By Dr. 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 Uzere,Tuesday. PHOTO: Akpokona Omafuaire.

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.”

But why the senate? Yes,   because this senate has acquired an ugly reputation for   pettiness, cynicism and vindictiveness. Often,   what happens at birth can have life long effects. The senate   had in the name of punctuality   denied half of its members participation in its  inauguration.

And in embracing subterfuge   infused its leadership with paranoia. The   senate   leadership is   dogged by   a   lingering feeling that a major retributive   payback lurks.   At inception Saraki’s defiance was cheered   but those events   have left Saraki entangled   with chronic anxiety.   And the senate is now   like a car stuck in the mud, screeching in vain. The PDP didn’t help Saraki by helping themselves to the deputy senate president position.   Because Saraki hasn’t stopped answering to why he traded that position. And where will he find cogency? Those doing the asking have no use for his answer.

The senate leadership feels   harassed and persecuted and the proposed     law   is a reflection of that mindset.     A hounded Saraki gropes and gropes and can’t feel the presidency and that leaves him insomniac and leaves the senate constipated and a bit disoriented. He has a few of his APC men with him   out of loyalty and has some others because he has answered them with good committee positions.

Yet he cannot rely on   the APC senators. He must keep the PDP senators close because they are his real protection against an ambush. So the senate has run on personal calculations and petty business. With many implacable foes, the senate leadership is always tensed, almost   always   braced for skirmishes. The perceived meddlesomeness of online media and groups must then be infernal nuisance.

Rationality has deserted the senate. The EFCC predictably came calling early .     Politics in Nigeria abhors finesse. Saraki’s wife   was remembered and Dino Melaye led the   ‘maiguards’ there. Melaye’s activism has seasonal variations. But if it weren’t gimmickry or perhaps arm-twisting, why hasn’t Saraki’s wife been charged?   Before Saraki could let out a sigh of relief,   the EFCC   upped   the ante and went   for Saraki’s manager.

The poor soul went on a “tactical withdrawal”, he eloped.   We haven’t heard of him since, perhaps we never will.   I am not suggesting the investigations were uncalled for,   no.   Those charged with criminal justice delivery must act in manners that suggest they are keen on justice and nothing else.   But rather than give the benefit of the doubt, because an investigative agency should retain the right to invite anyone in the course of its duties, the senate embraced retaliatory   pettiness. It proclaimed   persecution.

No one was then surprised when a petition emerged from somewhere and the   EFCC chairman was wanted for a senate probe.   A senate shouldn’t be so bereft of compunction. It’s easy to turn anything into a joke.   The EFCC chairman refused to turn up and that was sacrilegious.   The senate cannot be held to such contempt by any citizen even if   that senate had been   making a mockery of itself.

If   the EFCC   didn’t lose courage, didn’t   tuck in its tail and slink   away , why hasn’t anything been heard of those investigations after many months now. Some say the frightened EFCC nudged the CCB to help out. The   CCB received the baton and   promptly dug up   something,   and   charged Saraki for wrong assets declaration. The senate, always shortsighted, always cynical, frowned on the probe.

Andit must beggar belief that     the highest law making body is visibly angry at   an attempt by   an agency to enforce the laws it   has made.   Are the laws   made for the poor only? Whenever Saraki has to attend court,   the senate , a public institution,   suspends sittings and shuts down in solidarity. That   solidarity must imply   that the senate president is perhaps a victim of something.

It could be an   oblique hint   that big politicians are either beyond sinning   or above being punished. The accused is innocent until proven guilty but a horde of senators attending a trial in support of an accused?     The system is broken. The senate has scant   regards for principles.   Saraki is innocent until proven guilty but the   PDP senators, called on God, invoked ancestors and posterity,   contrived moral indignation and   staged a walk out because they wanted another innocent man to suffer some harm.

It is heart warming that the president has made his position known early. The bill will not get his assent. The senate set him up, many began wailing about the resurrection of   Decree 4 . This senate that has time for an elaborate ceremony to commission suggestion boxes must be watched.

It wouldn’t matter if that bill is withdrawn tomorrow and someone rises to take credit for being a listening senate president. The senate must answer for attempted castration of the youths. The recall process is cumbersome but the social media must make them know that such actions will always attract heavy social consequences.