As Nigeria approaches the 2019 general elections, online publishers have been challenged to use their platforms to fight political violence, hate speech and rigging and to also help Nigerians rediscover their voices.
They have also been charged to clean their house of purveyors of hate speech and fake news.
Speakers at the second Annual conference of the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP), made the call on Friday at the event which took place at the Sheraton Hotels, Ikeja, Lagos
Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, former Director- General, National Human Rights Commission, delivering a 19 paged paper on “Online Publishers’ Role Towards A Sustainable Economy, Credible Election and Security In Nigeria,” the theme of the Conference, Odinkalu noted that the trio of election violence, hate speech and rigging were the major challenges to credible elections in the country.
Noting that violence has sadly been a part of elections in Nigeria from the first general election, he said that for the 2019 elections, it was not a question of if there will be violence, but “how much.”
“I do not wish to get into predictions of fields of violence in the 2019 elections but it would also be naïve, based on what we already know and have seen, to assume that the contest will be without major incidents,” he said.
He spoke further; “the temptation is to say that political violence is part of Nigeria’s election political culture. It is not that violence is embedded in our political culture but that tolerance for it is embedded in the genes of our political leaders.
“They are the ones who use it, fund it and they benefit from it. Nobody gets punished for it.”
On the issue of hate speech, Odinkalu said, “some will say we are stuck congenitally with hate but that is a lie. That the different tribes cannot coexist, it is not true.”
READ ALSO: My nomination as vice presidential candidate about the masses-Peter Obi
Putting forward a thesis, he said; “for the past four to five years, our economy has been growing more slowly than our population. So we are creating more mouths with less to eat. What is happening in Nigeria therefore is not crisis of congenital hate but a crisis of demand and supply, a country creating more mouths than it can feed. When you don’t have responsible political leadership with capable institutions, that is breeds hate.
“The politicians socialize their costs and privatize our common patrimony, creating avoidable scarcity of public goods and growing immiseration. What ensues is a popular stampede for the limited crumbs that drop from the table, in pursuit of which narrow identity is freely deployed.”
Odinkalu, touching on the problem of rigging said; “Elections are about numbers because democracy is about counting. Every democracy is built on counting the people (demographics of census), counting the voters (elections) and counting and distributing the commonwealth (appropriations). In this way, numbers are supposed to make us honest.
“In Nigeria, however, we choose to subvert all of these processes of counting through manufactured political innumeracy (rigging). Predictably, Nigeria has a habit of historically innumerate counting, especially in elections. Our elections are more often than not problematic not because we don’t vote peacefully (we mostly do) but because we choose almost always to be rooked with counting. Like the auto assembly, our political innumeracy is born of a completely knocked down (CKD) process. It begins long before the vote. It has already begun with the party primary process with some State Governors manufacturing ghost numbers of turn out that were manifestly fictional.”
He therefore called on online publishers to close ranks and work together to fight these menace and make the 2019 election better than the past elections.
“The challenges will be daunting, the setting will be quite febrile, and the temptation to join those whom we supposedly cannot beat could be overwhelming. This setting calls for collaboration not destructive competition; for burden sharing and collegiality not for the instincts of the lone-ranger. Despite the snarling tribalisms of digital communities, there is ample evidence to suggest that consumers of news and citizens still treasure responsible journalism.
“GOCOP should set high standards for itself and its members. In the end, we are not just journalists, entrepreneurs and professionals. We are, before any of these, citizens and neighbours. As 2019 approaches, we will be required to reconcile the conflicting demands of these capacities.”
Chairman of the occasion, former governor of Ogun State, Segun Osoba, in his speech also called on GOCOP to clean its house by weeding out untrained people who use the social media to promote hate across the country.
Represented by the Executive Director of Diamond Awards for Media Excellency, Lanre Idowu, lamented that bloggers were promoting mischief and blackmail.
“It is a global concern that you need to look continually look into. How can we reduce the proclivity for this errant behaviour?”
“I am aware your association is made up of responsible journalists but all it takes for your reputation to be sullied is a handful of the deviant people, who have other objectives for their presence in the public sphere.”
Noting that it was good to get the news first, Osoba said however, it was better “to get it right,” stressing; “your association should drum this point into the hearing of your members for if there is a medium that has the greatest potential to stoke conflict through precipitate and unverified information, it is the online media.
“In a country with still a large population of the uneducated, we must be careful not to unwittingly stoke violent conflict, stunt economic development and imperil the future of our people.”
Commenting on the topic of the conference, Osoba said; “whilst I will be looking forward to the outcome of your deliberations, I note that when the subjects of discourse touch the economy, credible elections and security of our country, there is no doubt that there is a lot to chew.”
In his own remark, former Managing Director of Daily Times Tola Adeniyi, said GOCOP had come of age and should therefore help Nigerians to rediscover their voices as the labour leaders seem to have become ineffective in championing the cause of the masses.
He said online publishers were enjoying a rise in importance and relevance and so are in a position to help educate the people on the way forward.
