Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed has blamed the media and unpatriotic Nigerians for being the reason why social networking service, Twitter, decided to make Ghana its African headquarters.
The minister said this while being interviewed by journalists in Abuja on Thursday.
Okay.ng recalls that Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, had announced on Monday that it will set up its Africa head office in Ghana.
However, reacting to the news, the minister said it was expected that the microblogging platform would site its headquarters in Nigeria with about 25 million Twitter users against Ghana’s eight million users.
He said: “The reasons cited by Twitter for citing the headquarters in Accra, Ghana is that Accra is a champion of democracy and there is rule of law in the country, among other reasons. This is what you get when you de-market your country.
“The media is more to blame for this which most times exaggerate the challenges in the country.
“At no time was this worse than during the #EndSARS protest when Nigerian journalists both traditional and new media were trying to outdo themselves in painting Nigeria as a hell where nobody should live.
“When they all conspired to vilify not just the government but the people of Nigeria. We are not saying that you should not criticise the country but be fair and patriotic. When you destroy your own house, where are you going to live?
“You can imagine the kind of job opportunities that citing that headquarters in Nigeria would have generated, the kind of visibility it would have given Nigeria but we destroyed it. It is what the insiders say about their country that the outsider will use to judge and condemn the country.”
