No doubt, the tragedy of fake news has become a global epidemic that
threatens mankind in the face of globalization. The worry about the
deadly effects of fake news has become a global concern as mankind
struggles to battle an ennui that derives its lifeblood from feeding
false narratives and disinformation to people for ulterior intents.
In a recent policy paper, ‘Tackling Online Disinformation’ the
European Union states;
“The exposure of citizens to large scale disinformation, including
misleading or outright false information, is a major challenge for
Europe”. It went further to say, “Disinformation is verifiably false
or misleading information created, presented and disseminated for
economic gain or to intentionally deceive the public. It may have
far-reaching consequences, cause public harm, be a threat to democratic
political and policy-making processes, and may even put the protection
of EU citizens’ health, security and their environment at risk.
“Disinformation erodes trust in institutions and in digital and
traditional media and harms our democracies by hampering the ability of
citizens to take informed decisions. It can polarise debates, create or
deepen tensions in society and undermine electoral systems, and have a
wider impact on European security. It impairs freedom of opinion and
expression, a fundamental right enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental
Rights of the European Union”.
In announcing an 18 million Pounds budget to fight fake news in Eastern
Europe and the Balkans in July 2019, the British Foreign Secretary,
Jeremy Hunt stated;
“With only 10% of the world’s population having access to a free
media, fake news and disinformation continue to undermine and
destabilise societies.
“Today’s funding announcement will support journalists working in
some of the most repressive societies and step up the attack against
fake news.
“My aim for this conference is to work with my counterparts to agree a
way to protect media freedom and impose a cost on those who abuse it”.
In Nigeria, fake news has become a pandemic that has placed the
security of lives and propertied, inter-ethnic and inter-religious
harmony in grave danger. Since the 2015 elections where all the fault
lines of Nigerian nationhood were exhumed and launched for political
interests, fake news has become a convenient vehicle for hate, bigotry,
incitement and division among diverse interests of the multi-faceted
Nigerian nation and nothing is spared to evoke this in the quest to
provoke widespread national disharmony. The government must quit
pretending the task to come up with far reaching measures to deal with
this malaise is not very urgent at present.
Recently, the National Assembly made efforts to tackle this notorious
cancer when Senator Sani Mohammed Musa proposed a bill to ensure those
that spread and manufacture fake news are sanctioned proportionate to
their levels of involvement. There was a needless furore premised on
the charge that the bill was aimed at gagging free speech. Though the
opposition against the bill had not stopped the progression of the bill,
the senate seemed to have paused progression of the bill but the
dangerous epidemic of fake news has gone haywire in recent times which
calls for an urgent action to enact the bill into law and follow up with
the needed action.
Last week, I was somewhere, amongst a group and a gentleman who looked
educated was playing a whatsapp video about alleged mass massacre of
every Igbo and Yoruba along Markudi-Abuja Expressway. I didn’t see the
video but I was hearing the audio message where an emotional voice was
narrating that every Yoruba or Igbo man that was seen on commercial
motorcycle (okada) along Markudi-Abuja expressway was killed and
butchered into pieces. The man was nearly weeping as he engaged in the
narrative, asking why such should be allowed to happen. Curiously, he
didn’t mention the name of the culprits killing Igbo and Yoruba on
okada on Markudi-Abuja highway. As the video stopped, the gentleman,
whom I presumed is educated and another less educated Yoruba started
angrily wondering why such carnage should be allowed to happen in
Nigeria. I couldn’t stand it. I interjected and asked the two
gentlemen if they believed the video and they answered in the
affirmation. I asked them where Markudi-Abuja expressway is located and
they kept quiet. I further asked them if Yoruba and Igbo travel by okada
from Markurdi to Abuja. They kept quiet. I asked them when the mass
killings were being done and they replied that the video said it is
happening presently. I asked why no medium is reporting the news. They
kept quiet. Feeling caught by my questions, the gentlemen just mopped at
me as I went on to educate them on the dangers of allowing some bitter,
angry demonic interests use them as cannon fodders for their selfish
political interests. I educated them about Rwanda and the fact that some
of those that felt they were sowing mischief by spreading false news and
bigotry got caught up in the mass massacre that happened in that
country. They thanked me and that ended the conversation.
This is a common phenomenon happening all over the country as people
have gone berserk cooking and spreading narratives pf false genocides
happening all over the country and mobilizing people to react. Through
the uncensored social media, Nigerians are being fed gargantuan false
narratives and being incited to war and the government can’t just sit
idly by and watch this degenerate.
Then on Sunday, the nation was shocked when the news filtered in that a
bomber, Nathaniel Samuel, was arrested in a Pentecostal church in Kaduna
with bombs strapped on his body, with the intent to detonate the bomb
among the worshippers. What followed was a chilling effort to misinform
and manipulate the information about the bomber along religious lines as
the Chairman of Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Kaduna branch
claimed that the bomber’s name was rather Mohammed Musa and that his
name was changed to Nathaniel Samuel by the police after he was handed
over to them. He maintained that the bomber is not a Christian, as his
name suggests, but a Muslim. This created a he confusion among Nigerians
and widened the conspiracy theory about the incidents and other
incidents of insecurity in the country.
But the bomber was to be paraded before the press the next day where he
not only confirmed that he is indeed Nathaniel Samuel but a trainee
pastor in the church he wanted to bomb! This was the confirmation that
stilled the burgeoning conspiracy theory the Kaduna CAN mischievously
created and which was devoured hook, line and sinker by the other side
of the Nigerian political divide that had invested heavily in
instigating, circulating and spreading dire security trajectories for
Nigeria since 2015. Why are there no arrests for this deliberate
devious effort to sabotage the security of the nation but to incite
religious faiths against each other?
The Kaduna CAN Chairman had to follow a Daily Trust newspaper reporter
to the father of the bomber who not only confirmed his son’s identity
but regretted that he should indulge in such dastardly act.
Nigeria is presently awash with fake news, actively generated and shared
by those who aim to get back at the Buhari government for preventing
them from gaining unhindered access to the public treasury. The social
media in Nigeria is swarming with all manners of fabricated gory tales
meant to instigate strife, bloodletting and unrest in Nigeria and
satiate the beastly urge of those that deigned Nigeria as their
exclusive treasury cove; to raid at their pleasure. They haunt for gory
audio visual materials that happened in far flung countries and fit in
their narratives of mass killings, mass dehumanization and mass torture
so as to provoke a mass insurrection among the citizenry as a payback
for their withering political and pecuniary fortunes. Tribal bodies,
religious groups, ethnic groups, political interest groups are eager
recruits to this widening fatal coalition and blood and broken limbs
form the chassis of their bestial businesses. Through WhatsApp,
Facebook, google, YouTube and other variants of the social media, these
ghostly vermin have eaten deep into the arteries of many Nigerians.
Feeding on anger, bigotry, hate and frustration, fake news has rendered
many Nigerians walking forces and zombies to mischievous and devilish
ramparts who see in it the vengeance for their loss of political
privileges.
One will be damned to think fake news capture the uneducated and
unsophisticated genre of the Nigerian population. On the contrary, the
barons of fake news are the worsted political speculators who have lost
their privileged looting position, the top civil servants who no longer
milk government coffers as before, the questionably educated Nigerians
whose pseudo education cannot guarantee survival outside the capacity to
plunder the commonwealth. Hate speech is being driven by the displaced
elite who cannot fathom why the treasury is freed from their malevolent
reach. They want the Nigerian house to collapse on everybody. They want
to act the blind Samson and pull the entire Nigerian edifice down on all
Nigerians. The simple-minded rabid bigots and ethno-religious jingoists
they recruit to do their dastardly acts are mere pawns to their dirty
biddings.
But for Nigeria to outlive the morbid fate haunting it, the National
Assembly must muster the political will to push through the anti-fake
news bill and give it the force of the law. Commensurate punishments
must be put in place to punish fabricating and sharing of fake news. The
punishments must be pungent enough to deter those intent on employing
the social media as vista for national calamity. The proposed bill must
arm the citizens with tools for reporting perpetrators and enhancers of
fake news, starting from who shared the news last. The state must put in
place organs for enforcement so that Nigerians will be more careful in
circulating dangerous materials that injure the collective safety and
wellbeing of Nigerians. The intent of the law would be to deter
Nigerians from procuring and sharing materials which source they cannot
defend and where one runs foul of this desiderati, he would get severely
punished so as to deter others from dong same.
The time to act on this imperative is now otherwise, Nigeria will soon
implode under the full weight of fake news, to the pleasure of those
that are investing heavily in plunging the nation to preventable
fratricide for their demonic interests.
Peter Claver Oparah.
Ikeja, Lagos.
E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com