Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, has kicked against the proposal of the death penalty in the Hate Speech Bill, urging Nigerian legislators not to use murder as a justification to silence critics of the government.
Soyinka made the plea in an open letter entitled: “Is It Now Cool To Kill? – An Anguished Letter to Nigerian Lawmakers”, which was published on Friday.
The Hate Speech Bill, which is sponsored by Senator Sabi Abdullahi, a former Senate spokesperson and now the Deputy Senate Whip, passed first reading on the floor of the red chamber on Tuesday.
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The bill, among other things, proposes the death penalty for individuals deemed to have violated the proposed law.
But Soyinka, in his letter, stated that while he abhors hate speech and fake news and supports regulation for punishing offenders, he does not endorse in any manner the legitimisation of death as the penalty for offenders in the proposed bill.
According to the Nobel Laureate, the legislators would not be better than renowned terrorists such as Boko Haram, the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Shabab should they approve the death penalty, insisting that the proposed penalty is not the only remedy for the issue.
The playwright lamented that lawmakers, by the proposed penalty for the bill, are attempting to justify the act of murder for all correct or perceived offences as committed by jungle justice advocates and dictators across the African continent, thereby muzzling young persons in the country over their freedom of expression.
He argued that if the lawmakers decide to approve the death penalty as law, then the same must be replicated for the Nigerian elite, whom he accused of pilfering the country’s resources for private gains, adding that they should not see themselves as a thoroughly sanitized community of mortals.
The letter read: “Do you really, as presumably analytical minds, believe that a facile and final recourse to the gallows or a fusillade of bullets at the stake, is the sole remedy to the phenomenon of the diffuse classifications possible under the abuse of communication and the sowing of hate among people? How precise is the definition of ‘hate’ when it becomes a yardstick for the extinction of even one human life?
“Haunting, hopefully, our collective conscience as a nation, even till today, is recollection of a clique of social army reformers who instituted, and carried out the execution citizens under a retroactive law. 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.”
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The professor also questioned the intentions of the lawmakers with the bill, describing the proposal of the death penalty as suspicious.
He insisted that the proposed penalty for offenders is an attempt by the Senators to permanently silence the government’s opposition.
“Your motivations are also spectacularly dubious. Silencing the voices of criticism is a perennial preoccupation of power, but we know that a far more penetrative form of death, spelling the end of social vitality and relevance is incurred when human voices are silenced. Try and imagine how many “deserved” executions would be taking place in this nation right now – beginning with nearly all of you in the exalted homes of legislation – if Boko Haram had succeeded in subjugating this nation under its creed,” the letter read.
Noting that students, cultists, kidnappers, political thugs and fetish persons have made murder the current symbol of identity in Nigeria, Soyinka insisted that the last thing the country needs at this moment is a state-sanctioned killing of individuals who degrade other Nigerians’ reputation through their social media posts.
The “Abiku” poet recommended that such armchair critics should be publicly exposed and reformed by undergoing a series of actions rather than ending on the hangman’s noose for their action(s).
The letter read: “And now, you wish to add, to this culture of rampaging morbidity, the state empowered deaths of those dregs of society who titillate themselves with corrosive narratives from diseased minds, and boost their meaningless lives with the degradation of others? Are they even worth the cost of the hangman’s noose? No. True, governance has a responsibility to protect its citizens, but social malefactors must be fought and neutralized through far more painstaking methods.
“Reformed if possible, exposed and publicly humiliated, punished and compelled to make restitution where their actions have caused pain, anguish and destruction. That option, we know, is the more arduous path, but then, where did you obtain the notion that you were elected to occupy cushy, stress-free armchairs?”
Soyinka told the Senators that the repercussions of the bill’s penalty, if passed into law, may return to haunt them if future generations are taught that it is “cool to kill”, adding that example, especially by leadership, is a 100 times more explicit and enduring than the mere propagation of any counter-doctrine.
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