By: Joy Odor/Kaduna
The Senior Programme Officer, Mal. Isah Garba of Center for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) has informed that the Center have documented a total of 820 hate speech items in the month of September, 2017 only.
They are categorized as ethnicity, religion, Biafra agitation, farmers/herders and election issues from the results of their monitoring activities.
Speaking during a one day seminar organized to sensitized journalists in Kaduna, North-West, Nigeria on Tuesday on the danger of hate speech, Mal. Isah Garba was of the opinion that the analysis showed that ethnicity has the highest percentage of 57.0%, religion with 25.9%, Biafra has 5.6% while farmers/ herders and election issue shared 7.4%.
The Senior Program Officer of the Centre said the alarming rate of hate speeches depicts that the country is sitting on a boiling pot that needs a very immediate, pragmatic and constructive measure to preempt the occurrence of the dangers through the breaking of conflicts.
He urged the government to intensify its efforts in addressing the social economic problems of the Nigerian youth by occupying them with more positive engagement that will shun them away from engaging in conflicts stimuli.
Mal. Garba reiterated the commitment of CITAD to ensuring monitoring, reporting and sharing the reports monitored hate speech to the general public through the media every month.
He therefore called on the government to stop keeping blinds eyes on issues that are clearly security threat to the country but rather come out with just and pragmatic approaches to address the issues.
The Senior Program Officer also called on the media especially the online media to be very careful in their chic of words especially in making headlines on issues that are very sensitive such as religion and ethnicity.
