Hate Speech Vs Freedom of Speech

Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the society is dissolved and tyranny is erected on its ruins” Benjamin Franklin.

Tension is rife in the country presently. The pro and anti-government advocates have doused themselves in a war of words that is gradually dovetailing into physical warfare. The government of the day as well as other concerned Nigerians and members of the international community are apprehensive that the signals emanating from the country may be scary and calls for caution on all fronts. Expectedly, the social media and even the traditional media platforms appear to be the rendezvous for the verbal salvos flying in all directions of the country.

President Muhammadu Buhari, in his first public broadcast to the nation after a 106-day- long medical sojourn to the United Kingdom, took a swipe at the social media in what many political watchers and concerned Nigerians have dubbed declaration of war against the Social Media activists and freedom of speech. The president, short of immediately resurrecting the obnoxious Decree 4, which made him infamous during his first outing as military head of state, fumed that the social media activists were taking their liberty for free speech to an unacceptable extreme crescendo.

The president’s remark in that speech may have given innuendo that his media handlers kept feeding him with large doses of remarks on social media which could have contributed in worsening his health condition and prolonged his stay in the London Hospital. In his words “In the course of my stay in the United Kingdom, I have been kept in daily touch with events at home. Nigerians are robust and lively in discussing their affairs, but I was distressed to notice that some of the comments, especially in the social media have crossed our national red lines by daring to question our collective existence as a nation. This is a step too far.”

That remark drew the ire of a large spectrum of Nigerians, especially the ardent social media community and the army of civil society activists. While it raised a lot of salient questions regarding the temperament of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC government, it revealed the sensitivity of Nigerians about the current governance of the country. They queried when the government drew the so-called “national red lines”; whether it came prior to the 2014 electioneering campaign which saw the APC deploying all manner of derogation and invectives in an attempt to debase the then ruling People’s Democratic Party, PDP, or the lines suddenly appeared out of the blues after Nigerians started mudslinging the government over its sheer inefficiency and lopsided distribution of the dividends of governance.