Politics : The Senate : A petty, paranoid, red – eyedchamber intent on castrating the youths

Ugoji Egbujo

“Banish  the social media, dismantle the internet and confiscate their mobile phones. Isolate them, put out their lights and shut in these trouble makers and there will be peace.” “All in favour say aye”   If we hesitate, with this senate, the ayes will have it. The biggest threat to the perpetuation of the enslavement of the poor majority in Nigeria by the political class   is the social media.

protest: Uzere youths protesting at Shell Petroleum Development Company facility in United.

So the senators are not mad after all. If there is a tool with a potential to break   the sort of bondage that poverty , corruption and ethno- religious acrimony, acting in concert, have instituted in Nigeria   it is the social media.

Senators are sleepless not because of high infant mortality rate but because the ordinary people can now get back at them.   They want that audacity curbed or   cured.

The shield of murkiness, secrecy and deceit is now penetrable.   Their arrogance cannot tolerate the impudence of the activism that the social media has engendered.   It’s too much power to the people.

The political class had the people where they wanted them. Too poor, too desperate,   too weak to fight for rights.   Too divided,     too fractured, too disunited to mount a challenge against their collective oppression.

But the political class should be afraid. Since it appears that their resolve to keep the people impoverished and prostrate is unremitting, they should worry about the social media. Because an apocalypse like the Arab spring     is no longer far-fetched,   these politicians must   worry.     The youths must resist castrations.

Power in the hands of the youths possesses spontaneity and   innocence, and   can be gathered in a moment .   And because it can be daring, its flammability must trouble emperors and docile senators. It’s true that even the social media isn’t exempt from political exploitation   and isn’t immune to the devils that have pitted the poor against themselves while others milked them.

It   is true that   disunity and violence can easily be fanned by the dry whirl winds of   the virtual space of social media. But because,   if the highway is kept unclogged and   free- flowing , and information and knowledge allowed to travel unhindered, truth will ultimately   blow away   lies, and the poor will be freed.     The social media hastens the day of reckoning.

The argument that   social media   has generated such a debilitating malignancy in the proliferation of defamations is a half -truth. There have been cases where reputations have been tainted or ruined maliciously. But that happens with televisions and newspapers too. I agree that the social media by nature is particularly vulnerable to   such ugly applications.

Users can   be made more conscious of defamatory publications and the dangers posed by the dissemination   of hate and falsehood without threatening a clampdown.   We have enough laws already to deal with those mischiefs.   The prioritization of   the gagging of   social media   in a society where politicians and government officials have a world wide reputation for looting of   public treasury, corrupt enrichment and gross arbitrariness is   puzzling.
Whose interest is the proposed law supposed to serve? The desperate poor who have been dispossessed to desolation   and have no reputations to protect or the unscrupulous rich whose character cannot support the reputation the social media and its freedom will circumcise? Is it the poor majority whom rigging has made irrelevant in the electoral process and whose voice has been stolen by rent seekers   or politicians who rig their way into office and steal their way into political immortality?

Sacred rights cannot be curtailed on flimsy grounds. Freedom of speech is such a right.   And for a society drowning in the pit of corruption the social media is a life line. The powerful may be above the law   but not beyond the reach of collective scorn and opprobrium amplified by the social media.     But why is freedom of speech now suddenly more important than malaria and provision of clean water?

Democracy will be a dangerous experiment without the freedom of speech. That explains why Gnassigbe Eyadema and others were worse than military dictatorships. And the Nigerian democracy that was once bedridden by apathy and cynicism cannot survive the relapse that gagging of social media would provoke. Social media has greatly improved participation and enthusiasm in the democratic process and has primed the keenness of the public to hold governments to account.

The potentials of social media for social reawakening and transformation are truly great. Once upon a time media houses were shut and     burnt to muzzle freedom of expression.   At other times news could be killed or played down by editors or newspapers may be mopped out of the streets.   With the coming of age of social media, tyranny has been confronted with an immateriality it cannot contain.

With mobile telephony and the internet, everyone is now a reporter and news cannot be arrested. The resultant borderless public forum, that market place for the exchange of ideas,   would have been a nightmare for   Mobutu and Idi Amin. The sort of censorship the proposed law seeks   is an anachronism. It belongs to another age.

But who are the senators   afraid of this time? They are afraid of Nigerian youths. Power perhaps tampers with vision   because Rueben Abati in   the throes of the intoxication   power inflicted upon him once described   the same youths as “all the cynics, the pestle-wielding critics, the unrelenting, self-appointed activists, the idle and idling, twittering, collective children of anger, the distracted crowd of Facebook addicts, the BBM-pinging soap opera gossips of Nigeria, who seem to be in competition among themselves to pull down President Goodluck Jonathan.”