Your bill on social media is generating mixed reactions. What do you want to achieve with it?
I sponsored the bill to sanitize information flow on the social media. The social media is a very valuable platform for dissemination of information and it has helped this country greatly, but of recent, we have seen some few bad eggs that have turned it into a business venture.
They collect money from people and go into the social media to tarnish the image of their political opponents. It is against this backdrop that we felt people should behave responsibly on the platform.
If you take, for example, Facebook it has made it very clear the condition for operating on its platform, part of it, is that you must not be abusive. The second one is that you must not preach hatred. But what we have discovered of recent is that some very few bad eggs have turned the social media into money-making venture, wherein they blackmail people.
They ask you to bring money or they post things that will portray you in bad light or alternatively collect money from other political opponents and post unfavourable things about you. This is not going to augur well for this country.
Can you tell us some of these people that are making fortune through blackmail on the social media?
Well, if you look at the general complaints that we have had on the floor of the Senate, you would have seen that virtually everybody is a victim. Just this (yesterday) evening somebody told me how an executive officer, I think in NCC was blackmailed. Somebody paid money and they went and wrote false things about him on the social media and he was asked to vacate the office, only to discover that the allegations were false.
You see, if there is anything that God hates, it is for you to write something that is damaging against another person, based on falsehood. I think this country will not grow if as leaders we sit down and allow this kind of thing to continue.
So, it is a greater thing to say fine, you can do your social media, you can write whatever you want but whatever information you have is equally available to you because of the Freedom of Information Bill. So if you have all these, there is no reason why the law should allow you to continue to collect money and post or broadcast falsehood against individuals and damage their character. The law should not allow you to set the public against people or to set the public against government institution.
The bill came to limelight at a time when the Senate President, Bukola Saraki is having a running battle with the Sahara Reporters, an online medium. Is it part of it?
Let me be honest with you, I didn’t even know the Senate President has an issue with the Sahara Reporters until after Senator Dino Melaye raised a point of order on it on the floor of the Senate last Thursday. We had in our legislative agenda, the idea of making sure that this country is ruled by law and we are of the view that the only way this country can move forward is if there are laws and they are enforced and that was why the ICT committee of the Senate was created.
We felt the need that all these things must be regulated. All the areas where we have seen hitches in our democratic journey, we want to make sure that they are corrected. Some people just want to misinform the public on the bill, and don’t forget that the bill is going to go through public hearing, wherein the public are going to say their mind on it, whether the bill is desirable or not. But as a Senate, we should be seen to do something and the public should have say in it but the public cannot blackmail us into saying that we cannot sit down and make laws for the country. And our primary responsibility is to make laws for the good of the country.
But it is widely believed that you came up with the bill to shut people from criticizing your activities and the provisions in the bill seem to suggest so. What is your take on this?
No, no if you look at the bill, I have given you a copy, you’ve seen it. All we are saying is that; please go ahead and publish or broadcast whatever you want but make sure that the information you’re posting are correct. And we said, instead of filing frivolous petitions, wherein government money will be used in investigating it and at the end of the day it will turn out to be untrue. We say, you as a petitioner, if you have confidence in your petition, go to court and swear an affidavit to say whatever that are in the petition are true. So that if it is investigated and it turns out to be untrue, the person you wrote the petition against will equally have claims to make against you. So, it is an issue of balancing but all that are going on now it is misinformation and this will not help anybody.
The success of your party at the last general elections was chiefly attributed to the influence of the social media. Nigerians used it to catapult your party to victory. Are you trying to bite the finger that fed you?
No, I have told you in a very clear language that the social media played a very great role in bringing APC into the government and in stabilizing this country. The only reason why this law has to come is that you have to remove the bad eggs in the social media. After all, the social media users that helped in bringing APC into government were not telling lies about the previous government. Virtually, all the things Sahara Reporters said about Jonathan government have come to past. What we are after, is people who have created platforms on social media for making money by blackmailing people through posting of frivolous things. It has nothing do with the gag of the social media. So, before people criticize the law, let them have a look at the law.
If you have freedom of expression, it is not absolute. The fact that you have freedom of expression does not give you the license to continue to go and make allegations against people because those people too have their own right, which is called dignity of human person.
Are you sure the bill is not out to trample on people’s right to freedom of expression as guaranteed in the Constitution of the country?
Yes, it is the right of the every individual to express him or herself but that right stops where by doing so he or she will be affecting another person’s right. So if you have right to freedom of expression, does that mean you will just jump to the street and say, ‘This one is a thief, that one is a rogue when you don’t have evidence?’ We agree you have right to freedom of expression but does that right in the constitution anticipate that you have the right to continue to go on Facebook and be saying this one is a bastard that one is this . Is that what the constitution anticipates? If the constitution anticipates that, is the same thing as saying that other persons don’t have right to personal dignity? So both the right to freedom of expression and the right to dignity of person are all fundamental human rights.
So, you cannot take one and leave the other. In law, we say, ‘we all know that you have right of freedom of movement, therefore that entitles you to swing your hands in anywhere you want but that law stops where you will be hitting another person’s hand.’
The bill is not targeting the social media; in fact the social media operators should be happy that we are removing the bad eggs from them. Because we have some few people who have constituted themselves into criminals, collecting money to defame people on social media and most of them are faceless. You hide somewhere, collect money from Mudashir to defame Na’Allah. How can this be allowed in our society?
An online commentator said you sponsored the bill because of the way your picture at the Presidential Villa went viral on the social media weeks ago. How would you react to this?
Go and check the record. You have the record of when the bill passed first reading and when my picture was alleged to have been taken. It is not it; there is nothing personal about the bill.
The title of the bill: “An act to prohibit frivolous petitions; and other matters connected therewith”. How do you differentiate a petition that is frivolous from the one that is not, without carrying out investigation?
[You do that by checking out] the one that does not disclose any serious matter. For instance, [when] you say, ‘Mudashir was seen carrying money,’ when you don’t have facts. But if you have facts, you say, ‘Mudashir was seen carrying N400, 000’ and then you go to a court and you say, ‘I swear by my God I have evidence that he carried it.’ This is not frivolous and it’s worth being investigated
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