Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has picked up an unlikely supporter for the ban on Twitter in his country: former US president Donald Trump.
Buhari’s administration banned Twitter last week after it suspended the president’s account for posting a Tweet threatening violence against the country’s Igbo minority.
Attorney General Abubakar Malami has warned that people who tweet can go to jail.
However, millions of Nigerians have found ways of continuing to express themselves through social media.
In a statement on Wednesday Trump offered his congratulations to Nigeria for the ban and said he should have done it while he was president.
“Who are they to dictate good and evil if they themselves are evil? Perhaps I should have done it while I was President. But (Mark) Zuckerberg (the CEO of Facebook) kept calling me and coming to the White House for dinner telling me how great I was…”
Trump has been banned indefinitely from Twitter for fomenting violence and suspended on Facebook for at least two years.
Trump was less flattering about Nigeria while he was in the White House.
Complaining about immigration at one meeting he grumbled that the 40,000 Nigerian visitors to the US would never “go back to their huts” in Africa. A few months later he reportedly referred to African nations as “shithole countries”.
