• Friday, March 29, 2024
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Soyinka writes NASS over hate speech bill, blasts lawmakers

Wole Soyinka

Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka has lambasted the National Assembly over the introduction of the hate speech bill, saying that the bill was ridiculous and an attempt to silence criticism.

A week after the Senate introduced a bill to regulate social media; the senate reintroduced another bill seeking to establish a commission for the probation of hate speech in the country.

The bill prescribed death by hanging for any person found guilty of any form of hate speech that results in the death of another person.

However, speaking in a piece Friday, Soyinka wondered such bill should be introduced in this modern era , while wondering why killing should be seen as an alternative to the problem of hate speech.

“I hope you will excuse me for distracting you from your onerous duties, but I am a current sufferer and I am not alone from a persistent nightmare. That affliction has been induced by your most recent approach to addressing an acknowledged problem that affects, not only Nigerians, but the entire global community.

“However, dear legislators, consider more deeply the path on which you have chosen to embark. I invite you to reflect quite objectively on the company into which you are about to throw yourselves, and the consequences for the very nation you represent including its social psyche.

“You are about to corrupt youthful impression, to join the brigade of closet psychopaths for whom the only solution to any social malaise from the trite to the profoundly affective is killing! Is this what humanity and society are all about?

“You are psyching up your ranks to pronounce yourselves affiliates of inhuman aberrations such as Boko Haram, Isis (Da’esh), al-Shabbab , nomadic cow herders etc. etc. for whom killing is the only response for real or imagined wrongs, perceptions of entitlement and/or deprivation, sense of righteousness and generally concept of a thoroughly sanitized community of mortals,”.

Soyinka, however, acknowledged that hate speech was a global challenge that required concerted effort to solve, but while wondering how many people would be killed if the bill becomes law in the country.

The scholar said such law was synonymous with undemocratic society, stressing that effort to pass the bill into law should stop.

“Yet others wiped out entire communities as collective punishment for the loss of members of their elite class, the military. And surely it is too soon to dismiss memory of the mass decimation of a religious group, the Shi’ites, for obstructing the passage of a motorcade of that same elite class. These are classic instances of murder, albeit under the immunity of power legitimation”.

 

Iniobong Iwok