Yemisi Izuora
Spokesman of OneVOICE Pastor Adeleye has advocated for self-regulatory systems and intensifying activities geared towards sensitizing the media community and civil society practitioners about ethical and moral standards to avoid high level of hate speech and partisanship in the coverage of 2019 elections, especially as the elections approaches.
This is coming as the body vehemently rejects debate on the Bill seeking death sentence for hate speech perpetrators.
OneVOICE had in a recent press release to the media on the ongoing debate as to whether there should be a Hate Speech Law (carrying a maximum death sentence) observed that such a law could be misused by politicians and political office holders in government to hunt down opposition, and critical civil society’s non-state actors. The statement also faulted the Hate Speech Bill, opining that it is difficult to determine what constitutes hate speech.
According to Pastor Adedeji Adeleye, “One definition of hate speech is that it is any speech that employs discriminatory epithets to insult and stigmatize others on the bases of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or other forms of group membership. In other words, it could be a speech which attacks a person or group or ethnic people on the basis of race, religion, gender, or disability. If it disparages, intimidates or incites violence against the above category of people, it is termed to be a hate speech. The problem here is that offensive speech is also similarly defined”.
However, OneVOICE also noted that although any form of Hate speech is condemnable but other more effective measures can be employed to ensure that we put a stop to it in Nigeria, especially as the 2019 elections approaches.
OneVOICE therefore recommends that the starting point is to recognize that the line between offensive and hate speech could be blurred and that it would be more appropriate to resort to the use of non-legal instruments to deal with all forms of offensive speeches. According to Pastor Adedeji, “There may for instance be a need to develop such, in conjunction with critical organs of the society such as Labour unions, NBA, media owners and practitioners as well as CSOs. Media houses through their umbrella associations should incorporate the taxonomy of what constitutes hate speech and offensive speeches as part of good journalism practice and impose sanctions on erring members who publish or broadcast hate speeches”.
On a more hilarious note, he advised that Nigerians should also learn to laugh at themselves. This he said is already happening in some ways with our comedians (Ali Baba, Charlie Boy, AY, Seyi Law, Basket Mouth and others) who dish out jokes based on ethnic and regional profiling. In fact it could be argued that since every region and ethnic group in the country is both a victim and a victimizer when it comes to hate speech, they countervail and cancel out one another.