Time to criminalise hate speech

Many of us were delighted to hear the acting president, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, decrying hate speeches and calling on Nigerians to desist from making them. This call was timely. We are all aware of how venomous criticism have taken over our cyber space, as individuals and groups launch vicious verbal attacks against one another, on […]

Many of us were delighted to hear the acting president, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, decrying hate speeches and calling on Nigerians to desist from making them. This call was timely. We are all aware of how venomous criticism have taken over our cyber space, as individuals and groups launch vicious verbal attacks against one another, on a daily basis.

Some of us are living witnesses to numerous sectarian crises in this country, to the extent that we are easily allergic to anything that could trigger civil or religious unrest. All of these past crises were preceded by occasions of hate speeches, delivered by unscrupulous elements, who find it easy to rouse the common people to violence, through the eloquent spread of hatred. 

The Acting President himself noted this when, in the speech he made at the Institute for Security Studies, he observed that every major crisis in history was preceded by hate speeches. He therefore declared that hate speech must not be permitted in the guise of freedom of expression and urged that ‘We must control and insist that people don’t make utterances that are capable of disrupting the peace.’ 

While His Excellency’s prescription is a good one, it remains only a generalized prescription, which has not named any line of action which can serve as a deterrent. What we need, in the face of this Hydra-headed monster known as hate speech, is to make clear-cut laws stating the penalty for any one who engages in promoting hatred, against individuals or groups, through whatever means he uses to achieve it. 

We must have specified prison terms, with no option of fine, for such purveyors of hate because the fruit of their labour is usually bloodshed and loss of lives and limbs. Apart from the numerous instances we have seen in many parts of Nigeria, in places like Bosnia and Rwanda, we have seen how purveyors of hate successfully lit and fuelled the fire of civil wars that lasted for years and led to the deaths of millions. 

In Bosnia, where ethnic-cleansing was the aim, a whole generation of men and boys was wiped out when Bosnian Serbs were roused to hatred and made to take up arms against their Muslim friends and neighbours, in an aggression that lasted a few years. While in Rwanda it was a tribal war fuelled by hatred from the elites of the two main tribes in the country, the Hutus and the Tutsis, which also saw friends and neighbours engaging in full-scale massacre of one another. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts in Africa and like most of the others, a needless show of force. Yet we must remember that it all began with the Hutus setting up a radio station and inciting their kinsfolk to take up arms and murder their so-called minority Tutsi oppressors.

This is why from the moment IPOB commander, Nnamdi Kanu began his Radio Biafra broadcasts, some of us heard echoes of the Rwandan genocide, since that was how it began. Unfortunately, because we have no laws against hate speech, when Kanu was arrested and taken to court, it was for treason against the Federal Republic of Nigeria since he had declared the independent state of Biafra and therefore threatened her territorial integrity. If he had been tried for hate speeches and been sentenced for that, he wouldn’t have had the courage to continue his inciting speeches and denigrating comments against other Nigerians today. 

We must therefore create a law that will criminalise hate speech.  It should clearly define what a hate speech is and why it is now a crime to engage in it, whether in person or on cyberspace. And it must also be clear that no one, no matter how highly-placed will be spared, if he verbally incites hatred against individuals or groups, for whatever motive. 

This means that if the Christian elders who blamed this government for trying to Islamise Nigeria were to do so again, after the law is in force, they should be arrested and tried for committing a crime. 

When the Vice-President said he believed poverty is the worse evil in this country and is the recipe for social crisis, I agreed with him. This is because when people are comfortable and well-fed, no one can easily incite them to violence. But because a hungry man is an angry man, he can easily be swayed to pick up arms against an imagined enemy or oppressor. This government will serve us well if it makes hate speech a crime. It will also leave behind a great legacy, since this step is likely to end all the civil and sectarian unrests we have been witnessing in the country, for several decades.