Hate Speech Vs Freedom of Speech

“It is out of place to equate the Arewa youths’ exuberance with what IPOB is doing. One is lawless and the other lawful. Yet the illegal is allowed to meet in the open, commit clear treasonable felony and the authorities say the felons, who admitted to the backings of their elders, are beyond arrest. The Internal Affairs Minister said so.

The irony is that the lawful are on trial, a clear case of double standard. The Minister of Justice is one of those who do not wish our President well and one of his nasty acts is his recent move to have Nnamdi Kanu re-arrested and detained. If that intention goes through am sure the action will become a terrible dent on the psyche of the Igbo as a collective and something tells me it could boomerang on a larger scale than the instigators would have envisaged. Hate action is the mother of hate speech”.

The Director of Defense Information, Maj. Gen. John Enenche, when confronted with reports that the military has been assigned to monitor and arrest social media user on allegations of hate speech admitted that the security outfit was monitoring social media but not with intention to arrest anyone. According to him, the military does not have powers to make such arrests. Enenche said the military was just going to monitor the social media space but it has no power to arrest anyone that makes hate speech on social media.

Enenche said during a television interview:  “There was nothing like that. We do not have power to arrest people for hate speeches. It is just false assertion, against the military, and against my humble self that I said that we will be arresting people or checkmating people. The military is not going to be monitoring hate speeches. We have a strategic media centre, our strategic media centre monitors the media, simple. And it is like that all over the world. And we take that because it helps us to transform the nature of the intelligence to enable us to prepare for whatever call up we get to ensure security in this country,” said Enenche.

“Let me tell you and tell the public without fear of anybody; we are trained to do threat analysis of anything that would threaten the security of this country. So, it is part of our threat analysis. Any person can interpret it to mean that it is a follow up to the speech of the Vice-President (Yemi Osinbajo), the then Acting President and then the minister of interior; then that person can be right. Where do we take instruction from, where do we get information from? But on the whole, it is part of what is called threat analysis”.

Meanwhile, top human rights lawyers and activists have advised the Federal Government against its directive to security agencies to monitor citizens’ comments on social media over hate speeches in the country saying such moves would drag the country back to the dark era of military dictatorship, where Nigerians who were critical of the then government were driven underground.

As part of efforts to curb what the government terms the growing wave of hate speech in the country, the Federal Government had directed the country’s security agencies to monitor individuals on social media platforms whose comments, they aver are capable of derailing the corporate existence of Nigeria; with a view to arresting and prosecuting alleged offenders.

The Minister of Information and Culture, Mr. Lai Mohammed had vowed to unleash the National Broadcasting Commission on electronic media houses as well as security agencies against promoters of hate speeches and songs that are trending in some parts of the country.

A former governor of Abia State, Mr Orji Uzor Kalu, had in the same vein condemned the anti-Igbo songs being circulated on the social media in some sections of Northern Nigeria.

In his reaction to the government’s planned clampdown on alleged purveyors of hate speech, constitutional lawyer and human rights campaigner, Chief Mike Ozekhome, SAN, expressed his hatred for persons who peddle divisive comments in the country.