STOP USING HATE SPEECH AND FAKE NEWS TO DISCREDIT THE GOVERNMENT, LAI MOHAMMED SAYS

The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has said that hate speech, disinformation and fake news in the country are the handiwork of pessimists, whose aim is to discredit the government and destabilise the polity.

The Minister made the statement at the Extraordinary Meeting of the National Council on Information (NCI), which has the theme “Hate Speeches, Disinformation, Fake News and National Unity”, in Jos, Plateau State, on Thursday.”

“The campaign (to discredit the government) is a multi-million naira project and the people behind this string of hate speech, disinformation and fake news are not about to stop. In fact, they will become more vicious in the days, weeks and months ahead,” he said, according to Vanguard.

Mohammed blamed the resurgent push for separatism as well as the rising cases of ethnic and religious disharmony on the “growing phenomenon of hate speech, as well as the disinformation and fake news campaign”, and warned that hate speeches and incitement to violence set the stage for the genocide that left at least 800,000 people dead in Rwanda in 1994.

He traced the worsening cases of hate speech in the country to the period leading to the last general elections, when the then presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Muhammadu Buhari, was the target of a vicious campaign.

“Never in the history of electioneering campaign in Nigeria has such a quantum of hate speech been directed at any candidate. This did not stop even when he won the election and became President. For instance, the President had hardly left Nigeria for his vacation in London on 19 January 2017, during which he said he would have routine medical check-up, when these hate and fake news campaigners circulated the news that he has died. Between then and now, they have repeated similar fakes news times without number,” the Minister said.