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By John Azu
Counsel to activist Vincent Otse, also known as Very Dark Man, Marshal Abubakar has called on security agencies to investigate presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, over his claims on a voice message of President Bola Tinubu purportedly shared by against his client.
A video made by VDM from China, reacting to a lady complaining about lack of electricty, in which he warned against re-electing President Tinubu, was later found to have been doctored with a voice note of the president threatening a major presidential candidate and some sections of Nigeria.
In a statement issued on Friday, Abubakar said Onanuga circulated, without authentication, a doctored video against VDM and as such, should compel the government to distance itself from the embarrassing declaration and mete out appropriate sanction against him.
“The tweet under review lucidly falls within the narrow prism of the extant Section 24 of the Cybercrimes Act. Additionally, the several incendiary tweets particularly that made in March 2023 warning inter alia that 2023 should be the last time of igbo interference in Lagos Politics” amounts to racist and xenophobic offences prohibited by Section 26 of the Cybercrimes Act, as amended and if found guilty, he should face the penalty prescribed therein which is imprisonment of not more than five years or a fine of ten million naira or both fine and imprisonment,” Abubakar said.
The lawyer said it was surprising that Onanuga as a journalist with the Concord Newspaper, whose voice in the 1990s, spoke against the military regime Ibrahim Babangida, the hijack of Nigeria by the Chargouris and served as a pro-democracy activist for NADECO, and once indicted power now propagates its abuse in its cruelest form.
Continuing, he said: “Now that the inaccuracy and falsity of Mr Bayo’s allegations has been established, we submit without any sense of equivocation that the right of Nigerians to criticize, condemn, challenge any obnoxious government policy, and the right to demand for a change of government; including the right to assert that, which Mr Bayo and his paymasters find offensive and discomforting must be re-asserted and commitment to its protection re-affirmed by the Presidency he has sheepishly embarrassed with his provocative assault against our collective national interest.
“Need we remind the Bola Ahmed Tinubu presidency that as Lord Justice Stephen stated in Redmond Bate Vs DPP (1999), ‘Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.’
“It is no longer a secret that this present Ahmed Bola Tinubu regime has lost the confidence and faith of the Nigerian people and the right of Nigerians to insist that it yield the floor is one, the direct beneficiaries of the failed, anti-people regime must come to terms with. Had the previous PDP government the APC took over from prioritized clamping down on dissent, the Buhari/Tinubu regimes might never materialize.
“In 2004 when Mr Bayo and his co-travelers’ right to protest and demand a change of government was threatened, they ran to court and the Court of Appeal in the case of IGP v. ANPP (2007) in affirming the right held, ‘how long shall we continue with the present attitude of allowing our society to be haunted by the memories of oppression and gagging meted out to us by our colonial masters through the enforcement of issuance of permit to enforce our rights under the Constitution’.
“The Court of Appeal in the case of Arthur Nwankwo Vs the State (1985) had posited, ‘We are no longer the illiterates or the mob society our colonial masters had mind when the law was promulgated…To retain S. 51 of the Criminal Code, in its present form, that is even if not inconsistent with the freedom of expression guaranteed by our Constitution will be a deadly weapon to be used at will by a corrupt government or a tyrant …Let us not diminish from the freedom gained from our colonial masters by resorting to laws enacted by them to suit their purpose.”