For almost a month, TikTok has barely worked in Kaduna, Kano, Kebbi and Sokoto. Videos freeze, feeds refuse to refresh and uploads stall on ordinary mobile data. The trouble started around 11 September, and within three days the app was close to unusable across all four states. But in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and everywhere else in the country, it has carried on as normal.
In that time, TikTok has said nothing. The company has issued no statement, published no outage notice and ignored requests for comment. The Nigerian Communications Commission has been just as quiet, and so have the mobile networks whose data the app runs on. Millions of Nigerians lost access to one of the biggest platforms in the country, and every institution that could explain it has chosen silence.
That silence has now landed in court. On 5 October, the Foundation for Digital Justice and Sustainable Development filed a fundamental rights suit against TikTok at the Federal High Court in Abuja. It wants the judge to rule that the restriction violates freedom of expression and freedom from discrimination, to order the company to restore access, and to compel a public apology in three national newspapers.
The suit has a real weakness, and it should be stated plainly. The foundation has to prove that TikTok caused the disruption, and so far the evidence is circumstantial. Its strongest point is that users in the affected states can get back on the app by switching on a VPN. That tells us the block is tied to location. It does not tell us who put it there. A platform can restrict a region, and so can a telecom operator acting on its own or on an instruction from government.
Nigerians have good reason to keep that last possibility in mind. In June 2021, the federal government ordered networks to block Twitter, and the ban stayed in place for seven months. The ECOWAS Court later ruled it unlawful. Nobody has shown that anything similar is happening here, and it would be irresponsible to claim it. Still, a coalition of civil society groups has asked the government to disclose any directive or order that may have affected access to the platform, along with its legal basis, scope and duration. A simple denial from the NCC would settle that question in one afternoon. It has not come.
TikTok’s own position is no more reassuring. Its terms of service allow it to restrict all or part of the platform for business and operational reasons, without notice. Every user in Nigeria agreed to that clause when they signed up. A company that reserves the power to cut off a region at will carries a matching duty to say whether it has used that power. If TikTok did not restrict these four states, one sentence from its Africa team would clear its name. If it did, the people affected are entitled to know the reason.
The cost of this is easy to underestimate from the south. TikTok is where a Kano tailor shows new designs, where a Sokoto food vendor takes orders, and where young people in Kaduna argue about politics, football and music. The foundation’s lawyer, Festus Ogun, told TechCabal that “this has nothing to do with content moderation,” and he is right. Moderation removes a post or an account. What has happened in these states has removed everybody.
There is also the matter of which states. A disruption confined to four states in the north-west will be read through Nigeria’s oldest suspicions about region, religion and who gets to speak. Leaving that unexplained for a month is careless at best.
The court may well decide that the foundation has not proved its case against TikTok. Even then, the lawsuit will have done something useful if it forces the company to appear before a Nigerian judge and state on record what it knows. That is more than its users in the north have been given in four weeks. TikTok, the NCC and the telecom operators each hold a piece of the answer. One of them should give it.
