The Director of Defence Information, Maj. Gen. John Enenche, while featuring on Sunrise Daily on Channels Television on Wednesday denied claims that the military is monitoring hate campaigners with the aim of arresting them, saying it does not have the powers to arrest Nigerians in that capacity. He explained that the military would only monitor the social media for information that could be useful for the planning of its operations. On the alleged plans by the military to arrest hate speech campaigners, he said…
“There was nothing like that. We do not have power to arrest people for hate speeches. It is just false assertion, against the military, and against my humble self that I said that we will be arresting people or checkmating people. The military is not going to be monitoring hate speeches. Did I tell you hate speech in your recordings? We have a strategic media centre, our strategic media centre monitors the media, simple.”
“And it is like that all over the world. And we take that because it helps us to transform the nature of the intelligence to enable us to prepare for whatever call up we get to ensure security in this country. Let me tell you and tell the public without fear of anybody; we are trained to do threat analysis of anything that would threaten the security of this country.
So, it is part of our threat analysis. Any person can interpret it to mean that it is a follow up to the speech of the Vice-President (Yemi Osinbajo), the then Acting President and then the minister of interior; then that person can be right. Where do we take instruction from, where do we get information from? But on the whole, it is part of what is called threat analysis.”