The North is now synonymous with death! Why would any sane person go there for anything? They dont want non-muslims there, they dont want southerners there, you must be a muslim fanatic to survive up there in the zoo, you must be a quran-toting-sharia-crazy islamic extremist to avoid being slaughtered and your intestine given to your wife or husband to eat by the barbarians in the boko haram country. So why would anyone go up there for anything that has to do with civilization, if not to go and die. Mr. Iyayi is another victim of nigerias curse, the fulani north. May his soul rest in peace! But going forward, if you want to die go to arewa! For it is only an idiot that keeps venturing into the blood-sucking-valley-of-death called the North. Even the idiotic and timid governors from the South who preach one nigeria and a fake unity that doesnt exist dont go to the arewa north, even with their police-station-entourages. So why would any civilized human go to a dark animal land! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The above was posted as a comment on Sahara Reporters in reaction to the death of Prof. Festus Iyayi. The sheer volume of ignorance and un substantiated hatred displayed by the writer may seem grossly appropriated by many but the truth is that there are many people who think like this today. You begin to wonder where you want to start the task of educating them from or even if it is worth it. As someone who grew up in the north and still live in the north, I know for a fact that there are no nice words to describe the character who wrote this and the most flattering will be to simply call him a liar. And then we begin to really see that one of the main problems we have today is enlightening our population. Not the PR government driven enlightenment of the NOA or Ministry of Information, tailored to sell the government or its programmes but a real effort aimed at sifting the truth about Nigeria from the political and ignorance driven hate speeches and misinformation. For people who visit Sahara Reporters often though, the above comment is not surprising or even the worst in its category. We thank Sahara Reporters for SOME of the stories they have published in the past. Kudos. But there are two categories of what they publish on their site. Their direct editorial content and reader comments. So does Sahara Reporters owe Nigeria any responsibility in terms of what it allows others to publish using its platform? There are acceptable standards allowed globally for what should or should not be disseminated using ANY publishing platform. Even here on Facebook, there are comments and words that will not be tolerated. Posts that constitute hate speech are one of them. Posts that are likely to incite violence against a particular group are another. In a highly charged society like ours, the responsibility that comes with publishing needs even greater application and anyone who knows he or she cannot, for lack of resources or comprehension of what it entails carry this out, should kindly not be in the business of publishing. Freedom of speech assumes ab initio that the speech in itself is logical, legal and not designed to cause harm to a system, a person or a group of persons. Where the speech infringes goes beyond this, then there are checks in the legal framework of society to be applied. Where the offending area is something like your reader comment section, and you know you cannot dedicate adequate manpower to gate-keep the flow of comments, common sense and decency suggest you restrict people from posting comments on your site BECAUSE that is not the primary reason your site as a publishing medium exists. It is ancillary but not compulsory. Several online publishers have taken advantage of the fact that there is no proper monitoring of their activities within our borders to cause harm to the psyche of Nigerians and allow others to use them to perpetuate mental violence on others and in many cases, causing permanent changes to the perceptions of fellow citizens about their neighbours capable of marring any future interactions they may have with them. Nobody has a right to do that. Nobody.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 19:01:57 +0000
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