Fact Check: Is Communications Minister Pantami on a US terrorism watchlist?

Yesterday at 2:08 PM | Pulse Nigeria | Jude Egbas


There have been news reports suggesting that Nigeria's Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, is on a United States terrorism watchlist.

According to the reports, Pantami who is a former student of Salafist ideologies, was trained in Saudi Arabia and the Mid­dle East with other top Is­lamic jihadists.

The reports also say before his appointment as a minister by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019, Pantami was a known Islamic preacher who held dangerous views against the American govern­ment.

The platforms have also substantiated their stories by establishing a nexus between Pantami's alleged ties with terrorists and an old video of the minister debating Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf.


Was Pantami an Islamic cleric?

Yes, Pantami was an Islamic cleric who had a contest of ideas and doctrines with Yusuf and other scholars.

Pantami has also been an Islamic scholar for many years.

In the Youtube videos cited and currently making the rounds on social media, Pantami can be heard interrogating Yusuf's fundamentalist and extremist views and showing them up as deeply flawed.

Far from being a friendly chit-chat with the Boko Haram founder, Pantami in the videos referenced, tells Yusuf that his views on western education are problematic and erroneous.

The Islamic scholarly community in Nigeria is a very small, closely-knit one. It is not uncommon for scholars and clerics with opposing ideologies and differing views in this setting to publicly engage on doctrines and interpretation of the Koran.

Ahmad Salkida, a journalist who has covered the Boko Haram crisis from the trenches for many years tweets that: "Pantami put the Boko Haram doctrine to task more than any other Muslim cleric in northern Nigeria.

"Pantami, as a university Don at the time, had public debates with Yusuf about western education, democracy and some of the issues that the group was preaching against. He's been threatened repeatedly by the same group that you say he has links to.

"The problem is not Pantami, the problem here is our unwillingness to understand this crisis, and yet we want to end it. 10 years down the road we still miss the fuse that drives the #BokoHaram doctrine. The group has zero tolerance for the likes of Pantami."

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What are the US and Nigerian intelligence agencies saying?

Pulse has reached out to the US Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Embassy in Nigeria, the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), the Department of State Services (DSS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) through calls, emails and text messages on the allegations against Pantami in the local media.


A lady on the other end of the line at the US embassy in Nigeria said the allegation was untrue, before handing Pulse an email address for the press department and referring us to the FBI.

Text messages and calls to the NIA and DSS in Nigeria have not been responded to.

At the CIA and FBI, voices on the other ends of the lines first described the reports as untrue or hasty, before directing us to the publicly available terrorism list on the FBI website which Pulse has painstakingly gone through.

There is no 'Pantami' on the FBI's publicly available terrorism or most wanted watchlist.

We will update this story with responses to the emails we sent to the US State Department, the CIA and the US Embassy in Abuja as soon as we have them.

It is also instructive that no US news outlet or credible news platform in Nigeria has reported this bit of trending, 'weighty' news.

Conclusion

There is at this time, no shred of evidence that Nigeria's Communications Minister Isa Pantami is on any local or international terror watchlist.


The reports appear to have conveniently woven a link between Pantami's days as an Islamic cleric, his public interaction with a terrorist sect founder and his Salafist ideology.

In our reckoning, all of these are not enough to tag him a terrorist who belongs in a most wanted list kept by US intelligence agencies.

For while the Sunni Islamic Salafi movement is conservative in outlook and doctrine, Boko Haram's brand of Islam is brutal and lies on the extreme end of the spectrum.

Insinuations that Pantami's name is on a US terror watchlist are therefore baseless, speculative, frivolous and untrue at this point.

The reports in themselves have deployed the word "allege"--indicating that there is not enough evidence in them to convict Pantami at the time of writing.

naptu2:
Is there any statement by any US agency about this watchlist business? I've checked the FBI, State Department and other websites, but I haven't seen anything yet.

It was only reported on Nigerian newspaper websites.

naptu2:
By the way, that Pantami issue reminds me of a discussion at a family event c2005. In just a few words someone said something that had been at the back of my mind but I didn't know how to express it. It blew my mind.



This was during the politicking for the 2007 elections and there had been a picture of a politician at a shrine and people online, in the newspapers and on radio had been condemning the politician and then this guy says, "But if we had seen a picture of him in church with a bishop, nobody would have complained".



Think about that.

Yesterday some people said, "How can a sheikh be Nigeria's minister of communications", but the same people did not ask, "How can a pastor be Nigeria's vice president".


How can a sheikh be an ICT expert? How can a pastor be a professor of law.


It exposes our bigotry.

naptu2:
This ⬆⬆⬆ is the first article that answered the question that I asked yesterday.





This is not 1985. It was difficult to verify this kind of news item in 1985, but today all these agencies and people are online and verification is much easier. That's why I immediately went to the FBI's list of wanted terrorists when this story broke yesterday. There's no Pantami on the list. See for yourself. https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists


Now, if it was some top secret list that nobody had access to, do you think that Nigerian newspapers would have access to the information?

That's the other thing, how come the story only appeared on Nigerian news sites (most of them copied it from Daily Independent)? How come it's not on the BBC, CNN, etc?

This looks more like some kind of propaganda campaign.

anonym0us:
he's still a terrorist

naptu2:
This ⬆⬆⬆ is the first article that answered the question that I asked yesterday.





This is not 1985. It was difficult to verify this kind of news item in 1985, but today all these agencies and people are online and verification is much easier. That's why I immediately went to the FBI's list of wanted terrorists when this story broke yesterday. There's no Pantami on the list. See for yourself. https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists


Now, if it was some top secret list that nobody had access to, do you think that Nigerian newspapers would have access to the information?

That's the other thing, how come the story only appeared on Nigerian news sites (most of them copied it from Daily Independent)? How come it's not on the BBC, CNN, etc?

This looks more like some kind of propaganda campaign.