The billboard sign, All Eyes On The Judiciary, was a lie in plain sight. It was raw meat in the cage to rouse a rabble. They appropriated the word ‘all’ to mean all Nigerians. But they are targeting a rabble in the first stage of a rumble. A rabble is like a pack of irate dogs with rabies. Right now, they are like canines between growls. They wanted their audience to see the sign and rue, so they can ruin the state. But why not sue? That’s too prim. Their strategy? Intimidate the justices of the Presidential Election Petition Court.
They arrogate to themselves a monopoly of disgust. In their naivety, they assume that others have no eyes, no minds, and no rage. So, they could just get away with it. They sign on but expect others to sign off. They forget that if they write signs, others will assert rights.
The originators, cowards all, have not yet owned it in public. One wants to know why they did it, who they stand for, what goal they wanted to score. They should, at least, show some courage rather than hide behind a sign, especially now that their words no longer preside over the city.
Since the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON) has condemned it and started an inquest, and the Advertising Standard Panel (ASP) dissolved, the sponsors who were in arms for their liberty of speech should go to court and prove their innocence. Before then, they should entertain us with an unveiling ceremony of the sponsors, names, addresses, ideology, history and political faith. They lack the audacity of self-identity. They are the mice of the times.
Some shadowy persons and public commentators, including lawyers, are defending the advert, appealing to liberty of speech. But I have not, at the time of writing, heard or seen anyone who paid their money to unspool the sign. Those invoking liberty of speech are either concealing nativist hysteria, or thumping their chests over their soldiery for a phony idea about the constitution. They should ask for refund because their money has not run its course in the skies where the billboards scowled.
They claim you can speak anything in the name of liberty. On the surface, have all eyes never been on the judiciary? If that is trite, what was the use of the advert? Is it to bore anyone? Of course, no one spends millions of naira on a billboard to make us yawn.
So, they know it is not intended to bore but to become boors, to stir a specific emotion. If it was not intended as an underhand project, why not say who the sponsors are, so we can rebuke them for boring us, or for reminding us?
If they want to say it is mere words, why are they up in arms over mere words when it is struck out? Words have meaning. They do not jump out of vacuums. As Jesus said, “from the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.”
The authors must be in psychic torture that their investment has flamed out.
I am exercising freedom of speech by writing this essay. Yet, the same folks asking for freedom of speech invoked obituary of my liberty of expression last year. What hypocrisy!
Some ignore the difference between speech and incitement. Machiavelli wrote, “when everyone is free, no one is free.” It means that humans, like their words, can exercise freedom so long as it allows others to exercise theirs. The best advocate of free speech in the English language was John Stuart Mill with his opus, On Liberty. I have read it at least five times since my classmate, Osagiator Ojo, introduced him to me at Ife. In spite of his advocacy, Mill pointed out two obstacles, offence and harm. You can offend, but do no harm, he asserts. Trump, the ideal of the advertisers, is trying to invoke the same liberty of speech, or its First Amendment, after he provoked a mob to overthrow a democracy, and even asked officers to invent votes. Trump is no model.
Or else, we have anarchy. When the Jacobins-led Robespierre ignited the French Revolution, he didn’t evangelise liberty alone. A crucial part of the agenda was not just egalite, but fraternite. Fraternity cohabits a world of give and take. The French revolutionaries became assassins of that ideal when they guillotined opponents. At last, they fell to the same guillotine themselves, including the brothers Robespierre – Augustin and Maximilien.
It was to restrain speech that law philosophy introduced the concept of innuendo. It shows that words have reverberations. I noted last week that words are not innocent. They sparked wars in the past, including the Nigerian civil war. During the pogrom of the 1960’s, the mob invoked a specific chant that brought blood to their eyes.
What we have now are mobs made up of counterfeit men of ideas, lawyers who have soiled their gowns like debauched priests in cassocks, street oafs with new title and obsession, and clerics who view altars with rogue eyes. Hence, rather than follow the path of law, Oby Ezekwesili, said they should all go online where it is even cheaper. She, a former minister and anointed patron of “Bring Back Our Girls,” is leading her followers from the garden to the jungle. It is what cant can do to otherwise sapient souls. A teardrop for her. Oby is still a refined one.
But the internet has become a city of refuge for the misbegotten. It is a place for cheats, liars, murderers, many of them posing as patriots that Samuel Johnson calls “the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
The internet is their jungle city. It is the city within the city, like Haruki Murakami’s opus 1Q84, a novel about an invented city within a city where there are two moons and humans come out of goats. All eyes will spawn that city except those who spun it. It shows how we can reimagine facts to a false end. To reimagine what we know is a gift of the human mind. Hence the poet Shelley urged it, or else we will lose the power of thinking. And as Einstein noted, “imagination is more important than knowledge.” But these people want to cancel knowledge and turn lies into fact, much like their closet hero Donald Trump. They are inventing an invisible city, like Italian writer Italo Calvino’s work of that title. Calvino noted that such cities, as the ones the billboard maestro cast in our skies, are “like dreams…too probable to be real.” That’s the catch – probable.
It is not only the place for the good, and there is a lot of it. But it is the bad that gets a devil’s traction. One of the main beasts are the so-called online publications. Last week, I attacked the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria and challenged the Guild of Editors as well as the Eze Anaba -led initiative. These online publications have no correspondents in Jalingo, yet they can report a flood disaster there. They have no accredited reporter in Aso Rock, yet they write headline news like others. Is this not fraud? All we need is to prosecute them. But first, we can act like monitors of athletes for drug violations. We can pick a website at random that reports an incident, and interrogate how it got that story. When did its reporter go there? Ask for evidence. If none, then prosecute. It is a squad as truth detector. We need fact to save a profession of facts. Only facts can rescue journalism. This way, we can wipe the vermin out of that space. No media like that can operate online in Europe or North America. Google abides it because we let them. Rather than bellyache over dwindling fortunes, the media elite should invoke law and propriety.
It is organisations like these that open the space for lawlessness.
They failed to stop President Bola Tinubu’s inauguration with lies, prophecies and acts of verbal brigandage, like calling for the army. Is coup cry freedom of speech? Now, the mob is online. Napoleon, who put down mobs, said “when the mob gains the day, it ceases to be any longer the mob. It is then the nation.” It is the ugly side of populism.
Billboards are for signs but not for sinners. Its sponsors knew its audience did not need clarification. Hear Murakami in 1Q84: “If you can understand it without explanation, you can’t understand it with explanation.” The billboard sinners knew that debating it would ruffle their purpose. Unlike Cinna the Poet who the Roman mob killed out of mistaken identity, we know the culprits without explanation.
NB: Sam Omatseye is a respected columnist with The Nation Newspaper
