Dark motives in the anti-hate speech bill

It is easy to get lost in the thick thicket of ignorance that surrounds hate speech but this should perk you up on the dangers we face should the bill now doing the kokoma before the senate scale the fence of public opposition and finds space in our statute books. The first time a public official talked of hate speech in our country must be sometime in July 2017 when the Department of State Services hosted a national seminar on unity in diversity, security and development in Abuja. A worthy topic, if you ask me.

Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo addressed the seminar. I did not read his full speech and would not know what led to his warning that “hate speech precedes genocide, the greatest tragedy in human history.” But I suppose that if you are talking of unity in diversity, it is important to remind people that the country needs more men and women with both the capacity and the inclination to maintain what American writer, Edwin Newman, called “a civil tongue.”

The vice-president’s reference to hate speech instantly generated two reactions. The first came from INEC which promised to monitor the 2019 electioneering campaigns to ensure that politicians did not indulge in hate speech to secure political advantages over their opponents – and set the country on fire. The second was the zeal of some policemen who, out of ignorance, always a present danger, promptly arrested three young men in December 2018 for alleged hate speech. Deji Adeyanju, the convener of a social group called Concerned Nigerians, and two of his colleagues put out these posters: “The romance between APC and the police is unholy;” “the police is not a department of APC” and, “we just want the police to be neutral.”

Did these constitute hate speech? And were the policemen right to arrest them for breaking a law that did not exist? The posters were not even offensive, even if the police felt offended. If anything, the posters were childish. They were not the worst things people had said, and still say, about the Nigeria Police Force. There are clear and present dangers to our freedoms, rights and liberty when a minor irritation in the law enforcement community brings down the sledge hammer on our fellow men and women.

To start with, what is hate speech? I have not read the bill before the senate although I have tried to lay my hands on it and, therefore, would not know how its sponsor, Senator Abdullahi Sabi, defines it. But I accept the definition by Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. It defines “hate speech (as) speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such a race, religion, ethnic group, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Hate speech has nothing to do with an uncivil tongue. The world is full of men and women given to frequent fulminations against governments and their leaders everywhere. They are not hate mongers. Their robust and often incendiary views on how not to manage human and materials resources to favour the few to the detriment of the many, do not constitute hate speech. To their credit, they afflict the comfortable. And that is a very good thing.

The United States supreme court ruled in three separate cases of hate speech or offensive verbal representations in 1969, 1992 and 2011, that free speech is free speech even if it is bigoted or inflammatory. It is covered by the First Amendment. Freedom protected? I am jealous.

A speech, verbal, published or visual representation, must meet this criterion to qualify as hate speech. It must profile persons or groups of persons mentioned earlier with the intent to set them up for public ridicule or odium, leading to the egregious denial of their fundamental human and other rights and freedoms. Profiling is not a one-time thing. It is sustained over a period of time to create the desired effect. Criticisms, no matter how robust or even irresponsible, cannot be deemed to profile those at whom they are directed.

Countries that have anti-hate speech legislations based them on a) their historical experience and the need to prevent history from repeating itself and b) to protect minorities – racial, ethnic, religious, sexual orientation and, of course, women. Nigeria has had no historical experience it should guard against. The bill before the senate must have a more sinister motive than the need to protect minorities because no such need has arisen.

Two things, at least, are fundamentally wrong with the conception of Sabi’s anti-hate speech bill. One, it was conceived essentially as an anti-press legislation and thus follows the beaten path of some 59 similar legislations in the country since the Newspapers Amendment Act of 1964, to gag the media, the only social institution allowed by law to take full advantage of the most important human freedom, the freedom of speech. The media are beneficiaries of this freedom because they help others to exercise it on a daily basis. Once the exercise of that freedom by the people through the media is abridged, all other freedoms are simultaneously abridged. Opposition to the bill must be clear, focused and not mealy-mouthed.

Two, it seeks to ride on the wave of public sentiments generated by the social media to run the rings around the rest of it. Its dark intent is to protect public officers from the admittedly recklessness in the social media. The social media are platforms for the exercise of freedom of speech. I do see the president, the vice-president and other important people too sounding off on the social media platform, Twitter. The social media platform is a market place for the expression of views, some of which are polite and sober and others fiery and unarguably, irresponsible. But that is the beauty of freedom of speech. A democratic government becomes a hollow institution if it cannot guarantee and protect the basic rights and freedoms by refusing any legislations that assault or abridge the mother of all freedoms – the freedom of speech.

We must also worry about the fact that this being a country of eye-service, if the bill becomes law, the overzealous in the security community, anxious to please the government, would, with uncommon zeal, haul before the courts anyone who breaches the tradition of speaking well of the government. None of us would be safe. Now is the time to say no – medicine before death, I think.

An election observer group called Centre for Information Technology and Development, observed the November 16 governorship elections in Kogi and Bayelsa state, and has reported that its situation room captured 387 instances of hate speech during the electioneering campaigns. The coordinator of countering hate speech project under the umbrella body, Hamza Ibrahim, said, according to a Daily Trust of story of December 12, that these hate speeches were captured at campaign rallies and the social media. I wish he had given us instances of some of those speeches to help us judge if, indeed, they were hate speeches. Electioneering campaigns and elections are fought with brickbats oozing with hate and manufactured facts but they do not qualify as hate speeches. We must be careful about this otherwise we would foul the public space with naivety and misjudgments.

A speech must meet the following five criteria to qualify as hate speech:

One, it must be explicitly or implicitly directed at persons or group of persons who are different from the speaker in terms of race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation; two, it must be intended to cause social, racial, ethnic or religious disharmony and capable of inciting violence against persons or group categorized above; three, it must be seen to be calculated to injure or traumatize persons or groups of persons for the purposes of causing the community in which they reside to deny them their basic human rights, freedoms and entitlements; four, it must explicitly or implicitly profile persons or groups of persons it is directed at to prejudice others against them by emphasizing their detestable racial or ethnic characteristics and five, it must be discriminatory in intent and objective.

Bear these points in mind when and if, the come comes to become.