Sometime in 2014, and prior to the 2015 General elections,
most Nigerians were shell-shocked at the sort of language which certain
highly-placed politicians flung here and there at Goodluck Jonathan. The
arrowhead cum leader of those who used these irresponsible words to describe
their president then was Nasir El Rufai, now governor of Kaduna State, followed
by the present minister of information and culture, Lai Mohammed.
From the way, these highly-placed Nigerians used these words,
nobody would have thought those words constituted what we now know as ‘hate
speech’, ‘fake news’ and ‘irresponsible journalism’. What again made such words
as ‘clueless’, incompetent’ and ‘making Nigeria ungovernable’, seemingly
harmless then was that the individual who those hateful and highly embarrassing
words were directed at appeared to take them with a smile and did so apparently
because he understood that insults and aspersions are corollaries to public
office, and your ability to accept them, deflect or dodge them makes you a
leader or a charlatan.
What we realized hereafter was that those words caught fire, became viral
and practically became a mantra that helped in shoving the hapless recipient of
those hateful words aside. I found spot-on that even though we had not realized
it, those who were throwing those words about seemed to have read JL Austin’s How To Do
Things with Words.
Simply, JL Austin’s book in capturing what was the Speech
Act Theory said that words have elocutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary repercussions
– to mean that words don’t just pass information, they perform actions as well.
Therefore, as those words, ‘clueless’, ‘Goodluck Jonathan is incompetent’, went
out, they established a grandmum with which we would henceforth hold our
leaders to account if they ever tried to either be clueless and incompetent. It
also established the progenitors of these words as linguistic experts to whom
we should draw inspiration, for crass expressions deployed to realize ephemeral
political gains.
And then, just after this government came on board, we heard
that someone had named his dog ‘Buhari’, just the same way goats with ‘Goodluck
Jonathan’, tied across their necks were dragged across the streets of Lagos,
Port Harcourt, and Abuja. While the owners of the goats with ‘Goodluck
Jonathan’ laughed it all the way to their homes, the chap with the ‘Buhari’ dog
spent some time in a police cell before he eventually managed to get off. And
this was to become the trend of intolerance to criticism, and which has become
the hallmark of this seeming civilian dictatorship.
And so after we heard the first time that the Buhari
administration wanted to introduce a Social Media Law, most of us who were
but kids, when he came with his Decree 2, were not surprised in the least at what
is happening to Sowore, and to the many journalists and Nigerians being
harangued, harassed and clamped in detention today.
Wikipedia presents what happened after Buhari’s Decree 2 was
promulgated like this: with Decree Number 2 of 1984, the state security
and the chief of staff were given the power to detain, without charges,
individuals deemed to be a security risk to the state for up to three
months. Strikes and popular demonstrations were banned and Nigeria’s
security agency, the National Security Organization, NSO, was entrusted with
unprecedented powers. The NSO played a wide role in the cracking down of public
dissent by intimidating, harassing and jailing individuals who broke the
interdiction on strikes. By October 1984, about 200,000 civil servants were
retrenched.
Most of what Decree 2 achieved in Mr. Buhari’s time as head
of state is what this so-called Social Media Law seemingly is about, and if we
may, Mr. Buhari seems to have been given the opportunity by Nigerians to
unleash that draconian side he failed to deliver post-1984. But what we must
tell the progenitors of this obnoxious bill, and who are suggesting death
sentence for anyone who ‘contravenes’ their law is this, that those who ride on
the backs of tigers to power must not think of coming down from that tiger.
This is not 1984 dear Mr. Buhari and Mr. Lai and co and we urge you to abandon
this attempt to deprive Nigerians of the only thing they presently enjoy –
their freedom to speak freely.
Nigerians have moved on from 1984, and you should not drag
us down that antediluvian avenue, please. The world over, people speak truth or
lies and there are institutions in place to identify whether these truths are
truths or that they are lies – and dealt with.
On the front page of Thisday newspaper
of 11th November 2019, there was a certain report. It said that an
organization, Save the Children, revealed that pneumonia had claimed the lives
of 162,000 children below the age of five in Nigeria in 2018. Now if the Buhari
admin does not realize this, I dare say this is the most damning a report can
ever be, effectively indicating that our health institutions are comatose, and
condemning the leader of a country who goes for medical treatment abroad and
leaves the children under his keep to die of simple ailments like pneumonia.
But is this what we want? Certainly not. Nigerians want food. They
want basic health care. They want electricity for 24 hours, and they want to go
about their businesses in a safe and secure environment. Will a Social Media
Bill or Law guarantee power supply, or will it exterminate Boko Haram and Bring
Leah Sharibu back?
Most Nigerians who have read Section 39 of the Nigerian
Constitution of 1999 (as amended), are wondering why of all things the
government of Nigeria seeks to regulate is freedom to ventilate. Let the
government of Mr. Buhari, which seemed to be getting its act together in the
second term of his admin, not spoil everything by trying to gag us. We need him
to give Nigerians a sense of ease and an environment enabling everyone to
pursue their dreams and aspirations. The people he took over from struggled
very hard to make Nigeria’s economy the first in Africa. They did this by
focusing on reining in other sectors of the economy we did not albeit take into
consideration at first.
Let the Buhari government please and for God’s sake
concentrate on building an economy where we are not a poverty capital but a
haven where issues like unemployment and poverty are issues for 1983. We have
no need for a volatile and charged up atmosphere today I beg sir.
Etemiku is deputy executive director, Civil
Empowerment and Rule of Law Support Initiative, CERLSI.
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