHZ states using three qubits for the first time.

Krenn and his colleagues were aiming for GHZ states of higher dimensions. They wanted to work with three photons, where each photon had a dimensionality of three, meaning it could be in a superposition of three states: 0, 1 and 2. This quantum state is called a qutrit. The entanglement the team was after was a three-dimensional GHZ state that was a superposition of states 000, 111 and 222. Such states are important ingredients for secure quantum communications and faster quantum computing. In late 2013 the researchers spent weeks designing experiments on blackboards and doing the calculations to see if their setups could generate the required quantum states. But each time they failed. “I thought, ‘This is absolutely insane. Why can’t we come up with a setup?’” says Krenn says.

To speed up the process, Krenn first wrote a computer program that took an experimental setup and calculated the output. Then he upgraded the program to allow it to incorporate in its calculations the same building blocks that experimenters use to create and manipulate photons on an optical bench: lasers, nonlinear crystals, beam splitters, phase shifters, holograms, and the like. The program searched through a large space of configurations by randomly mixing and matching the building blocks, performed the calculations and spat out the result. MELVIN was born. “Within a few hours, the program found a solution that we scientists—three experimentalists and one theorist—could not come up with for months,” Krenn says. “That was a crazy day. I could not believe that it happened.”

Then he gave MELVIN more smarts. Anytime it found a setup that did something useful, MELVIN added that setup to its toolbox. “The algorithm remembers that and tries to reuse it for more complex solutions,” Krenn says.

It was this more evolved MELVIN that left Krenn scratching his head in a Viennese café. He had set it running with an experimental toolbox that contained two crystals, each capable of generating a pair of photons entangled in three dimensions. Krenn’s naive expectation was that MELVIN would find configurations that combined these pairs of photons to create entangled states of at most nine dimensions. But “it actually found one solution, an extremely rare case, that has much higher entanglement than the rest of the states,” Krenn says.

Eventually, he figured out that MELVIN had used a technique that multiple teams had developed nearly three decades ago. In 1991 one method was designed by Xin Yu Zou, Li Jun Wang and Leonard Mandel, all then at the University of Rochester. And in 1994 Zeilinger, then at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, and his colleagues came up with another. Conceptually, these experiments attempted something similar, but the configuration that Zeilinger and his colleagues devised is simpler to understand. It starts with one crystal that generates a pair of photons (A and B). The paths of these photons go right through another crystal, which can also generate two photons (C and D). The paths of photon A from the first crystal and of photon C from the second overlap exactly and lead to the same detector. If that detector clicks, it is impossible to tell whether the photon originated from the first or the second crystal. The same goes for photons B and D.

Read the rest here:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-designs-quantum-physics-experiments-beyond-what-any-human-has-conceived/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buj2YHoQEQ8

Thought he was in jail awaiting trial for contravening bail and lately for incitement to violence and killings of law enforcement officers evident in historic Social Media platform records. Aren’t there many in Nigeria calling for self determination e.g in MOSOB not in jail?

SeeThisLoser:
I pray that Nigeria SSS makes a mistake, please, I am begging them. Please do something really bad to them, so we can kiss your shit hole good bye.

[img]https://i./fxZF.gif[/img]

You’re very arrogant (setting aside coonish and brainwashed) with this your Israel and West must come destroy Nigeria stitch. Are you even black let alone Nigerian?

Nigeria will always be the Just one wronged because Nigeria never leaves her affairs to go bother other Nations. Nigeria didn’t send no Nigerian journalist to go interview, photograph, nor document no Hamas in no West bank, risking Israel’s ire.

History of Sentiments as weapon against development in Nigeria: demolition of illegal shanty towns = War against the poor; forget Tax, tax is universally demonised as war against the poor; traffic law enforcement including confiscation of motorbikes and cars = war against hardworking youth! And now demolition of illegal structure or relocation of markets = war against ethnic groups!


Media does not help, why adjective-ise this as “Houser” residents instead of just Residents?

If the pic isn’t fake, or some sort of misrepresentation, then the guy might have taken that thing out of a sense of humour. Perhaps something he and people around him will have a good laugh over, to lighten the miserable situation they find themselves in, at this juncture of inner city South Africa life. This does not however justify the looting of hard working people’s businesses.

The money Nigeria overall seems to spend on road constructing i.e. on rehabilitating, repairing, building new in additions to fly-overs may have provided Nigeria with the more enduring railway infrastructure. Railway circuit needn’t be vast.

Soulsymbol99:
This guy jst rush dis adventure make Jeff no first am

I don’t know what they all got against Jeff – the entire neo space exploration fan base as well as the leading figures such as Elon, Branson etc. In my experience, when a sizable USA fan base are against a leading figure, that figure often has done or said something favourable to black people or is a liberal…

Instead of making conclusions such as 'its the Army', 'its Terrorists', 'it's attack against Igbo traders', 'oh what a country', 'it has began', etc, etc wouldn’t we be better informed when some of these attackers are caught? Then all are able to find out more about them?

If we are unable to apprehend any of these people and so arnt able to get a closer look at them, we should not loose track of the fact that our says are nothing but opinions and speculation not Facts!

lexy2014:
So who is telling d lies?

The entire world acknowledges that with wider interment reach enabling grassroots access to information and disseminating of same, false information as prank or weapon ,deliberate or inadvertent ,is problematic. Majority of Nigerians acknowledge this development. Fake news, outright lies is fact in Nigeria media space and particularly rampant. Fearing the government in power will exploit concerns not to enact measures sanitising it but instead to stifle dissenting public, civil society and political opposition voices is a different argument. Fake news in Nigeria Media space is objective fact . Government exploitation of calls to sanities the media is an important argument but one we cannot afford to allow neutralise need for measures against our media decent into madness if not abject farce. Since opposition parties will forever distrust any media regulation by the party in government we would be forever moribund. In multi-party dispensations’ even Independent Media Regulators are suspects. This impasse needs to be broken.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0sKS0Ea8xs

Bloggers lied about my EFCC arrest ― Comedian Pankeeroy

By Ayo Onikoyi,

Recently, the news went viral that Instagram comedian and social media Influencer, Nwagbo Oliver Chidera, popularly known as Pankeeroy was arrested for internet fraud.

The reports credited to many media outlets claimed that items seized from the comedian included a Mercedes Benz car worth N36M and N22,300,000 worth of Bitcoin in his account. The reports also claimed that the comedian went into Bitcoin scam after suffering depression using a particular website to defraud his unsuspecting victims.

Fake news' driving ethno-religious crisis in Nigeria

Misinformation risks worsening ethnic and religious tensions in Nigeria, media commentators and researchers say, at a time of heightened concern about internal security and fragile community relations.
Advertising

The months and weeks running up to recent elections saw a slew of false claims about politicians and their parties, as part of deliberate attempts to shape the narrative before polling.

Africa’s most populous nation is often characterised as teetering on the brink.

Security threats include Boko Haram Islamists in the northeast and violence between nomadic cattle herders and farmers in central states.

The latter is primarily a battle for water and land but those involved have been polarised along ethnic, sectarian and religious lines, in a country with more than 250 ethnic groups and where identity is rarely far from the surface.

https://www.france24.com/en/20190414-nigeria-buhari-fake-news-azikwe-islam-muslim-christianity


Whats the truth on Amatukun, Kanu, Esn, Buhari, Police, Soldiers, The War, Bokoharam, Sepratist, Black Magic, Vloggers, Where’s the truth on anything written by Nigerians online ?

Images of protesting Nigerian separatists have been shared multiple times on Facebook alongside claims that they show a rally at the White House on July 2, 2021. The posts surfaced days after the arrest of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) group, which supports the secession of the south-east of Nigeria. But the claim is false. AFP Fact Check traced the photos, which are video screenshots, to a Biafran demonstration in Vatican City in 2019.

“Happening now! At the White House right now in the USA ! Biafrans protest in thousands,” reads the caption of a Facebook post shared alongside two images showing people holding up Biafran flags. The post was published on July 2, 2019 -- a few days after Biafran leader Nnamdi Kanu was arrested and repatriated to Nigeria.

A video viewed tens of thousands of times on Facebook is being shared alongside claims that it shows supporters of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) movement protesting the arrest of their leader Nnamdi Kanu in June 2021. This is false; AFP Fact Check found that the footage has been on the internet since 2015 and is unrelated to Kanu’s latest arrest.

The video, posted on Facebook here on June 30, 2021, has been shared more than 2,000 times.

The caption warns Nigerian officials against harming Nnamdi Kanu, the secessionist leader behind calls from some Igbos for a separate state of Biafra, and claims supporters had just gathered in Port Harcourt for a demonstration against his recent, surprise extradition.

It reads:“Happening now 30/6/2021 at egweocha portharcout...If any thing happen to our able leader mazi Nnamdi Kanu the zoo called Nigeria government is going to be very big mess Biafra is our last hope know more going back until biafra is restored under the leadership of mazi Nnamdi Kanu (sic).”

lexy2014:
I didn't tell u anyone is telling d truth so feel free to ask what u want to ask. U are d one making allegations as seen below:

"Media Bill is necessary since Nigeria’s information space is bloated with lies".

So who is telling d lies?

You're funny. What about the Leki massacre for starters ?

Nigeria's popular ThisDay newspaper recently published a story headlined: "Drama as US Embassy Denies Bishop Oyedepo Visa".

It described how David Oyedepo, founder of Winners' Chapel, and one of Nigeria's revered and influential religious leaders, allegedly threw a tantrum at the US consulate in Lagos after he was refused a visa.

According to the story, the bishop was "obviously flustered". It quoted an unnamed source as saying that the religious figure had "immediately sent for his bodyguards to get his phones so he could make some calls".

In a country where religious leaders are celebrities, and their every action or inaction scrutinised, the detailed story quickly went viral.

Comments on, and criticisms of, Bishop Oyedepo's alleged behaviour poured out.

Back in 2014, when the Ebola virus hit Lagos State, the city’s healthcare team had to contend with the spread of misinformation regarding its prevention and treatment. A piece of fake news claiming Ebola could be prevented by drinking and bathing with salt water went viral. According to Symplur, a company that tracks health misinformation on Twitter, Nigerians began using the words “Ebola,” “salt,” “water” and “drinking” together in tweets from 2014 on August 4. Four days later, two persons were reported dead in Jos, the capital city of Plateau State. They had consumed an excessive amount of saltwater.

That experience may have been useful for Nigeria’s health authorities when the first coronavirus case was announced in Lagos this year, as it was apparent that outside of providing care for affected persons, it was necessary to provide factual information to the public while countering fake news.

Still, along with the government in neighbouring Ogun state, Lagos state’s authorities had to fend off a barrage of fake news. Mayowa Tijani, a fact-checker with AFP, says, “Fake news and long-standing trust issues affected the country’s response” to the coronavirus in the first few months of the pandemic.
Where six years ago, a misleading regimen for prevention went viral, this time, one of the first coronavirus-related fake news pieces was focused on the index case. On Facebook, a post claimed that the man who drove Nigeria’s first confirmed victim of the virus from Lagos to Ogun escaped from a hospital where he was receiving treatment after he, too, tested positive.

In June 2018, images of a baby’s bloodied corpse, a man’s cracked skull and bodies in mass graves quickly spread across Facebook feeds in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.

The Facebook users circulating these images accused Fulani Muslims in the Plateau state — an area of tremendous ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity — of perpetrating atrocities against Berom Christians. In what the authorities described as an act of vigilante retribution, several Berom youths then dragged Fulani men out of their cars and killed them. At least 10 people died.

A crisis of disinformation is beleaguering nations around the world, sowing discord in established democracies such as the United States, Germany and Britain and rattling fragile ones such as India, Taiwan and Nigeria. With just a laptop and a login, it is so easy to create inflammatory material, rapidly disseminate it and draw strong — even violent — reactions that some experts fear that the very foundations of society are threatened.

Last year, a BBC investigation exposed the bloodshed in Plateau state, linking it to the viral disinformation spread by Facebook.

False information, hoaxes, urban rumors and “deep fakes” — digitally altered video and photos that purport to show actions or speech that did not, in fact, happen — are a rising threat worldwide, but they are especially dangerous to emerging economies such as Nigeria, where internet use is rising far more rapidly than education levels. In the last seven years, the number of internet users in Nigeria has tripled, to 100 million.

Adamkolo Mohammed Ibrahim, a scholar at the University of Maiduguri who studies fake news, says that bots and propagandists who use social media and spread false news are threatening to render democratic rights — including freedom of speech — meaningless. He fears that Nigeria is teetering on the edge of “post-truth” — a time when falsehoods, mild and extreme, permeate society so intensely that the truth becomes meaningless.

With more than 200 ethnic groups and 500 languages, Nigeria, a former British colony, is one of the largest multicultural societies on earth. Since independence from Britain in 1960, it has also grappled with separatist movements, sectarian and ethnic discord and struggles over natural resources, including minerals and oil.

Not until the late 1990s, scholars say, did Nigeria become a genuine multiparty democracy, with competitive, free and fair elections. Now, even those fragile advances are being threatened by fake news.

Last year, for example, President Muhammadu Buhari, who has suffered from various health problems, found himself compelled to deny rumors that he had died and been replaced in ceremonies by a Sudanese clone.

It is no crazier, to be sure, than the far-right claim that Hillary Clinton was behind a child sex ring housed in a Washington pizzeria. But an embryonic democracy such as Nigeria may need layers of protection to keep people safe from communal violence.

“Our democracy is only 20 years old,” said Ibrahim. “There is the fear that if fake news is allowed to continue as it is, it might get to a point where the democracy is threatened and the military might step in.”

Because Ibrahim does not want this to happen, he is supportive of some type of government action.

A federal senator, Mohammed Sani Musa, recently introduced a bill that would criminalize those who create “fake news,” with penalties that include fines and imprisonment for individuals, and financial penalties for companies.

“There is too much misinformation trending in our social media space,” Musa said.

“Is that the kind of world we should live in?”

Though the bill is still in its infancy, opposition to it has been fierce, largely because citizens fear it will only provide cover for censorship.

An online petition decried the so-called social media bill as a measure to curb critical online speech against politicians.

Toyin O. Falola, a professor of African studies at the University of Texas in Austin, said the proposed ban on “fake news” was mainly a reaction to “comments directed at political leaders reporting high level of transgressions and misdeeds.” He noted that Buhari, 77, had been highly secretive about the state of his health. He also said that the government had been incompetent in handling serious problems such as rising tensions between Muslim herders and Christian farmers.

“There is nothing special about ‘fake news’ in Nigeria,” Falola said in an interview. “It has become a global phenomenon in a post-truth age.”

Musa, the senator behind the bill, said “it is not an attempt to stifle free speech, it’s an opportunity to address growing threats that disturb the peace.”

But the legislation — like other proposals around the world to curb fake news — does not offer a very reliable definition of the problem.

Muthoki Mumo, an Africa expert at the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based group that advocates for press freedom, noted that lawmakers in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania proposed bans on “fake news,” as “part of an attempt to grapple with a public that is expressing itself more freely and frequently online.”

The problem is that authoritarian governments throughout the world have used “fake news” as a pretext to curb legitimate speech. Threats against journalists are rising, and journalists worldwide increasingly are being imprisoned on accusations — often trumped-up and bogus — of disseminating false news.

Agba Jalingo, the publisher of CrossRiverWatch, was arrested by Nigerian authorities in August after the news website reported alleged corruption involving Cross River state’s public bank and governor. Officials asserted that the outlet’s reporting was false, treasonous and an attempt to disturb the peace.

Officials’ use of existing laws to go after reporters is troubling for advocates such as Mumo, who fears this new legislation would give the government greater authority to define truth and silence critics.

“If you have a government that’s willing to implement these laws in a broad way against critics, you’re not going to have a positive outcome no matter how well-meaning it is,” she said. “We’ve seen truth being defined in a way that favors authority. That’s a problem.”

Musa contends that the definition of truth can be sorted out in court and that his proposed ban would not harm nonpartisan journalists.

But the actual outcome remains far from certain.

In October, a court permitted the prosecution to bring forward an anonymous witness, making it harder for Jalingo’s attorney to defend his client in a fair and free trial.

And, for those who cannot afford to fight charges in court, the alternative is pleading guilty and paying the fine. And in a time that is becoming increasingly financially strained for media outlets, the fine can seem lofty.

The market to peddle falsehoods exploded in Nigeria after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, said Ibrahim, the scholar. And, with greater access to the internet and a thriving social media scene, rumors spread like wildfire in the West African country.

For Ibrahim, Nigeria “is in crisis,” and clamping down on “fake news” is key. If a central body can stop false, viral posts from creating violence and confusion, the country has a chance for more peace, he said. And while purported nonpartisan fact-checking organizations are starting to pop up throughout the country, their ability to address the root of “fake news” can never carry the same weight as that of a government.

No one is above the law, Ibrahim said. “Even if the president defines what truth is, the legislature can check him. You can never change the truth. Even if you suppress it, it will emerge.”

Falola disagrees, arguing that the government should not have the power to define what is fake. “The federal government itself is not transparent, thus creating the space for various individuals to create stories to fill a vacuum,” he said. Better governance, he said, is the answer.

Fake news is not new to Nigeria. In the 2015 elections, for example, a 55-minute documentary full of falsehoods entitled “The Real Buhari” aired on television before doing the rounds on social media. In 2017, Biafra separatists attempting to disrupt the Anambra governorship vote claimed the army was injecting school students with monkey pox to depopulate the South East, leading some schools to close and parents to withdraw their children in panic.

This phenomenon has reached new heights, however, ahead of Nigeria’s 2019 elections. As the campaign has heated up, fake news about both President Muhammadu Buhari and his main opponent former vice-president Atiku Abubakar has swirled on Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter. It has been shared knowingly by canny campaign officials as well as unwittingly by thousands of unsuspecting voters.

This false information covers many topics and takes different forms. On the subtler end of the scale, there are examples such as Buhari’s aide saying that Atiku only avoided arrest on his US visit because of diplomatic immunity; or the opposition official posting news that “800 companies shut down” even though the story pre-dated Buhari’s term. On the wilder end of the scale, there are the claims that President Buhari has been replaced with a Sudanese clone; or that Kim Jong Un wants to re-colonise Nigeria.

There is also much in between and, together, these stories have spread far and wide. Many have taken on lives of their own. This has created an ever-more uncertain and heightened atmosphere ahead of Nigeria’s high-stakes elections.

Bloggers peddled lies about how our sister died, say brothers of late Nneka Odili


The grief-stricken family of the late National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) member, Nneka Odili, who was crushed by a train have continued to express their deep sadness and pain on social media, as friends offer their condolences.

Pope Odili Chukwuemeka and Odili-Obi Albert, both elder brothers of the late Nneka expressed their heartbreak in tear-jerking Facebook messages they posted after the burial of their sister.

The two brothers are particularly agonized and incensed at reports that went viral online on the circumstances that led to their sister being killed by a train at the Ikeja-Along railway track a fortnight ago.

Several social media platform and blogs had in their reportage of the tragic incident, painted different scenarios surrounding how the incident happened. Many alluded that she committed suicide by walking along the rail track until the moving train hit her. Others alleged that she was carried away by the music she was listening to from her phone while many bloggers disclosed that Nneka was fiddling with her phone and was so engrossed in her chatting that she did not notice or hear the blaring horn of the approaching train.

“My kid sister died and bloggers started posting rubbish that broke our hearts even more. But I’ll say may Almighty God who knows best forgive them all”, cried Albert in one of his emotional Facebook posts three days after the late Nneka was buried on the 10th of March.

In another post, he said: “I won’t shed any more tears, cause I believe my Nne is ok wherever she is. Nne wasn’t even carrying a phone that plays music. She’d been robbed severally and had decided not to go out with big phones again. She was holding a torch phone.

“And the Nne we knew very well wasn’t a music type of person. Tell me about sports related stories, then I’ll agree, music wasn’t her thing at all. Please, before you believe anything you read, ask questions. Bloggers can post whatever they feel is comfortable for them, so be wise. Sites like Opera mini, and lots of them out there without names are not places to get credible answers. I pray that we don’t lose any loved one till they live old and die at the right time… Amen. God bless us all.”

Also in a bid to set the record straight, Pope, while debunking stories making rounds that Nneka had an earpiece in her ear when she was crushed, raised pertinent questions on the circumstances surrounding her death. He further posted pictures that compared the mangled bodies of persons crushed by a train and the photos of his sister’s injuries at the scene of the tragedy. According to Pope, Nneka fell near the train because she was struggling with a thief that grabbed her bag inside the train contrary to reports that she was crushed because she did not see the oncoming train.

“I have been mute because I have to bury her first, but it’s quite unfortunate that some persons in social media, online news and newspapers have been going round and flying false news about her death. The false news they have been spreading about her is that she was listening to music with her earpiece and so did not hear the sound of the train and that she was pinging with her phone and then she walked onto the rail track and got hit by the train.

“I have been waiting for the NYSC officials to comment on this whole event which they have done recently. So now, I want to let the entire public know that the three reports about my late sister are all LIES, complete lies and we have the facts and evidence to prove it.

“Firstly, with the way Nigeria railways is designed, when a train moves, it vibrates the ground, even without the noise from the train the ground vibrates so heavily that one will know something heavy is coming.

stinflame:
What are you saying? You hate this you hate that. This is exactly how law is been practice in every single country. We are just to fast to nail the lady, you & I weren't there and we just have only the third person information as evidence. Things will unfold and the law is near accurate to point out any discrepancy.
Take a time out and visit a court room, it will help you a lot.

Thanks for informing that guy, I wanted to reply but his margin of ignorance was so great, the thing weak me. Over three hundred from the Troll House liked his post so it was important to challenge him, in the process educating those that might have been persuaded. Nigeria legal system is weak but his understanding of the law and how it works is unrelated to why or how.

lexy2014:
Who is telling d lies?

This question is like me asking you who is telling the truth.

Dagger111:
Oja mi lara jee. I will surely choose Nigeria over others. This is the reason:

BLACK/ AFRICAN SOCIETY: You have two cows, you eat them all the same day and you dream that donors or the international community give you others. You turn to God and hope for miracle cattle. You fast 40 days and 40 nights without eating or drinking so that the cows will fall from heaven. At the end, you die in extreme poverty.

This last point does not apply to Nigeria but very true for the rest of Africa especially East Africa. Nigerians do turn to god but they are likelier to turn against government than ask international donors for help. The rest of Nigeria except the North have grown to hate cows.

Media Bill is necessary since Nigeria’s information space is bloated with lies. And Nigeria News Papers anti-anti media bill stance isn’t convincing when scrutinised. This is why: before the information revolution, when Nigerians relied on newspaper stands, Nigerians were pretty critical of their broadsheets and tabloids, labelling them either Godfathers of political party mouth pieces. Indeed, Al jazeera, CNN, BBC and other Western media organisations have many times dismissed Nigeria News Papers as Political Party mouth pieces, crushing my boasts that Nigeria is home to some of the developing world’s most vibrant free press spaces. How or when the tabloids morphed into Free Press deserving of backing in their stance against politically motivated censorship, is eyebrow rising.

We are all rightly weary of censorships but existential threat posed to Nigeria by unregulated media – either by the media or government – I believe warrants it. The Bill is to me as if an emergency measure to safe guard the State. Someone on Niraland or perhaps I saw this on one of the Nigeria Televised news Youtube pages, made the point worth reiterating and that was, ‘finally, we need a Nation (existing) in which to debate or fight for improved freedoms.

Says Italy 1 vs England 2 on twitter

on google 1, 1...

AskiaHarem:
I've already proved you wrong with facts so I'm dropping this pseudo history debate. Keep telling yourself whatever makes you happy. Ignorance is bliss for you types I guess.

When others research "in-depth" for themselves the text books evidence will be there for them to decide this, not you or me. Ultimately you or i did not go out on the field, researched for years, made discoveries and published our findings. We are shamefully relying on white people's work and as is evident in what you read and what I read, how they differ, they can twist information to fit thire political agenda or peddle contradictory evidence because they are unsure and still benefit from book sales. Besides of this, common sense should tell us migration flows from greatest numbers to lowest. Igbo number approximately 30/40 million in present day Nigeria. Where the are now in Nigeria is almost certainly their original homeland.

SPACEPORT AMERICA, New Mexico — Richard Branson completed a daring, barnstorming flight to edge of space Sunday, rocketing through the atmosphere in the spaceplane he’d been yearning to ride for nearly 20 years.

The suborbital trip gave the British billionaire, his three crewmates and two pilots a glimpse of the Earth from more than 50 miles up and a few minutes of weightlessness before the vehicle they were traveling in, SpaceShipTwo Unity, glided back to Earth and a landing on the runway at Virgin Galactic’s facility here in the New Mexico desert.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTpWYWIfP7Y


https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/11/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-live-updates/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ChAqTMzPvQ


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fMGBzROHGE


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmSsBcfc2rI

AskiaHarem:
That's not completely true that's strategic pseudo history. There are Bantus in Nigeria but there not aboriginal they where a small wave that moved and settled in the West from Cameroon before launching the Southern waves later .

The Migration start-point was centred in the east of Nigeria encompassing the part of Cameroon near Nigeria. I read this in numerous books taking their sources from competent researchers in the field. For some reason, the start point of this migration has been steadily shifted to Cameroon in contemporary literature. I personally believe that this shifting of the start point of the great migration from what is now Nigeria ending in South Africa to from Cameroon to South Africa owes more to political tinkering, perhaps some of these bogus Afrocentric Kemet, Nemet, Queen and Kings type works etc, than any new findings in the fields. The problem is that Nigerians don’t seem to take these things seriously because Nigerians are ignorant of how important they are to National grounding.

AskiaHarem:
But I thought he was a Biafrian Citizen not a British Citizen? Does he really believe the British are going to come and save his BLACK @$$? The delusions of some Africans I swear.

These people should have just went back home to Central Africa where there proto-bantu ancestors originate from while they had the chance.

Bantu are originally from Nigeria, actually. The start point of the migration to South Africa is located in Nigeria and some parts of the area of Cameroon near Nigeria. As a youngster I had tons of Anthropological literature that stated this. But I guess politically motivated books (and Black scholars doing bogus research) of recent are revising history.