The House of Representatives has lamented the low financial allocation to the Ministry of Information and Culture in the 2021 budget.
The Ministry is allocated N8.206 billion in the proposed 2021 Appropriation Act, out of which personnel cost takes N4 billion, overhead gulps N900 million while N3.304 billion is earmarked for capital projects.
The Chairman House of Representatives Committee on Information, National Orientation, Ethics and Values, Odebunmi Olusegun (APC-Oyo) who spoke on Tuesday when the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed appeared for budget defence said the low allocation was hampering the performances of the Ministry.
Olusegun said: “as a matter of fact, budget of the Information Ministries in States like Akwa-lbom and Rivers States are far more than what the whole Country is proposing for Federal Ministry of Information, in spite of the very high responsibilities attached therein”.
He called on the Nigerian government to go in search of the technology needed to regulate the social media in the country and be able to work with what is already available in the cyber space.
The lawmaker said: “I don’t want the media to misquote us. The social media has come to stay. What the government should do is to look for technology that will work together with what is in the space. We are not asking the government to stop the social media. The most important thing is that government should go and look for the technology to regulate so that you can equally be working within the space”
He commended the Ministry for proactively disseminating information to Nigerians in the fight tocombat against COVID-19, adding the ministry and the Departments and Agencies under its supervision helped the nation to flatten the curve of the pandemic.
The Information Minister while responding to questions from the lawmakers said the nation was sitting on a keg of gun powder with regards to the issue of fake news and stressed the need to immediately begin to regulate the social media space.
Mohammed stated that the next war that will be fought in the country and across the globe may be fought through the social media, stressing that the biggest challenge facing the country was the issue of fake news and misinformation which the government identified since 2017 and decided to launch a national campaign against fake news.
The Minister explained that the government was not seeking to shut down the social media space in the country because “the social media has come to stay”, but to have a social media policy that regulate the social media and check fake news and misinformation.
He sad: “the biggest challenge facing Nigeria today is fake news and misinformation. Based on that, we dedicated an entire National Council on Information meeting in His to that issue after which we launched a national campaign against fake news in July 2018.
“We said then that the next war will be fought without a shot being fired, but with the use of fake news. We didn’t stop there. We went on tour of all media houses to solicit their support in the fight against fake news. We launched the campaign to regulate social media which was bitterly contested by the stakeholders.
“We kept saying that if we don’t regulate social media, it will destroy us. Social media and fake news will not destroy Nigeria. In 2017, there was a fake video of herdsmen and farmers crisis. It was a video of what happened in Tanzania and was played in Nigeria as if it was true. In 2017, a very popular entertainer in Nigeria raised a false alarm that students that students of the College of Education, Gidan Ways, Kaduna state had been murdered.
“There was almost reprisals only for him find out that it was not true. In the same 2017, we found out that some of the videos being posted are things that happened in other parts of the world. When there was a problem between South African and Nigeria, they were posting videos of what happened in India and Tanzania to suggest that Nigerians were being roasted alive. That was what led to the reprisals on the malls.
“At every time, government has continued to draw attention that this is a menace. Unfortunately, it is not happening in Nigeria alone. The University of Ohaio conducted a research and discovered that Hillary Clinton lost the Presidential election to Trump because of fake news which was promoted by Russia and the worked on three issues. First was that Trump had been endorsed by the Pope. The second was that when she was Secretary of States, she authorized the sale of arms and also that she was a very old person. These three things did alot to sway the votes.
“We are sitting on a time bomb on this issue of fake news. Unfortunately, we have no national policy on social media and we need one. When we went to China, we could not get google, Facebook and Instagram. You could not even use your email in China because they made sure it is censored and we’ll regulated.
“In June this year, there was a riot in Ethiopia when a popular musician was killed. What the government did was to shot down the social media for two days to bring that riot under control. Bear in Mind that Ethiopia host the AU and In office for Africa. But the truth is that the only way to do it was to shot down the social media”.
