SIR: When reasonable avenues are opened for people to express themselves without fear or unnecessary gagging, inherent inferences are drawn from contending national issues for immediate resolutions. However, when political leaders become ‘know-it-all’ and hence become acutely intolerant to differing opinions, emotions and angers of people are bottled-up overtime and later explode to social imbroglios and national calamity.
In a nation where the political class is swimming in affluence and the downtrodden masses are further confined to the state of irrecoverable poverty, there is bound to be hate speech. Also, when youths/graduates are massively unemployed, under the nasty grip of hunger and starvation, hate speech cannot be ignored. When people have lost hope in the system because of adventures of leaders, hate speech cannot be ignored. Hence, our political leaders are encouraged to uplift our nose-diving welfare through realistic dividends of democracy and not degrade it through selfish pursuits.
The question is: what is the government doing convincingly to mitigate present prevalent poverty and hunger among her citizens? What is the strategy to turn around the skewed vice of illegal wealth accumulation among political leaders that has become the basis of massive corruption, kidnapping for ransom, ritual killings, internet frauds, political killings, etc.?
It is an irony that our so called-leaders are now considering hate speech as a national aberration when some of them got to power through spiteful actions/statements against other political contenders. What will they do to dubious leaders (among them) who were involved in looting the pubic treasury in plainly crude and intelligent manner? Is the law against hate speech an ideal panacea to resolving its causal factors? Ideally, there should be proper penalties to sanction political leaders who siphoned our resources, demeaned our society and brought us to this hateful condition. A reasonable law should also suffice to deter political leaders from siphoning our collective resources and further confining the poor masses to the bay of suffering and hopelessness.
No individual, group, press, association, etc., should be gagged from saying or writing or dissemination obvious truths in whatever manner that they deem proper through draconian law.
The strategic inducement of fear to dampen legal complaints of poor people and their quests for reliable political change will not work under a polity universally acknowledged as politically-heated. We must prevent utopianism in power that can lead to display of absolute power. Dubious hijackers of electioneering process for selfish gains, mandate grabbers and political marauders desperately lusting after self-succession or sit-tight in power must be checked by ‘Eagle Eyes’ of watchful Nigerians.
- Akinniyi Joseph Akinwumi,
Lagos.
