By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Both the proponents and opponents of the so-called Hate Speech
Bill in the Nigerian Senate don’t seem to realize that the bill itself is
fundamentally rooted in, and nurtured by, crass and deep-seated ignorance of the
very meaning of “hate speech.”
Hate speech doesn’t mean speech that hurts the sensibilities
of government officials. Nor does it mean any speech that incites and insults individuals.
It simply means speech that besmirches—and incites violence against— a
community of vulnerable and marginalized people who are easy targets because of
their invariable group attributes such as their ethnicity, religious beliefs,
sexual orientation, racial identity, national origin, gender, age, physical and
mental disability, etc.
That is why Encyclopedia Britannica, in common with most
recognized authorities, defines hate speech as “speech or expression that
denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social
group identified by attributes such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, religion, age, physical or mental disability, and others.”
Since government officials aren’t vulnerable and marginalized
people (they’re actually the very opposite of marginalized people) and don’t
constitute a primordial community, they can’t be the victims of hate speech.
Yet Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi, the sponsor of the “hate speech” bill,
recently told the news media that his sponsorship of the bill has exposed him and the bill itself to “hate speech” from Nigerians!
Although both of us share a common Borgu heritage, I don’t
know Senator Abdullahi, but he is obviously an uneducated legislative thug who
would do well to go back to school for his own good and so he would stop embarrassing our
people. Criticizing a clueless, illiterate senator who wants to strangulate
people’s constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech and constrict the
discursive space isn’t, by the wildest stretch of fantasy, “hate speech.”
Senator Abdullahi also said his bill is designed to “seek justice for Aluu 4 and others.” But the “Aluu 4” murder doesn’t exemplify hate
speech by any definition of the term. It was jungle justice. The victims weren’t
murdered because of their ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or disability.
Although I am a free speech advocate, I concede that there
are groups of people in Nigeria who need hate speech protection. Here is an incomplete
list of groups that are habitually the targets of hate speech in parts— or all—
of Nigeria, which the bill doesn’t even address:
1. Homosexuals. There is no part of Nigeria where gays
and lesbians aren’t subject to violent denunciations on social media, in the
traditional media, and in quotidian dialogic spaces. In Europe where hate
speech laws are codified, homosexuality is regarded as a “protected attribute,”
and people who slur or incite violence against gays and lesbians can be charged
with violating hate speech codes. Yet the very Nigerian Senate that is sponsoring
a “hate speech” bill has criminalized homosexuality.
2. Shiites. This is perhaps the most vulnerable
Muslim sect in the Muslim North. On social media and in mosques, Sunni Muslims
perpetually direct wild, unrestrained hate speech against Shiites without any
consequences.
They are indiscriminately murdered in the streets by both
everyday Sunni fanatics and the government. Yet the Presidency, to which the
current Senate is a shameful extension of, has officially labeled Shiites, who
have been the victims of murderous persecution, a “terrorist” group.
3. “Fulani herdsmen.” Although the Global Terrorism
Index has consistently ranked “Fulani extremists” as the “the fourth deadliest known terrorist group” in the world, most Fulani people are not terrorists, but
Fulani people, particularly “Fulani herdsmen,” are stereotyped as inescapably
violent and murderous, which exposes them to threats of indiscriminate mass
murders in many parts of Nigeria.
The Global Terrorism
Index’s 2019 report says, “There are an estimated 14 million Fulani in Nigeria.”
It’s impossible for all 14 million Fulani in Nigeria to be terrorists. If that
were true, almost everyone would be dead in Nigeria. Yet in 2017, Apostle
Johnson Suleiman said, “And I told my people, any Fulani herdsman you see
around you, kill him. I have told them in the church here that any Fulani
herdsman that just entered by mistake, kill him, kill him! Cut his head!”
That was classic hate speech that could result in a “hate
crime.” Being a “Fulani herdsman” does not invariably lead to being a
terrorist. To kill someone who has not committed a crime, who just happens to
belong to a primordial category of people who commit a crime, is quintessential
hate crime. Plus, the vast majority of everyday Fulani herdsmen are poor,
illiterate, marginal people whom people and governments habitually cheat and
exploit.
4. Christians in the Muslim North. Christians are an
endangered group in the Muslim North. They are periodically murdered by
homicidal thugs at the slightest provocation. Over the years, certain Muslim
preachers, particularly in Hausaphone Muslim northern Nigeria, have typecast
Christians as expendable, murder-worthy, inhuman outsiders who are invariably
enemies—and who can only be tolerated at best.
The murderous contempt for Christians in the Hausaphone
Muslim North is encapsulated in the odious term “arne,” which means “pagan,”
but which connotes much more than that. The term functions to denude the
humanity of whomever it is directed at. It makes him or her the legitimate target of remorseless cruelty or murder, especially in moments of political or religious
tension in the country. An informed and legitimate hate speech bill would
protect Christian minorities in the Muslim North from rhetorical—and actual—
violence.
5. “Hausas” in the South. In all of Southern Nigeria,
Hausa people (which is linguistic shortcut for all northerners even though the
North is home to more than half of Nigeria’s over 500 ethnic groups) are pigeonholed
as stupid, unthinking automatons who are always roused to mindless violence,
who are indistinguishable from cows.
“Aboki,” the Hausa word for friend, has now been misappropriated
as a term of disesteem to slur northerners. So is “Mallam,” the Hausa domestication
of the Arabic mu’alim, which means teacher, but which is deployed as a
term of courtesy for any male Muslim. It is also usual to call northerners “maalu”
(sometimes malu), the Yoruba word for cow.
The insults, in and of themselves, are not the issue. The
issue is that they homogenize a vast and varied people and prime them for often
retaliatory mass murders. When I was a reporter in Nigeria in 2000, I covered the
retaliatory murders of northerners in the Southeast in response to the Sharia
riots in Kaduna that year. It turned out that most of the “Hausa” people murdered there were,
in fact, Christians from Benue and Kogi states who share common boundaries with
many states in the Southeast.
The survivors I spoke with told me their entreaties that
they were Christians who would have been murdered in Kaduna, along with Igbo
people, had they lived there failed to persuade their tormentors. They were told that they were “abokis,”
“mallams,” or “malos.”
6. Atheists and agnostics. Nigeria is a
hypocritically hyper-religious society with an overabundance of toxic levels of
intolerance for people who choose to question or depart from the orthodoxy of
received spiritual wisdom. People who question or reject the idea that there is
a God who supervises and regulates the affairs of human beings are often reviled
and attacked in almost all parts of Nigeria.
For instance, in 2014, Nigeria attracted global attention—and
ridicule—when an atheist by the name of Mubarak Bala was committed to a psychiatric
hospital in Kano by his family for publicly renouncing his faith in Islam and
God. After he was found to be of sound mind and released, he was welcomed by a
steady stream of death threats.
As is now obvious, hate speech laws all over the world are enacted
to protect weak, defenseless, and marginal social, religious, ethnic, cultural,
etc. groups from the tyranny of dominant, mainstream groups. But Senator
Abdullahi and his uninformed political bedfellows are more concerned about
protecting oppressive, overpampered, corrupt, and unaccountable government
officials from the searing scrutiny of the governed than protecting weak, marginal
populations.
Postscript:
Postscript:
Many Igbo commenters are crossed that I left out Igbos in my
list of vulnerable groups that need hate speech protection. They are right to
be disappointed.
However, I couldn't include every group. That was why I
called it "an "incomplete list." This is a newspaper column with
a word limit, which I actually exceeded by over a hundred words. I thought
identifying "Christians in the North" as a vulnerable group takes
care of Igbos because most people in the Muslim north who kill Igbos at the
slightest provocation can't tell Igbos from other ethnic groups in the South.
It is their Christian identity that stands out. But I agree that Igbos are an endangered group in the Muslim North.
Another group that I wanted to include but didn't have the
space to include is women. Well, I'm glad this intervention is sparking the
right conversation about what hate speech really means.