In a non-surprising statement on Thursday evening, the Nigerian Presidency backed the embattled Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami.
Dr Pantami has been in the news over a sermon he delivered over a decade ago supporting jihadists groups such as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
The Minister claimed he had renounced his teachings over the years, blaming it on maturity, but Nigerians on social media have continued to demand his resignation.
The statement by Garba Shehu, a Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to President Muhammadu Buhari, said Nigerians had subjected Dr Pantami to a “cancel campaign” instigated by those who seek his removal.
Mr Buhari statement also alleged that the people stand to profit from stopping the Minister from making decisions that improve the lives of everyday Nigerians.
“The Minister has, rightly, apologized for what he said in the early 2000s. The views were absolutely unacceptable then and would be equally unacceptable today were he to repeat them. But he will not repeat them – for he has publicly and permanently condemned his earlier utterances as wrong,” the statement reads.
“In the 2000s, the Minister was a man in his twenties; next year, he will be 50. Time has passed, and people and their opinions – often rightly – change.”
The Presidency is also claiming that the Minister is targeted because he leads the charge against illegal data deductions and pricing, revolutionalizing the government’s virtual public engagement to respond to COVID-19 and save tax payers’ money.
“He has established ICT start-up centres to boost youth entrepreneurship and create jobs; he has changed policy to ensure locally produced ICT content is used by ministries, starting with his own; and he has deregistered some 9.2 million SIMs – ending the ability for criminals and terrorists to flagrantly use mobile networks undetected.”
“In two short years, Minister Pantami has driven the contribution of the ICT sector to the GDP to more than 18 percent, making it one of the top two playing a critical role in the emergence of the economy from the COVID 19-induced recession,” Mr Buhari defends on Thursday.”
The government blamed the opposition for the attack on Dr Pantani, saying “the Minister and this Administration have made enemies. There are those in the opposition who see success and want it halted by any means. And there is now well-reported information that alleges newspaper editors rebuffed an attempt to financially induce them to run a smear campaign against the Minister by some ICT companies, many of which do indeed stand to lose financially through lower prices and greater consumer protections.
In bold terms, the Presidency said, “The Administration stands behind Minister Pantami and all Nigerian citizens to ensure they receive fair treatment, fair prices, and fair protection in ICT services.”
The Presidency hinted that the government is investigating the allegation that ‘haters’ financially induced some editors to run hate campaign on the Ministers, warning that anyone found will be reported to the police for further action.
The Nigerian government position back an earlier statement by the embattled Minister who claimed on Saturday while delivering a speech during his daily Ramadan lecture at Anoor Mosque in Abuja that his position on Jihad has since changed.
He claimed his old position was due to the information he had at the time, some of which were the consensus option among clerics in Northern Nigeria at the dawn of the faceoff between the West and some Islamic countries in the early-mid 2000s.
“Some of the comments I made some years ago that are generating controversies now were based on my understanding of religious issues at the time, and I have changed several positions taken in the past based on new evidence and maturity,” Daily Trust quoted him as saying.
“I was young when I made some of the comments; I was in university, some of the comments were made when I was a teenager. I started preaching when I was 13, many scholars and individuals did not understand some of the international events and therefore took some positions based on their understanding; some have come to change their positions later.”
In his earlier defence, Pantani said, “Some of the lectures were even more than 15 to 20 years old. All of these countries that I have visited know more than all that the people are mentioning. Usually, all the lectures they mentioned were presented around 1998, 1999, 2000.
“The most recent could be around 2006, which is also 15 years ago. Most of them were, firstly, academic lectures from an Islamic perspective, and we were presenting the lectures in order to calm our youth that was being recruited to join extremism. So, in the course of doing that, I came up with an approach.”
Mr Buhari isn’t the first person to defend Pantami young utterances. A journalist who has covered the Boko Haram crisis, Ahmad Salkida tweeted that
Ahmad Salkida, a journalist who has covered the Boko Haram crisis from the trenches for many years tweets that: “Pantami put the Boko Haram doctrine to task more than any other Muslim cleric in northern Nigeria.
“Pantami, as a university Don at the time, had public debates with Yusuf about western education, democracy and some of the issues that the group was preaching against. He’s been threatened repeatedly by the same group that you say he has links to.
“The problem is not Pantami, the problem here is our unwillingness to understand this crisis, and yet we want to end it. 10 years down the road we still miss the fuse that drives the #BokoHaram doctrine. The group has zero tolerance for the likes of Pantami.”
Trouble began for the Minister when a local online news unearthed his past views which supported the killing of infidel, a word Jihadists use to describe a non-muslim.
Pantami could be heard saying “We are all happy whenever unbelievers are being killed,” “But the Sharia does not allow us to kill them without a reason.”
“Our zeal (hamasa) should not take precedence over our obedience to the sacred law.”
