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The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed has said that some people are bent on dragging the President Muhammadu Buhari administration through the mire by sponsoring hate speeches and fake news both on the emerging and traditional media.
Mohammed noted that the sponsors of these hate speeches hope to discredit the government, destabilize the polity and make the country ungovernable.
The minister made the statement at the Extraordinary Meeting of the National Council on Information (NCI), which was themed “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 is not about to stop. In fact, they will become more vicious in the days, weeks and months ahead,’’ he said.
Alhaji 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 in Nigeria has such a quantum of hate speech being 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 a routine medical check-up when these hate and fake news campaigners circulated the news that he had died. Between then and now, they have repeated similar fakes news times without number,’’ the minister said.
He cited three instances of disinformation and fake news targeted at him, including when he was quoted as saying the government does not know who will sign the 2017 budget when what he said was that when the budget is transmitted to the presidency, a decision will be taken.