While Asari-Dokubo’s purported statements are without doubt offensive, the truth is that across the fault lines, irredentists and merchants of parochialism abound, often competing on hate-speech, grandstanding and threats. Several of such characters from various enclaves have said far worse things and challenged authorities even more audaciously than Asari-Dokubo did – and nothing happened. The […]
The call for Asari-Dokubo to be arrested
While Asari-Dokubo’s purported statements are without doubt offensive, the truth is that across the fault lines, irredentists and merchants of parochialism abound, often competing on hate-speech, grandstanding and threats. Several of such characters from various enclaves have said far worse things and challenged authorities even more audaciously than Asari-Dokubo did – and nothing happened. The tragedy of our country is that we like to play ostrich – our enclave is the embodiment of virtues, which others are trying to undermine, while those who are not ‘one of us’ are merely animated by hatred or envy. The truth is that the foibles we find in others abound aplenty in us – just as no enclave has a monopoly of the virtues and strengths they like to appropriate.
Calling for Asari Dokubo to be arrested – as Governor Babangida Aliyu did, is in my own opinion not informed by wisdom. Similarly, I feel that it was an error of judgment for the House of Representatives to ask the security agencies to investigate him because the political message here is that both Governor Aliyu and the House of Representatives felt sufficiently threatened by Asari-Dokubo’s threats to make their calls for him to be arrested or investigated. And it is precisely their ‘unwise’ interventions that helped to ensure that the matter remained on news headlines for days – boosting in the process, Asari Dokubo’s political stock. If Asari-Dokubo had been ignored, or allowed to be dealt with his equivalents – which you find in every enclave – the issue would be taken for what it really was – a mere grandstanding.
Now by intervening as they did, both Governor Aliyu and the House of Representatives unwittingly energized the ethnic-watchers, who effortless began to reel out the list of people from other fault-lines who had made even more ‘inciting’ statements without anything happening to such people. So what would be Governor Aliyu and the HOR’s responses to such long list of other offenders who went scot free? I believe such ‘unwise’ interventions by very top ranking politicians and political institutions end up widening the social distance among Nigerians by unwittingly fanning the embers of ethnic and regional discords.
Aside from what I believe is an inappropriate call for Asari-Dokubo to be arrested, dealing with offensive statements such as he made is often not a straight forward matter in free speech jurisprudence. An analogy could indeed be made between AsariDokubo’s offensive statements and those made in the 1960s by a member of the Ku Klux Klan – one of the worst purveyors of racial hatred in the USA. In a landmark case, Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), an Ohio Klansman named Clarence Brandenburg was arrested following a speech where he called for the overthrowing of the government. In a unanimous judgment which overturned his initial conviction, Justice William Brennan argued that: “the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” In other words, unless the ‘clear and imminent danger’ test is passed, you simply cannot arrest or start investigating someone for uttering a threat, however offensive that threat may be. This is complicated by the fact that even what constitutes ‘incitement’ could be contentious. As argued in another landmark case in the USA (Gitlow v New York [1925]), “Every idea is an incitement… The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker’s enthusiasm for the result”. By this definition, even the opinions we express in articles and books could be construed as incitement.
I am not by any means condoning the type of offensive statements that were credited to Asari-Dokubo. My point is that such statements are usually inflamed by unwise interventions from higher-political ups which often end up reinforcing the suspicions and feelings of persecutions by members of the in-group. In societies where the basis of statehood is settled, there is often an in-built self-censorship, which would ensure that unacceptable statements such as those made recently by Asari-Dokubo would lead to his being shunned by his peers and mainstream political actors. However in a highly polarised country like ours, where the basis of statehood remains contested, his offensive statements will achieve the opposite effect: he will be lionized by members of his in-group for being bold and audacious and they will readily roll out the war drums in defence of a ‘son of the soil’.
