Pantami says Facebook page hacked after reportedly raining curse on activist

Embattled Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, says his Facebook page was hacked but is now recovered.

On Monday, Mr Pantami reported that his social media account was hacked.

“This account was hacked. Just recovered it. It is not being managed by Dr Isa Ali Pantami, but by some youth. Disregard any request, comment or message from it,” he wrote via the same page on Monday night.

This comes after a comment from the account cursed Deji Adeyanju, an activist, who has been clamouring for the minister’s resignation.

Mr Adeyanju had written the United States Embassy and the Department of State Security (DSS) to investigate the allegations against the cleric.

Under a Facebook post tagging Mr Adeyanju as an enemy of Islam, the minister wrote in Hausa ” Allah ya tsine masa albarika”, which is translated as “May God destroy/ terminate/ruin his blessings.” in English.

The comment is now deleted and no longer visible.

While the Facebook post claimed the page is not being managed by the minister, checks by PREMIUM TIMES showed that the email address used to open the page ” isapantami@yahoo.com” belongs to Mr Pantami.

An email address “isaaliibrahim@hotmail.com” provided for enquiries is also owned by the minister and is reflected on his profile on NOUN’s website.

A media aide to the minister, Uwa Suleiman, who acknowledged a text from our reporter, did not respond to PREMIUM TIMES’ enquiries.

Pantami in the news

Mr Pantami has been in the news lately over sermons he delivered over a decade ago that supported extremist groups such as Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

Although he has renounced these teachings, blaming his immaturity at that time, Nigerians on social media have demanded his resignation from office.

While responding to questions during his daily Ramadan lecture at Anoor Mosque in Abuja on Saturday, the minister said his position on the issues such as the jihad has since changed.

He said his old position was based on the information he had at the time, some of which were the consensus opinion among clerics in northern Nigeria at the dawn of the faceoff between the West and some Islamic countries in the early mid-2000s.

“Some of the comments I made some years ago that are generating controversies now were based on my understanding of religious issues at the time, and I have changed several positions taken in the past based on new evidence and maturity,” Daily Trust quoted him as saying.

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“I was young when I made some of the comments; I was in university, some of the comments were made when I was a teenager. I started preaching when I was 13, many scholars and individuals did not understand some of international events and therefore took some positions based on their understanding, some have come to change their positions later.”

He had earlier told PREMIUM TIMES in an interview that some of these issues were concocted from certain lectures he presented over a decade ago.

“Some of the lectures were even more than 15 to 20 years old. All of these countries that I have visited know more than all that the people are mentioning. Usually, all the lectures they mentioned were presented around 1998, 1999, 2000. The most recent could be around 2006, which is also 15 years ago. Most of them were, firstly, academic lectures from Islamic perspective, and we were presenting the lectures in order to calm our youth that were being recruited to join extremism. So, in the course of doing that, I came up with an approach.”