This is a deleterious bill that warrants an urgent arrest. The apologists of this counter-productive bill are oblivious of the inherent cancer it poses to our democracy. The hierophants of this potentially obnoxious bill must be made to be cognisant of the simple fact that this bill will not espouse stability nor will it be appurtenance for the smooth functioning of our democracy. In fact, it may end up fulfilling what its sponsors want most.
For the votaries of the despicable bill to be obstinate about its passage, they must believe in the destructive capability of hate speech to decouple the equilibrium of our rambunctiously heterogeneous country. As such, they may be inadvertently placing the disintegration of this country on a speed-dial by attempting to occlude hate speech through the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In as much as I defer to the phasic approaches taken by various individuals to highlight the self-fulfilling potentiality of the bill, a holistic approach is needed to startle its crusaders into jettisoning the bill for democracy sake.
The loose construction of the bill with its disjointed nature is too broad to withstand judicial imprimatur. The features of this bill are heavily careened towards behavioural aspect (actus reus) at the detriment of criminal intent (mens rea). Not every time can one make a causal relationship between actus reus and mens rea. Where the intent is not discernible or where it is muddy, the attendant actus reus may not be sustained.
The bill is overzealously attempting to criminalise most attributes of humanity to the extent of mingling offensive speech with hate speech. The very essence that the United States Supreme Court found hate speech indictment to be poaching free speech despite a plethora of racist groups in the USA: Aryan Nation, KKK and other white supremacy associations.
Despite its 200 years plus of existence, the US has only been afflicted by one civil war, without the likelihood of another civil war looming, unlike in Nigeria where the likelihood of disintegration is a constant denominator because of scarcity-caused-mismanagement of resources, lack of upward mobility, limited geographical mobility, pervasive poverty, corrupt leadership, electoral malfeasance, infrastructural failure, unemployment galore, religious over-reach, tribal toxicities and pervasive illiteracy resulting in inter-religions animosities with tribal undertones.
Hence, ethnicity is not the cause of hate speech but a symptom of many underlying factors just like hate speech. Criminalising hate speech-causing ethnic rivalry is tantamount to blowing fire-woods with one’s mouth filled with water. The causa sine quo non of hate speech is allowed to flourish while the governments are not strictly held accountable for egregious leadership. More so, when the major focus of the bill is ethnicity-instigated hatred, which is a symptom of bad leadership.
This self-serving bill is deficient of the universally acceptable definition of hate speech: attacks on an individual or group on the basis of ascribed (not achieved) attributes: ethnicity, race religion, disability, sex, and age. This bill zooms mainly on violent, ethnic attendant of hate speech at the expense of other ascribed attributes–beliefs, sex, age, national origin or disability.
When does hate speech have religious or ethnic coloration? How do we characterise a belief that marriage outside a religion is a taboo justifying honor-killing? Or a religion aggressively flaunting the mantra of “only Jesus or Allah can save” amidst a religious omniumgatherum like Nigeria? When does the intolerance of Wahhabism against other Islamic sects and other religions transverse into hate speech and ethnic jingoism? Where the strict preaching of Evangelicals and Pentecostals threatens religious harmony of a nation, it is likely to have ethnic ripple effects in Nigerian context.
Religious fundamentalism has the tendency of inflaming hate speech. The enactment of Sharia in the hard core North is perceived to be culpable for the prodigious growth of Almajaris and Boko Haram. An assimilation of a religion with its cultural backdrop is an adoption of superiority complex with the subtext of hate speech over other races, religions and ethnicities as exemplified by ISIS and Al Qaeda and Hindi fanaticism.
A fatwa from an Imam from the North can be construed as a religious discrimination or ethnic slur by the other 50 per cent Christian Nigerians. An overseer’s proclamation against peaceful coexistence of religions may engender ethnic cleansing. Under this offensive bill, the criticisms of Buhari’s effort to impose Fulani settlements across the country would have heightened to hate speech. The rants of Femi Fani-Kayode against perceived Fulani hegemony would have risen to hate speech. Unqualified “Federal character” excluding millions of qualified Nigerians from opportunities and advancement for less-qualified candidates or applicants because of state of origin or religion is presumed to be an aggravated hate speech by a lot of Nigerians.
The devotees of this bill should be forewarned about its plausible and unintended consequences. In other climes, hate speech equivalence has been hyper-stretched to encompass atypical ideology from the dominant ideology. In the late 40s and 50s, presumed communists were persecuted in the USA under McCarthyism. Also under Chairman Mao during the 60s, a lot of Chinese were persecuted under the Cultural Revolution.
You do not start what you cannot end, especially in a fragile multicultural Nigeria! A recourse to special pleading by the zealots of this bill is foolhardiness at full-strength in a frail diversity and tenuous democracy. Be very careful of what you fear, it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Most Nigerians are careless about who leads them as long as they are beneficiaries of proactive leadership that provides for their material well-being and quality of life. As long as opportunities for self-actualisation abound, education guaranteed, qualitative health care flourishes, power supply constant, multiple transport networks proliferate, homelessness obliterated, corruption deescalated, and poverty restrained, a hate speech law is unneeded. The merchants of ethnic and religious bigotry would be starved of buyers. The obduracy of the pushers of this bill is banking on sequacity of the populace to feign the incompetency of leadership with hate speech. The sophistication of the following is more advanced than that of the do-nothing leadership.
Historically, hate speech has been weaponised by the oppressors to legitimise their brutalities. During slavery, any form of expostulation by the slaves and abolitionists was legally forbidden to preserve the status quo. Ditto, in apartheid South Africa, any remonstration against policies of racial discrimination was violently squashed. In the US, a policy of separate but equal was legitimised by the courts for many decades before it finally withered. Hate speech laws have been fashioned to muzzle legitimate concerns of the oppressed in order to foster the vested interests of the powerful.
Suffice to say that the foisting of hate speech law will be more dysfunctional than its conductive functionality for the nation and citizenry. Unity and patriotism are indwell by policies to uplift citizens’ material and security well-being, and quality of life. Notwithstanding the location of an American, a Swede, a Briton, a Japanese, a Chinese, an Aussie or a Norwegian in the universe —even on Mars or space— you cannot assail his or her sense of patriotism and belongingness to his or her nation.
In the civilised world, capital punishment is being phased out but we are flaunting death by hanging for hate speech! Where the punishment must fit the crime, capital sentence is cheapening human lives and making martyrs out of ethnic rabble-rousers while sculpting pronounced furrows among Nigerian ethnic groups, especially when it is perceived that the President is using the hate speech bill against their opponents. Imagine what tyrannical power hate speech decree would have vested in murderous General Sani Abacha!
Olatunji, a lawyer, wrote in from Lagos
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