Dear President Muhammadu Buhari,
I greet you in the name of Allah and congratulate you on the return of your son Yusuf after an apparently successful medical tourism to a country better managed than Nigeria. When I saw Yusuf’s smiling face on television, I recalled the gloomy faces of my schoolmates picked up by moonlight that fateful night as we were being driven by our abductors to a land unknown after they forcefully took us from our school.

The excitement on your son’s face as he returned back to a life of luxury whereby he uses expensive motorbikes to drive away boredom contrasted sharply with the dreadful melancholy on the faces of my schoolmates as we were being taken in a rickety truck to a life of certain misery. I saw Yusuf being surrounded by ministers, government officials and a state governor, each person trying hard to identify with his joy. This was almost the same way our abductors surrounded us, each of them trying to identify closely with any of my schoolmates he found most sexually attractive.

When I saw the mirth and glow on the face of your wife over the recovery of her only son from a serious accident, I remembered the crying and tear-ridden face of my mother when they showed her on television. I heard that your wife thanked Nigerians for their prayers and concern over Yusuf’s accident. I also heard that my mother complained that security agencies harassed and beat her because she lamented the way the government handled the issue of our abduction.

Please send my warm regards to Yusuf. Tell him that I envy people like him – those who are fortunate to live like kings in a land full of suffering. Tell him that people like us still exist – those whose cardinal sin was that they were unfortunate to be born in a country cursed with incompetent leadership and insensitive leaders.

His Excellency, I currently live with two men who take turns to rape me countless times in a day. The first day, I fought one of them as he tried to deflower me but he hit me so much that I passed out. It was when I woke up that I realised that he had deflowered me while I was unconscious. I wept for several hours over my lost virginity and wept more when I realised that the second man also slept with me too in my insentient state.

I wish you can ask these men why they usually thrust their stinking bodies on me one at a time, one after the other, anytime they finish saying their prayers, taking my pride as a woman in such a violent manner that I wonder whether the god they just prayed to do assent to such cruelty. I used to struggle and cry in the past but now I am drained of energy. So I only close my eyes and beg God to take my life and save me from an existence I never thought was possible. But God has refused to listen so I starve myself and eat any strange substance that I come about, hoping to die of hunger or poisoning. I am disappointed that I am still alive.

They did not care whether I ate or not in the first four days. But since their commander came and talked to them, they have been bringing food to me, sometimes begging me to eat. I overheard their commander telling them that they need to keep me alive and well so that they would use me to make a lot of money from the Nigerian government and get some of their commanders in government custody released. Initially I did not understand what they meant until one of them said they want to use me and my schoolmates the way they have been using the other girls they took from Chibok to blackmail and extort the government.

Sir, even in the lowest point of your glorious military service and your remarkable life, you wouldn’t have experienced half of what I am going through. I am permanently disheartened over my uncertain, miserable future and I keep thinking of my parents and siblings who don’t know whether I am still alive or dead. My mother is hypertensive and I doubt whether she would survive the abduction of her favourite daughter by bloodthirsty terrorists.

I don’t know where exactly we are being kept but I know we are very very far from our school where they took us. The truck that took us from our school drove through the road and bush for several hours in the night, until we got to a newly cleared place that looked lonely and deserted. They kept all of us who were taken from our school there for a day and then separated us and drove me and nine others for several hours to another place where we were shared out to twenty dirty, stinking bearded, Quran-clutching, gun-trotting men. The place we now find ourselves looks like it was hurriedly built with wood and paper cartons and is located deep inside a thick bush.

Every evening, they bring ten of us together in the house of a man they call Sheikh where I was surprised to see a big television with satellite connection which is powered by a small generator. Most of the men were usually interested in Nigerian news, which Sheikh interpreted to those who do not hear English.

All of us former schoolgirls usually sit quietly in a corner of the large room, each of us aware of the trauma and tragedy of the other. We recognise one another but we hardly talk to each other as we are aware that our oppressors may be listening and they have instructed us not to speak to each other. Even if we wanted to talk, I wonder in our anxiety and anguish what any of us may want to say to another. So we always sit face down, innocent girls whose lives have been ruined by the failures of the government and institutions that were supposed to protect them.

Mr. President, you need to do something about those in your government that tell regular lies and those who bring disgrace to your name. You need to see the way the men laughed when they heard that you have deployed 100 aircraft to look for 110 girls and how they laughed harder when they watched a newscaster narrating how the Nigerian police and army were blaming each other over our abduction.

It was the third day we were taken there that Sheikh explained the existence of the television. I heard him telling one of them that looked like a fresh recruit that they bought the television together with a generator and a lot of sophisticated weapons after your government paid them handsomely in order to secure the release of some kidnapped lecturers. They talk about you as if you are one of them. They seem very delighted that you are Nigeria’s president.

Sheikh has huge white beards and spoke with authority. He looks like you – tall, dark in complexion and lanky – but with a beard. He speaks to us like an uncle and keeps telling us that we were abducted in the service of the holy prophet and that we may be needed on an important mission. One day, I complained to him about the persistent rape and beating by the men that I live with. That was after one of them beat me mercilessly only because I was menstruating.

I wasn’t surprised or shocked when Sheikh told me that I should count myself lucky that some servants of Allah were violating an infidel. My ordeal is like an unending horror movie that I have become inured to surprises and shocks.

When we got back to the place we are staying after the encounter, both men beat me thoroughly with sticks. I did not cry or shed a tear. Maybe the tears refused to come or my body is now deadened to pain. I don’t really know.

Our dear President, it was during our sixth visit to the Sheikh’s place that I saw you on television looking very happy and excited amongst other expensively clothed men and women. It took me a while to understand that you were attending the wedding of the children of two serving state governors. Do you know that our abductors found the scene on television so amusing that they laughed and laughed and laughed? Their laughter was so loud and consistent that it drew the attention of all of us in the corner of the room. When we realised what tickled the men, all of us started crying. Our scalding tears were because of the tragedy of our lives and the tragedy of our country.

You see, when I was in primary school, I dreamt of being married by a wealthy man and having the kind of wedding you just attended. I realised that the easiest route to achieving such dream was to read hard and work hard. I read hard, I worked hard. That was the reason I have been top of my class since I entered secondary school.

Now my dreams are shattered. I don’t think I have a future. I don’t even want to have a future. Because the future offers me lowlife, endless sexual assault, possible pregnancy, death from the bullets of the Nigerian Armed Forces or the terrorists themselves. A future for me means possible indoctrination to become a suicide bomber whereby I go and blow up a market killing innocent people or being abused in captivity until I will be used as a bait to fund the terrorists and increase their capacity to kill more people. Or sometime in future I will appear on Shekau’s video, which would surely kill my mother. I just want to die now.

President Buhari, you have failed me. Your government has failed me, Nigeria has failed me.

Mayor Ikoroha is an author and public affairs analyst. He is on Twitter as @tellthemayor

The Bill on Hate speech before the National Assembly is an embarrassment. We seem to revel in taking decisions in moments of emotional flourishes and consequently often fail to soberly reflect on possible unintended consequences of our actions.

Last year we saw how the country made itself a laughing stock when IPOB, as despicable and unacceptable as its activities were, was hastily labelled a terrorist organization when it hardly met any of the four key criteria used by terrorism researchers in classifying an organization as a terrorist group. No country or credible researcher on terrorism was willing to support the government’s position. So how exactly did that hasty pronouncement help the country – except to trigger competitive calls for troublesome organisations and rural bandits to be similarly pronounced as terrorist groups? We must not lose sight of the lesson from that mistake.

I have written severally on hate speech and how it interplays with free speech and other speech forms. My reflections on the Hate Speech Bill will therefore draw from some of my articles on the subject over the years.

The first challenge the Hate Speech Bill will face is determining what constitutes hate speech. One definition of hate speech is that it is any speech that employs discriminatory epithets to insult and stigmatize others on the bases of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or other forms of group membership. The problem here is that offensive speech is also similarly defined.

Another definition of hate speech is any speech, gesture, conduct, writing or display which could incite people to violence or prejudicial action. Here the key word is ‘Incite’. However defining hate speech in this manner creates its own problem because even the opinions we hold could be construed as an incitement.  As Justice Holmes put it in a landmark case in the USA, (Gitlow v New York [1925]), “Every idea is an incitement... The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result.” 

Several scholars have tried to more precisely delineate when offensive speech crosses that fine line and becomes hate speech.  Susan Benesch, Director  of the Dangerous Speech Project and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University identified five key variables for determining  the ‘dangerousness’ of speech or when speech transmutes from offensive to hate speech: (1)The level of a speaker’s influence  (2)the grievances or fears of the audience (3) whether or not the speech act is understood as a call to violence, (4) the social and historical context, and  (5) the way in which the speech is disseminated. 

Even Professor Benesch’s delineations are fraught with relativities. The point is that delineating hate speech from offensive speech is extremely difficult. The definition of ‘hate speech’ adopted by the Hate Speech Bill is not rigorous enough. And any plea of ‘Nigerian exceptionalism’ is unlikely to persuade the international community when the country tries to implement its provisions and runs into inevitable difficulties. Some people believe that the term ‘hate speech’ should only be used for extreme cases such as speeches that explicitly call for the physical injury or extermination of certain people. I will define hate speech as speech that has ‘clear and imminent danger’ of triggering violence.

The second challenge which the Hate Speech Bill faces is the effectiveness of using the law to curb hate speech. Hate speech is prohibited by law in several jurisdictions such as Canada, France, the United Kingdom and South Africa. In the United Kingdom, among the panoply of the country’s hate speech laws, is Section 5 of the Public Order Act (POA), which makes it a crime to use or display threatening, abusive, or insulting words “within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm, or distress thereby.”  Under this section of the POA, Harry Taylor, an atheist who placed drawings satirizing Christianity and Islam in an airport prayer room, was convicted in April 2010 and given a six-month prison sentence. In Nigeria under the Hate Speech Bill he would be condemned to death!

In  The Netherlands, which is  long considered a bastion for the freedom of thought and expression, Articles 137(c) and 137(d) of the country’s Criminal Code prohibits making public intentional insults, as well as engaging in verbal, written, or illustrated incitement to hatred, on account of one’s race, religion, sexual orientation, or personal convictions.  In The Netherlands, the most prominent hate speech case to date is that of politician Geert Wilders, who was indicted by the public prosecutor in 2009 for his public comments about Muslims and Islam, and his release of a short film documenting what he called ‘inflammatory passages’ in the Qur’an.
In France, Section 24 of the country’s Press Law of 1881 criminalizes incitement to racial discrimination, hatred, or violence on the basis of one’s origin or membership (or non-membership) in an ethic, national, racial, or religious group. In 2005, politician Jean Marie Le Pen, runner-up in the 2002 presidential election, was convicted of inciting racial hatred for comments made to Le Monde in 2003 about the consequences of Muslim immigration in France. In South Africa, Julius Malema, the former ANC’s Youth League leader was in 2011 convicted of hate speech for promoting the song, “Kill the Boer”.

In contrast to the above countries, 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 prohibits the restriction of free speech. In the US law courts, even ‘fighting words’ (those that pass the ‘clear and imminent danger’ test which are categorically excluded from the protection of the First Amendment) are not that easy to separate from hate speech, which is a protected 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 by the country’s Supreme Court. 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.”

Is hate speech less in countries that use the law to fight it?

This is debatable.  What is clear is that laws can sometimes exacerbate the problem. A good example of this is what happened in the Australian state of Victoria where a law banning incitement to religious hatred led to Christians and Muslims accusing each other of inciting hatred and bringing legal actions against each other which only served to further inflame community relations. Besides, even if the law is effective in curbing hate speech in countries where the basis of statehood has long been settled, we cannot assume that the same will apply here where the country is extremely polarized and the basis of statehood remains contested. It is in fact tempting to speculate on what will happen if Junaid Mohammed, Edwin Clark, Prof Ben Nwabueze, Gani Adams, Prof Ango Abdullahi, Asari Dokubo and others who hold strong views that are sometimes unacceptable to sections of the country are condemned to death for speeches they uttered? Will that promote amity or widen the social distance among the different sections of the country?

How do we fight hate and offensive speeches?

A starting point is to recognize that the line between offensive and hate speech could be blurred. While proper hate speeches – those that pass the ‘clear and imminent danger’ test should be criminalized (certainly not with death penalty), my opinion is that we should use non-legal instruments to deal with offensive speeches. There may for instance be a need to develop, in conjunction with critical organs of the society such as media owners and practitioners, the taxonomy of what constitutes hate speech and offensive speeches. 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 speeches. 

 Perhaps one of the most effective ways of combating hate speech is to ensure that purveyors of such speeches are marginalized. For instance in the UK, while the racist British National Party and the ideas it purveys are not banned, it will be political suicide for any politician to be seen to associate with  the party’s members. In Nigeria offensive and hate speech mongers are adopted as regional and ethnic heroes.

Nigerians should also learn to laugh at themselves. This is already happening in some ways with our comedians who dish out jokes based on ethnic and regional profiling. In fact it could be argued that since every region and ethnic group in the country is both a victim and a victimizer when it comes to hate speech, they countervail and cancel out one another

The National Chairman of the National Action Council (NAC), Dr. Olapade Agoro, has advised President Muhammadu Buhari to bury the thought of seeking a re-election in 2019.

Agoro, who has severally run as the presidential candidate of his party said rather than seeking a fresh tenure, Buhari should return to his hometown, Duara in Katsina State for a good rest.

Dr. Agoro in an interview with another newspaper said the President has not performed as expected as it appears he is not in charge of his government. He said: “If it is in a civilized society, he would have left office. Buhari has done his best, so he should go back to his village to rest. He has not been able to perform; he is not in control.”

The NAC chairman also said he is willing to take the wife of the President, Mrs. Aisha Buhari as his running mate come 2019.

“I am sure and certain that I am coming to power in 2019 and people will start seeing the sign before June. The sign would be in the horizon.

“I know that by the grace of God, whether APC, PDP or third force; they will see me in power. This is my time; this is the time for honesty and righteousness in government.

“Buhari won’t contest. If his wife, Aisha is interested in being my running mate, I will take her.

“She is a nice woman. But for the President, he should go home and rest. He has nothing to offer again,” he said.

He also commented on the reinstatement of the suspended Executive Secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Prof. Usman Yusuf by President Buhari after he was suspended for corrupt practices by the minister of health.

Agoro said the reinstatement was an insult to the Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole, who had suspended the secretary after an allegation of financial impropriety.

“The reinstatement is wrong. It hurts me to the bone marrow that the Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole, is still staying in that office. What duty does he have in that office after being insulted? Agoro queried.

Daily Times