Two years after funding began and several months after Crowwe was introduced to the public, the app has not appealed to Nigerians
The President Muhammadu Buhari-led government has for two years been funding IPI Solutions, a software engineering firm owned by Adamu Garba to produce Crowwe, a platform, that would help the government silence existing social media platforms in the country.
According to People's
Gazette, more than two years after the Buhari regime invested public funds into
Garba’s application, there is little hope, however, that taxpayers would see a
bang for the buck.
People's Gazette
obtained bank documents that carried a transfer of funds from the Central Bank
of Nigeria to Garba’s IPI Solutions, a software engineering firm run by Mr
Garba.
The company developed
and deployed the Crowwe social media app.
The Central Bank of
Nigeria on May 21, 2019, transferred N136.8million to Garba’s IPI Solutions,
documents said, marking one of several transfers that sources said the Buhari
regime paid to Garba in the course of building the Crowwe app.
Although a major
beneficiary of the social media storm that weakened the Goodluck Jonathan
administration and amplified the opposition’s messages ahead of the 2015
presidential election, Buhari has relentlessly railed against the negative
influence of social media since coming to power.
After realising the
enormous control that social media has in shaping public opinion, even amongst
citizens with little education or financial ability to be on the Internet,
Buhari started introducing different tactics to regulate online speech.
A few months after
assuming office in 2015, members of his ruling APC pushed a so-called social
media bill that civil liberties campaigners said was too offensive to be
accepted in a democratic system.
The bill was summarily
defeated, but the government pushed at least two other similar bills, including
one that proposed death penalty for online speech, that were defeated under the
Bukola Saraki-led parliament.
But shortly after
narrowly securing a second term, Buhari agreed with his aides that it was
necessary to control social media, according to sources familiar with the
matter.
Several ways to ensure
that the government’s message dominated the public space with little to no
pushback from citizens were suggested.
“It was while the
government was trying to find ways to control the media space that Adamu
Garba’s company was picked as one of the promising businesses that could
proffer solutions,” an administration official told People.
“The seriousness of
controlling social media cannot be overplayed.”
Garba earned instant
name recognition in 2018 after showing interest in running for president
against Buhari.
He summarily abandoned
his campaign and became a recognisable voice in support of the president.
The regime provided
hundreds of millions to Garba’s firm in anticipation that its Crowwe platform
would make a sufficient dent on the appeal of Facebook and Twitter, officials
briefed on the matter said.
But two years after
funding began and several months after Crowwe was introduced to the public, the
app has not appealed to Nigerians on the scale expected by both the regime and
its developers.
Only a few thousand
users have signed up, and even then the app has been riddled with complaints
around its functionality.
As part of efforts to
give life to Crowwe, Garba sought to push Twitter out of Nigeria, filing a
lawsuit against the platform in the wake of last October’s historic #EndSARS
campaign.
More than any other
social media rivals, Garba saw Twitter’s presence in Nigeria as an existential
threat to his own platform and assumed its exit would push Nigerians to his own
platform by default.
But his expectation
was again dashed this month when his platform failed to pick up despite the
government’s ban on Twitter. Instead, Garba found his Crowwe app removed from
Google Play Store a week after the Twitter ban following a deluge of complaints
from users.
He said the app was
taken down to upload, but failed to explain why it was only Crowwe that
required being taken down before an update could be pushed to enhance user
experience.
The app was largely
unusable that Buhari, his administration officials and supporters had to move
to Indian platform Koo following their exit from Twitter earlier this month.
In his reaction, Garba
said, "We do projects and receive payments from the Central Bank. I think
it is a project we did for the EFCC.”
He was silent on
whether or not the projects were through competitive bidding in line with
extant public procurement regulations.
Crowwe was “100 per
cent developed by us internally," Adamu added.
“We are even looking
for investors locally and internationally. We are looking for investors to
further scale up and improve Crowwe capacity.”
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