By Michael Dokosi
In light of the brouhaha and the furore that has been generated by elements within the NPP after the police arrested some activists of the party who threatened the President of Ghana with death or tried to incite others to assassinate him, and with the way some have used mass media platforms to defend these utterances, it is pertinent to ask if hate speech is free speech.
First of all, it is worth noting that the issue under discussion here is not about insults. An insult is one thing and hate speech is another. In the furore that has been generated over the arrests, it is clear that some people think an insult is the same as a hate speech.
An insult and a hate speech are not the same. An insult is the act of denigrating another. Hate speech is the act of stirring hatred for another person, religion, ethnic group etc. Insulting somebody is most unlikely to result in murder but hate speech can easily lead to murder, assassination, genocide or civil war.
When a person is celebrating the death of another in a tragic accident and takes to a mass media platform to say he or she wishes the President of the country was part of those who died in the accident, it is clearly hate speech. When a person calls for the assassination of the President of a country, he or she is indulging in hate speech because any crank head(s) or psychopath(s) can decide to act on it and proceed to attempt to or assassinate the President.
The crank head(s) or psychopath(s) may fail. If they succeed and hell decides to break lose, civil war and genocide may be the result.
The assassination of President Melchoir Ndadaye of Burundi in 1993 sparked a civil war in Burundi with between 50,000 to 100,000 people killed in the first year alone. The following year, the shooting down of the plane carrying Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntamayira as the plane in which they were was about to land at the airport in Kigali is the immediate cause of the Rwandan genocide. The Hutu extremists in the Rwandan army blamed the Tutsis for the shooting down of the airplane. By the evening of that very day, April 6,1994, many had been killed. The next day, the systematic slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus began. What is undoubtedly Hate Speech from one of the radio stations in Kigali, Radio Television Libre des Collines (RTLM) became the order of the day. This radio station called on Hutus to kill the “cockroaches”. The Tutsis were the ones being referred to as “cockroaches.”
Within 100 days, between 900,000 and 1,000,000 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered. The accounts of the viciousness of the genocide are too painful to recall. This is what Hate Speech can do! This is how hate speech can devastate a country and a people. Is that what we want for Ghana?
On July 25, 2015, a crank head was caught at the Ringway Assemblies of God Church with a loaded gun. When he was busted, he confessed wanting to assassinate President Mahama. He was tried and jailed ten years but later, acquitted with the claim that he had a psychiatric problem. Many did not believe this claim. How a man who knows how to buy a gun, where to buy one, goes to buy one, knows how to load it, knows how to cock it, knows where to find his intended target, goes where the target will be and position himself behind him, ready to assassinate him before he was arrested does is a psychiatric case beats the imagination. In any case, if he had opened fire on the President, the President may have been killed because bullets have no psychiatric problem. They kill. The President would have been killed. If the would-be assassin, Charles Antwi, had succeeded, Ghana could have gone the way of Burundi or Rwanda because the Hate Speech by some people before this incident will see others pointing accusing fingers at them as master minders of the dastardly act. The retribution that may have followed may make the Rwandan genocide a child’s play. Is that what some Ghanaian’s want?
During the era of the Kufuor government, a vehicle following ex-President Rawlings at Denu in the Volta Region was stopped and searched by locals. Guns were found in it. The occupants of the vehicle were BNI operatives. National security came out to say the operatives were following the ex-President to ensure his safety. Later, a senior National Security officer, explaining what happened to some journalists told them that there was no way National Security (under then President J.A. Kufuor) could be making any attempt to assassinate the ex-President because they know none of them ( in National Security) will survive it if Rawlings was assassinated. This is food for thought; those who are defending Hate Speech should not think that they will go unscathed if, touchwood, the consequences of Hate Speech flares up in our faces. So, let the so-called moral voices of the society who are defending Hate Speech rather advice elements of the NPP to desist from Hate Speech. Did they hear the General Secretary of the NPP advising the party’s supporters to continue to do what they are doing? In the forest, when the tortoise told the climbing plan to tell the bird that the noise it was making will land them in trouble, the climbing plant said the trouble will come upon only the noisy bird’s head so it does not concern it. When a hunter one day followed the noise, saw the bird and shot it down, the bird fell right where the tortoise was. The hunter, counting his blessings because he now has a bird and tortoise for his house decided to cut the climbing plant and use it to tie the two animals. On the hunter’s way back home, the tortoise reminded the climbing plant about its claim that only the bird will suffer; now, they were all suffering.
The Defenders of Hate Speech should beware. They too will be victims of Hate Speech if it results in the unthinkable one day. Perhaps, they will only begin to see Hate Speech for what it is worth when they find themselves if it causes Ghana to degenerate into civil war and they wake up one day in a United Nations tent on a school park in Togo, Ivory Coast or Burkina Faso and line up as refugees to collect a bowl of porridge being served by staffers of the Foods and Agriculture Organization(FAO) of the UN.
Criticism and even insult can be tolerated but Hate Speech must not! Hate Speech is not free speech!
