Ethnicity, Hate Speech & Nation Building – By Dr. Jideofor Adibe

Posted by admin Articles, Columnists, Jideofor Adibe, PhD, NNP Columnists Friday, August 31st, 2012

Dr. Jideofor Adibe | London, UK | August 31, 2012 – Am I alone in noticing how
Nigerians seem to enjoy profiling and pouring invectives on one another
whenever they congregate in their in-group to discuss the Nigerian condition?
And if you think this is only a past-time of the uneducated and those who
believe the world revolves around their ethnic enclave, you may be
disappointed. Just read the ‘comments’ that follow most articles online – whether
in newspapers, blogs or on the numerous online news-and features aggregator
sites on the country, and you will marvel at the capacity of educated Nigerians,
including Diaspora-based ones who are presumably living in ‘civilized’
countries, to write from their base animal instincts. Hate speech is so
pervasive in Nigeria that it is doubtful if there are many Nigerians that are
completely free from the vice. The irony
is that people who usually complain of being insulted by other ethnic groups
often use even more hateful words in describing the groups they feel have
insulted them. Net effect: the widening of the social distance among the
different ethnicities that make up the country and an exacerbation of the
crisis in the country’s nation-building.

Several
observations could be made about the interplay between ethnicity, hate speech
and the crisis in the country’s nation-building project:

One,
hate speech employs discriminatory epithets to insult and stigmatize others on
the basis of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or other forms
of group membership. It is any speech,
gesture, conduct, writing or display which could incite people to violence or
prejudicial action. There are individuals and groups in this country who openly
relish the freedom to rain insults and profile others by appropriating to
themselves the role of ethnic and religious champions. The problem is that hate
speech is often the gateway to discrimination, harassment and violence as well
as a precursor to serious harmful criminal acts. It is doubtful if there will
be hate-motivated violent attacks on any group without hate speech and the
hatred it purveys.

Two,
there is nothing wrong in people celebrating pride in their ethnic and other
cultural identities. It is not always a manifestation of ethnicity when someone
proclaims, ‘I am a proud Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba or Efik’. Most ethnic groups across the world feel that their way of life – their
foods, dress, habits, beliefs, values, and so forth, are superior to those of
other groups. There is nothing wrong with this.

The boundary between this love for one’s ethnic
identity (ethnocentrism) and ethnicity (which is conflictual in character)
could however be thin. When our love for our ethnic identity results in seeing
other groups as competitors or the reasons why we are not getting what we
believe we deserve to get, then there is often recourse to hate speech to vent
our frustrations on the out-group. At that point, the love for one’s ethnic
identity has become conflictual in form and thus crossed the boundary to
ethnicity. It is important to underline that
although ethnicity is rooted in the struggle for the scarce societal values –
political positions, jobs, contracts, scholarships etc – by the various ethnic
factions of the Nigerian elite, it has overtime acquired an objective character
such that it now exists independent of the original causative factors. Not
surprisingly therefore we have a group of ‘ethnic watchers’ whose only vocation
appears to be working the arithmetic of which ethnic group gets what, when and
how in the proverbial sharing of the ‘national cake’.

Three,
there is an urgent need to do something about hate speech because of its
tendency to exacerbate ethnicity and the crisis in our nation building. For instance
though the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)
– a multilateral treaty adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on
December 16, 1966 and which came into force from March 23, 1976 – encourages countries to prohibit any advocacy
of national, racial, ethnic or religious hatred, in practice hate speech
is difficult to prohibit. In the US for
instance, hate speech is protected as a civil right (aside from usual
exceptions to free speech such as defamation, incitement to riot, and fighting
words). In fact laws prohibiting hate speech are unconstitutional in the United
States as most often fail legal challenges based on the First Amendment of the
Country’s Constitution which prohibited the restriction of free speech. In the
US law courts, even ‘fighting words’ – which are categorically excluded from
the protection of the First Amendment – are not that easy to separate from hate
speech.

An insight into how the American jurisprudence
protects hate speech is in the way the
law treats the Ku Klux Klan – one of the worst purveyors of racial hatred in
that country. In a landmark case, Brandenburg
v. Ohio (1969), the arrest of an Ohio Klansman named Clarence
Brandenburg on criminal syndicalism charges, based on a KKK speech that
recommended overthrowing the government, was overturned in a ruling that has
protected rascals of all political persuasions ever since. In a unanimous
judgment, Justice William Brennan argued that “the constitutional
guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or
proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such
advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is
likely to incite or produce such action.” In another important case, Snyder v. Phelps (2011), Westboro
Baptist Church, which has achieved some notoriety for celebrating the 9/11
attacks and picketing military funerals, was sued by the family of Lance
Corporal Matthew Snyder who was killed in Iraq in 2006 for intentional
infliction of emotional distress after it picketed during the Corporal’s
funeral. In an 8-1 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Westboro’s right to
picket.

There
are at least four key arguments for justifying free speech in American jurisprudence–
the importance of discovering the truth by allowing ideas to compete freely in
the marketplace of ideas, free speech is regarded as an aspect of self-fulfillment,
it is also seen as indispensable for a citizen to participate in a democracy
and there is the deep suspicion of government and a belief that only free
speech can restrain the government from trampling on the rights of the citizens.

Away
from American free speech jurisprudence, hate speech is prohibited in several
jurisdictions such as Canada where advocating genocide or inciting hatred
against any ‘identifiable group’ is an indictable offence under the country’s Criminal
Code with maximum prison terms of two to fourteen years. In the United Kingdom,
several statutes criminalize hate speech against several categories of persons.
In South Africa, hate speech (along with incitement to violence and propaganda
for war) is specifically excluded from protection of free speech in the
Constitution. The Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination
Act, 2000 in fact contains the following clause: “[N]o person may publish,
propagate, advocate or communicate words based on one or more of the prohibited
grounds, against any person, that could reasonably be construed to demonstrate
a clear intention to― (a) be hurtful;(b) be harmful or (c) to incite harm and
(d) promote or propagate hatred”.

Four,
how should the government tackle the menace of hate speech- should it follow
the American model and believe that the
ability to live with speeches that shock or awe should be a small price to pay
for safeguarding free speech and that Nigerians should see it as part of the
process of nurturing the culture of tolerance? Or should it follow the European
and South African model that explicitly prohibit hate speech? My personal
opinion is that the government should go for a cross between the two. For
instance using the law to prohibit free speech could sometimes be
counterproductive. A good example of this is what happened in the Australian
state of Victoria where a law banning incitement to religious hatred has led to
Christians and Muslims accusing each other of inciting hatred and bringing
legal actions against each other that only served to further inflame community
relations.

I
will recommend the following measures: There is an urgent need to develop, in
conjunction with critical organs of the society such as media owners and
practitioners, taxonomy of what constitutes hate speech. Media houses through
their unions should incorporate these as part of good journalism practice and
impose sanctions on erring members who publish or broadcast hate speech-laden
materials. The National Orientation Agency, in concert with civil society
groups and community leaders, should also embark on a campaign against the use
of hate speech. In the same vein, Internet Service providers should be
encouraged to bring down blogs and websites they host which publish, promote or
give unfettered space for the expression of free speech. Above all it should be impressed upon the political
leadership at all levels that a deep distrust of the government is at the heart
of the sort of free speech jurisprudence you have in the United States and that
Nigerians have the same level of distrust of their governments.

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