] Olaoye] Wole Beware the diet of hate!
If you are a regular user of social media as I am, you cannot but wonder what has come over some of our people. There are more than 11 million Nigerians on Facebook alone. Other platforms are swarming with our contributors. I find the chat rooms and political fora most disturbing. Hiding under the anonymity of an alias, many of the contributors seize the opportunity to rain invectives and pour scorn on other ethnic groups. You would think there was a more hateful version of the Arab/ Israeli war going on in Nigeria.
The kinds of words they typically use are not otherwise publishable; I could have illustrated with a few. Pure, undiluted hate for other ethnic groups based on stereotypes! The interlocutors are notorious for ignoring whatever issue is up for discussion only to dispense intense and extreme bigotry in the name of social commentary. It has gone beyond the stage of mere derision. I remember that I have had cause in the last two years to draw attention to the fact that the older generation of Nigerians seem to be handing over their traditional ‘enemies’ to their children in a classic case of transgenerational perpetuation of anthropophobia and naked primitive narrowmindedness.
Manyofthecyber-warriors are young people straddling the entire gamut of the social spectrum. Where did they acquire the deep revulsion, no — nihilistic contempt for groups other than their own? When they refer to Nigeria’s past, it is always in an attempt to justify their narrow misconceptions of the agenda of other groups. They freely throw in absolute lies and disingenuous contrivances which they pass off as gospel truth. Nothing could be more dangerous than the raging war going on quietly in cyberspace and rending our social fabric. No guns, no bombs, no arrows, no armoured carriers; just well appointed words of derision and hate dispensed over and over again until one is left with no choice than to conclude that if those haters ever got their hands on lethal weapons and had the opportunity of translating their passionate revulsion into action, they would depopulate whole sections of the country.
Hitler did not just wake up one day to kill Jews. He nursed his hatred for the people for years. He worked on his hate; honed it; spread it through word of mouth and the media. Eventually the insanity that always captures all haters captured him and he ordered the incineration of millions of fellow human beings in the worst heist in recorded history.
We are breeding our own Hitlers quietly. The internet has now allowed them free rein to publish and spread their hate. It has also enabled us to know that there is so much social dislocation. I once replied to one of such haters on a forum. He had written that Nigeria’s problems were traceable to only one section of the country. I replied that he was wrong. I told him that Nigeria’s problems were caused by the ruling elite peopled by all the major and minor ethnic subnationalities in Nigeria. “There is federal character in the list of high profile thieves in Nigeria”, I wrote. No part of the country was innocent, I argued. The fellow went into the cesspit to find words to deploy in his diatribe against me. He was no longer interested in the subject under discussion but in his newly acquired enemy — me!
Just a couple of days ago, I received a godsend in the shape of a mail from a friend who shares concern about our dangerous predilection for hate vending. The mail was about a blogger from SierraLeone who had noticed how Nigerians insulted each other on his blog site and he thought he was seeing something the Nigerians themselves were probably not seeing — the beginning of potential fratricide.
The blogger wrote: “I don’t think you (Nigerian) guys know what you are playing with. You can call each other names and laugh about it now but when you end up inciting hate here as I read through your posts here and a real civil war starts in your country, you will regret what you are doing now. Your religious and political leaders are trying to divide you between religious lines and you are helping them do that rather than standing up and say we are all Nigerians never mind our tribe, region or religion. That’s the only stand that will save your blessed nation. The foreign powers pushing the government to take certain decisions will abandon you when you start killing each other and reject you from running to their countries. So, be careful. Our 11 years war in Sierra-Leone was not even based on religious or tribal differences — and see what we did to our country. The worst conflicts are those based on tribal and religious differences.
“See Central Africa and Bosnia. My heart bleeds when I read what you guys are saying because I know what this will lead to. You will be the losers; all of you, whether Christian, Muslim, Ibo, Yoruba or Hausa. Stand as one and save your nation together because you have only one Nigeria…”
There it is then. The choice is ours. Hate, or tolerance and understanding? Hate is a powerful emotion which, if not checked, can cause an avalanche of destruction deadlier than Boko Haram. We must step back from that brink.