SOS Alert: PIDOM NIGERIA Is Missing (And I Think We May Know Who Has Him)

Nigeria's best known anonymous insurgent whistleblower has gone missing and his social media accounts have been compromised. Here's what I know.

This morning like many other mornings, I opened my Twitter app and I checked my direct messages. I saw a message from PIDOM NIGERIA, who is a familiar face in my inbox and I opened it. Thus began a long and winding story that has occupied my entire day, and is still far from over.

For those who do not know him, PIDOM is an anonymous Nigerian whistleblower who has gained fame and notoriety over the past 4 years for a series of high-profile document leaks and online exposés showcasing various appendages and apparatchiks of the Nigerian government at their malfeasant, abominable worst.

His leaks have caused embarrassment at the highest levels of government multiple times, resulting in multiple high level warnings from the Presidency to the civil service invoking the Official Secrets Act. This happened most recently in June.

While PIDOM and I have always maintained a friendly and mutually respectful relationship, we have generally worked independently of each other. It is however, public knowledge that my Twitter handle is the only one that he follows. This has often fed the impression that “PIDOM NIGERIA” is in fact, a David Hundeyin alter ego - an idea that neither of us has been eager to dispel as it has provided an extra layer of security for him.

On occasion, we have even collaborated on big stories and we touch base and share information with each other via direct messages and voice calls from time to time. I would go as far as to say that we have become good friends over the years - within the boundaries necessitated by our unique security situations. He has never disclosed his location, his photograph, his government name or any other identifying information to me. I also do not have his direct contact number, and I know nothing about his family situation.

PIDOM and I had not spoken since early August, because I was actually somewhat displeased with him due to a difference in opinion regarding the recent #EndBadGovernanceInNigeria protests. While I favoured stepping back and allowing Nigerians to speak for themselves organically, PIDOM was of the idea that “defacto leadership” needed to be established to assist the protest logistically. Consequently, he had made what I considered to be an error of judgment in the process of trying to ease logistics for protesters, leading to an online spectacle that was predictably seized upon by the government as evidence of “politicians funding the protests so as to achieve regime change.”

What Happened

Given this background, I had no idea what to do when this person claiming to be his close associate reached out to me using his account, offering me his login details. The purported associate claimed that PIDOM was arrested on August 5 in Port Harcourt and transferred to the Force Criminal Investigation Department (FCID) in Abuja shortly thereafter, where he remains under the purview of the National Cybercrime Centre (NCCC).

According to this unidentified person, PIDOM’s instructions to him/her were that if anything were to happen to him, the login details of his account should be handed over to me. Supposedly, his phone was destroyed during the arrest and given the alleged lack of evidence tying him to the Twitter handle, a case for his innocence could be made stronger if I used his account and tweeted in his voice. Supposedly, this person said, he had been granted administrative bail with “stringent conditions.”

I reflexively disbelieved the story and I noticed that this person made a subtle attempt to ask me for my WhatsApp number. Nonetheless, I tried to press him/her for more information by accusing them of working for the government. Their response was to give me what purported to be login details for PIDOM’s account.

I tried the details - they didn’t work. This in itself was a red flag. Why would a close and trusted associate of PIDOM who had access to his account and claimed to be following his instructions hand me incorrect details? If indeed the incarcerated person were so important to him and my involvement could help clear his name, why would he not first make sure that any information handed over was correct?

I made this point forcefully and once again accused this person of working for the government, just to see what they would do. I also included a demand for a video proving their identity with a 5-minute ultimatum, failing which I would go public.

Their response was 2 voice notes from different individuals purporting to be his family members, pleading with me not to make the matter public and promising to send the correct login details. Eventually, whoever was on the other end of the conversation sent another login password. This also failed.

He/She then sent 2 new sets of login credentials purporting to be for PIDOM’s Gmail account Twitter accounts.

The Gmail credentials did not work.

The Twitter password however, worked and I found myself in PIDOM NIGERIA’s account. Recognising that I still did not know who I was speaking to or what their agenda was, I immediately changed the account password and set up fresh multi-factor authentication, permanently logging out anybody else who might be signed in to the account.

To confirm the timing of all this, you can find one of these tweets here

Immediately I did this, several things started happening.

First of all, I received what looked like a 2 Factor Authentication code of some description on my WhatsApp account.

Almost simultaneously, I also began receiving login authentication codes for PIDOM’s account on the UK number I had just used for a new 2FA on the account.

In quick succession, someone also began trying to hack into one of my WhatsApp accounts.

All of these happened within 40 minutes of each other, and I rapidly began to draw some deductions about what was happening.

My Conclusions

1. The purported “close associate” of PIDOM who only decided to reach out to me today - 17 days after he was allegedly arrested - was at the very least, not being truthful with me. If PIDOM’s express instructions to a close and trusted person were to contact me, they would have done so immediately, and would definitely not have waited 2 and a half weeks.

2. The fact that this person (or persons) kept tweeting from PIDOM’s account after the 5th of August (and did not need my help trying to sound like him), meant that they had another reason for wanting to get me involved now, 17 days after the fact.

3. In our several conversations, PIDOM alluded many times to having multi-factor authentication and multiple layers of security on all his social media accounts and electronic devices. The idea that I would be able to login to his account using only a username and password - no 2FA code from the supposedly destroyed phone containing the authenticator apps - meant that someone had systematically gained control over all his internet accounts. That phone was definitely not destroyed in the “scuffle” that allegedly culminated in his arrest.

4. The originating IP adresses of login attempts to Twitter and Gmail accounts can be viewed by anyone logged into the account. The purpose of giving me wrong login details could have been to attempt to view my IP address - and thus track my physical location. Unfortunately, I happen to use a VPN pointed permanently at Lagos, Nigeria or Accra, Ghana.

5. The supposed administrative bail was as good as no bail. The chances of finding anyone with property worth half a billion naira willing to place themselves as surety for someone suspected of being one of the biggest causes of embarrassment to the Nigerian government in recent history, were as good as my chances of becoming an Olympic medallist someday - not quite zero, but also definitely zero.

   

6. That being the case, the hysterical insistence by the “family members” that I keep his disappearance secret made no sense. If indeed the person allegedly in detention at FCID called “Isaac Bristol M” is indeed suspected by the NSA’s office of being the same person as PIDOM NIGERIA, his biggest chance of ever achieving freedom again would be for the public to make as much noise as possible, so that he would become recognised - correctly - as a political prisoner. Keeping quiet - and even helping to conceal his disappearance by tweeting from his account - would make me complicit in his disappearance.

7. On August 13, National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu made a loud claim about having “arrested key protest sponsors and frozen crypto funds linked to them.” PIDOM - as is well known - carries out most of his daily transactions using crypto, and in fact he had his Tether and bitcoin wallet addresses pinned to the top of his Twitter profile.

   

   It just so happened that 2 of the addresses purportedly frozen by the NSA were in fact, PIDOM’s Tether and bitcoin addresses.

   

   Using data from the algorithmic wallet identification startup Arkham Intelligence, Pelumi Adejumo of CryptoSlate published a story on August 14 showing that PIDOM’s Tether address had recorded multiple interactions with centralised crypto exchanges like KuCoin, Binance and OKX.

   

   Could it be the case that the government obtained his KYC information from Binance - which effectively has a hostage currently held by the Nigerian government? If in fact this is what happened, and the person linked to these wallets was the same person allegedly arrested by the government, that person would be in very big trouble right now - the sort that would not be served by keeping silent about it.

8. What if the person who is allegedly in the custody of the Nigerian state under suspicion of being PIDOM has been tortured or even murdered? What if the attempt to rope me into the narrative management surrounding his disappearance is an attempt by Nigerian intelligence to conceal their torture and/or murder of a prominent whistleblower?

9. Before locking him out of the account, I asked the person using PIDOM’s account for proof of the incarcerated person’s life. He claimed that he saw PIDOM last week and that he is in “high spirits.” I asked if the lawyer was aware of my prospective involvement in the issue, and if I could speak to the lawyer. He replied, “Not now.” What on earth did that even mean?

10. The obvious attempts to hack into my WhatsApp account show that while the person I spoke to claimed not to know my number, someone definitely did. From this I deduced that even if the person I spoke to does not work for the government, the government was almost certainly using them as a patsy while working to compromise my security behind them.

11. 2FA login codes such as the ones I received on my UK number are only sent when a password is entered correctly. If a wrong password is entered, no 2FA code is sent out. Now bear in mind that I had just changed PIDOM NIGERIA’s Twitter login details - yet someone was able to correctly enter the new password and make multiple attempts to login.

    

    The incredible speed of this hack is a telltale sign of a state actor’s involvement. The list of entities in Nigeria that have access to the technology, complex hardware and resources to brute-force a high-security password in less than 40 minutes is very short, and has only 3-letter agencies on it. DSS. DIA. NIA. NSA.

    Take your pick.

What I Think

I have decided to go public with this because something I have learned in my years of interaction with state actors in Nigeria is to always expect the worst, and nothing but the worst. Personally, I suspect that my friend PIDOM is - at the very least - in serious mortal jeopardy, and may in fact be dead. This would explain why the Nigerian state has - in its characeristically cack-handed, Mickey Mouse fashion - tried to rope me into this poor attempt at narrative concealment.

Anyone who is familiar with the behaviour of the security establishment - particularly the Intelligence services - knows that their surprisingly sophisticated technology and endless budget to buy every sort of surveillance technology that Israel will sell to them, is only matched by their total absence of purpose and base barbarity. These people will buy a Japanese Samurai’s ceremonial Tantō for millions of naira, only to end up using it to cut suya in Garki. It’s just their nature.

All the Israeli surveillance tech they have spent billions on over the years was never used to prevent the ongoing hostile takeover of the Nigerian state that started in 2012. It was never used to prevent Nigeria from becoming the world leader in deaths caused by terrorism, ahead of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. It was not even used to prevent a coup next door which toppled a regime that was friendly to Nigeria, and installed one that chased NAF-001 - with Nigeria’s president onboard - out of its airspace at gunpoint.

It is only ever used to go after whistleblowers like PIDOM NIGERIA, and journalists like myself and Fisayo Soyombo. Because nothing - not even a loaded anti-aircraft gun pointed at NAF-001 with the president onboard, shaking like an insect doused with Raid - is as threatening to the Nigerian security establishment as people who dare to speak the truth when it’s not fashionable to do so.

If indeed my friend PIDOM has been killed, I want the world to know what happened and who was responsible for it. I will not be silent about it. Nigerians must know. Even if as usual, they will do nothing about it, they must know. If not for our sake, then for our children. If not for them, then for their children. Or maybe their children after them.

Eventually someday, a generation will arise in this country that will not know fear. No NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware will suffice for this establishment then; no Circles and its smartphone exploits will yield nearly enough information to stop what is inevitable.

And on the off-chance that PIDOM NIGERIA is still alive and in the custody of the Nigerian government, I also want the Nigerian people to know. This is what your gratuitously-extracted taxes are funding in our country. Speak out for PIDOM because tomorrow it will be you. If not you, then your wife, your brother, your neighbour, your child. The monster we have emboldened since 2015 with our silence and fear is coming for all of us next.

If you want, you can speak up and shout for PIDOM.

If not, that’s also fine.

We will all be here.

That is all.