In whose interest is the Federal government building an internet firewall?

By Our Reporter. 

The Chinese firewall is more of a national strategy to counter the information war being waged by the West against the country. As we're all aware that the western media deliberately promote falsehoods against China or any country not in their own good book. The use of the internet and social media platform by the west to destabilize China through terrorist activities in the Xinjiang province of the country is a typical case. Most of those involved in terrorist acts were radicalized through fake media contents online and before you know what is happening several people were already dead. So, China's use of firewall is justifiable and proper, if not the western countries would have created serious internal problems for China in a way that it won't have time to achieve all that it has achieved over the years. 

Nigeria opting to build such a firewall is welcomed, but for what purpose? Are we really clear about what we want to achieve with this? Is it just because the government is scared of citizens criticisms? If the government is embarking on this in order to muzzle the citizens, then they've got it entirely wrong, because even though China blocked Twitter, Google, facebook, youtube etc, Chinese people are still allowed to access these sites using VPN. In fact, there are local Chinese VPN providers who offer open internet services for Chinese users and the government didn't arrest them.

One other thing about the Chinese firewall which the western countries don't mention is that the firewall filters out every sexually lewd sites, pornography and the likes. These sites are known to have devastating effects on people who visit them and China took the responsibility to make its internet clean for its citizens. Any right thinking government should install a firewall program to protect its citizens against predatory nations like the US and its allies who spy on everybody including their allies. It's important to note that one of the tactics to control and conquer  a nation is to infiltrate the people with things like pornography, drugs and the likes. This the US has used very well in some countries around the world and thereby crumble their defense mechanism. One cannot blame China for taking steps to protect its citizens against the wolfs. 

If Nigeria is looking towards China for this type of firewall, then it's  welcomed, but if the intention is to muzzle the people, it will boomerang. The reason is that the current leadership in Nigeria is clueless about managing a nation in crisis. the president does not address the nation until he's begged. He doesn't hold media chats or interviews, all avenues where he could reach out to Nigerians and bring the nation together. The Chinese president speaks to his people almost on a daily basis, not by proxy or on twitter like Buhari is doing. Nigerians don't even know if their president is dead or alive! He ought to be using the traditional media more often because majority of the people are still using the traditional media as their first source of information. If the government of Nigeria goes ahead to build a firewall that will not allow people to use the internet freely, then it has shot itself in the foot because nobody will know what it is doing since the president is not media friendly.