Jos – The Minister for information and Culture, Alh Lai Mohammed has warned public and private practitioners against hate speeches and fake news which impact results in genocide, trigger senseless incitement to violence.
Mohammed reiterated this on Friday during the opening ceremony of extraordinary meeting of the national council on information holding at the Eliel centre, Gold and base ,Old Airport road, Jos.
He commended Governor, His Excellency Simon Lalong, and his Executive Council, in particular the Commissioner for Information, for being such great hosts.
The minister condemned ,” HATE SPEECHES , FAKE NEWS AND NATIONAL UNITY,” stressing further the looming danger facing our country from what has now become the scourge of our time were innocent lives are killed.
According to him ,”our called on extra-ordinary meeting of the National Council on Information attests to the seriousness we attach to this issue, I have repeatedly called the attention, in many fora, to the dangers posed by the menace of the now pervasive hate speech, disinformation and fake news, no one gave the issue the attention it deserves until it started threatening the very foundation of our national unity.”
He disclosed that the role of hate speeches and fake news in 1994 genocide that left at least 800,000 people dead in
Rwanda , it is worth rehashing here for the purpose of this discourse.
Adding that “Anti-Tutsi articles and cartoons in the Kangura newspaper, as well as hate speech and incitement to violence on the radio station called RTLMC – Radio-Television Libres des Mille Collines (Thousand Hills Free Radio and Television) helped to set the stage for that
genocide.
The station was set up by hard-line Hutu extremists, and received the backing of many rich and prominent people in that country ,fingering that those who saw the danger posed by the station called for it to be shut down, but against the backdrop of freedom of speech, such calls fell on deaf ears, until it was too late. Some 23 years later,
Rwanda is yet to fully recover from war .
Lai Mohammed cautioned that In Nigeria today, the hate being spewed on radio stations across the country is so alarming. If you tune into many radio stations, you will be shocked by the things being said, the careless incitement to violence and the level is insensitivity to the multi-religious, multi-ethnic nature of our country. Unfortunately, even the hosts of such radio programmes do little or nothing to stop. Oftentimes.
He maintained that ethnic media are willing collaborators of hate speech campaigners,we must not
allowed this to continue because it is detrimental to the unity and well-being of our country.
He advised that false information deliberately spread to deceive the people reporting is another clear
case of disinformation.
The campaign is a multi-million naira project and the people behind this string of hate speech, disinformation are simply to discredit the government, destabilize the polity and make the country ungovernable he said.
Mohammed explained that there is no doubt that the resurgent push for separatism as well as rising cases of ethnic and religious disharmony are all traceable to the growing phenomenon of hate speech, as well as the disinformation and fake news campaign.
The latest instance of this vicious campaign occurred last week. During my visit to the Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON) House in Lagos last Saturday, I had said that any programme tagged Nigerian or local content programme, which is meant for the consumption of Nigerians, must be produced in Nigeria, rather than in foreign countries.
He appealed for the ban on production of music videos and films outside the countries. Gullible and malleable commentators, many of them recruited by the campaigners, went to town abusing me and the federal government, without even trying to know the truth. Such is the tragedy of our time.
He pointed how a German newspaper described this phenomenon: ”For a society in which people are informed mainly through the media – and form their political opinions through it – this process is threatened when lies
spread through the media. When it is no longer clear what is false and what is correct, people lose their confidence in the state”.
Lai Mohammed reminded us that Nigeria is a country of ethnic and religious diversity that should be a source of
strength, if the fault lines are not deliberately being exposed and exploited by those who are bent on setting the people against themselves, using their new-found tools of hate speech, disinformation and fake news.
These dangerous trend is threatening the very foundation of our national unity. It is daily pushing the nation close to the precipice, perhaps more than at any other time since the end of the civil war,he added.
This is a tackling canker-worm of hate speech, disinformation and fake news. We as government information managers must embark on a relentless campaign against these evil tendencies at our various levels, whether federal or state.
We must boycott any medium that engages in hate speech, incitement to violence, disinformation and fake news. The regulators must also be alive to their responsibilities by promptly sanctioning the purveyors of hate speech, disinformation and fake news. Yes, our constitution allows freedom of speech and this government believes in
it, but freedom of speech must not be allowed to become freedom of irresponsibility.
The federal government, the Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, has recently undertaken a series of engagements
with all stakeholders to defuse the tension cause by these tendencies, and his efforts have gone a long way in calming frayed nerves, especially in the aftermath of the attacks and counter-attacks by various groups across the country. We must replicate this kind of engagement in our various states.
Government follow-up to the efforts of the Acting President, the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture is planning a series of engagements with the media, to educate and sensitize them to the dangers posed to the unity of the country by hate speech, disinformation and fake news. Needless to say that we are also appealing to the media, the traditional media in particular, to show responsibility by repudiating the freewheeling and out-of-control
purveyors of hate speech, disinformation and fake news. Unlike the Social Media, the traditional media is subject to the rigours of accuracy, fact-checking and fairness, among others. Sadly, even a section of the traditional media now apes the hate campaigners by lifting their unverified or distorted news and dumping such on their readers. This is not right.
A section of the tradition media is also now thriving on anti-government tendency. If you pick up copies of some newspapers, you will think the government of the day is doing nothing at all to alleviate the sufferings of the people, occasioned by the economic downturn. They ignore any positive actions of government, including
the massive investment in infrastructure like roads and railways, and instead focus on anything that will make the government look bad. Instead of reporting the news freely and fairly, they have constituted themselves to an opposition bloc.
He noted that it is only because we have a peaceful country that we have journalists, doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc all practising their trade. If we allow our country to be plunged into crisis just because of the antics of an irresponsible few, neither the journalists nor any other professionals will be able to practice their profession. This is the blunt truth. We all have a stake in this country, hence we must not allow hate campaigners and purveyors of fake news and disinformation to drag the country down with them the minister maintained.
