Insult or stalking: Is TheCable trying to uneducate Nigerians about Sowore? Journalist Femi Owolabi may not have read the News piece he wrote
By ETN24 Ng
After 44 days in detention, the Federal Government, on Friday, brought seven-count charges against the founder of Sahara Reporters and leader of the RevolutionNow movement, Omoyele Sowore. Media houses across the country, however, singled out a word from the law to tell a misleading and sensational story about the charges.
The Attorney General of the Federal, Abubakar Malami, instituted the case against Sowore accusing him of conspiracy to commit treasonable felony, money laundering and Cyberstalking.
The charge claims that Sowore breached section 516 of the Criminal Code Act by allegedly staging “a revolution campaign on September 5, 2019, aimed at removing the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria”. For this, he is accused of treasonable felony.
For context, a felony is a crime that attracts more than three years of imprisonment. The opposite of this will be a misdemeanor. Treasonable felonies are serious offenses of treason, treason being spelled out in Part 2 Chapter 6 of the Criminal Code to include a number of things including,
“Any person who forms an intention to effect the remove during his term of office otherwise than by constitutional means the President as Head of State of the Federation and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces” (Section 41a)
But the break came for the media houses with the Charge of Cyberstalking. The Nigerian Cybercrime Act 2015 describes CyberStalking in section 25b as,
“Any person who knowingly or intentionally sends a message or other matter by means of computer systems or network that he knows to be false, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, ill will or needless anxiety to another…”
Simon Kolawole’s TheCable published this story pulling out one out of the 45 words in this subsection and used it for a sensational headline “FG charges Sowore to court for ‘insulting Buhari’”. This formed the basis for the narrative about the story, as Twitter influencer Japhet Omojuwa, media veteran Khadaria Ahmed and a host of other notable personalities screenshot the headline and suggested the President is a tyrant for charging people for insult.
Noble Laureate Wole Soyinka jumped on the same misinformation as Premium Times reported him as saying the government “has indeed attained an unprecedented level of paranoia over the improbable charges that include insulting President Muhammadu Buhari.”
Soon it all hit the top of google search as articles and even more misleading stories were told of it.
TheCable’s fake News breaking the internet
Vanguard Newspapers, in a News report, described the charges against Sowore as “murky”, meaning it is obscure or morally questionable.
TheCable doubles down on its characterization of the story in yet another News story. where Sowore claimed to have been mishandled by the DSS. This time it separates the charge of “insulting the President” from the charge of Cyberstalking; moving its reportage from sensational to false.
TheCable’s false report
Still courting traffic, TheCable published yet another story in which it reported social media reactions to its initial story, including the misleading reactions. An example is seen in the tweet below wherein the user suggested that Sowore is innocent of the actual charges and the President is using national asset (sic) to arrest private citizens. This user called this a “nutshell” of TheCable’s News report and TheCable republished it.
In a nutshell.. sowore didn’t treaten or violate any direct constitution law. Buhari is using national assets to arrest a private citizen. Infringement! https://t.co/1Is1xXitMK
When corrected, the user did not appear to have an explanation for his characterization of the issue.
This, however, did not stop TheCable from republishing his tweet as they did 16 others; all of which were anti-government and most of which distorted the News story. Two of such tweets pulled misleading quotes directly from TheCable’s earlier news report, yet got republished.
In August 2016, Inibehe Effiong, who is now Sowore’s lawyer, published an article about Cyberstalking wherein he admitted that “insult” was part of the wordings of the law. But as was expected, he did not single insult out at the time. His only gross as at the time was that the EFCC cannot prosecute such a case. He wrote,
“A careful reading of the provisions of the Cybercrimes Act clearly shows that many of the offenses created therein have no bearing whatsoever on the mandate and specialization of the EFCC.”
Although, Mr. Effiong has been consistent in his dismissal of the said law, as he added in the 2016 piece “This is one law that should not be taken with levity.”. Efffiong stood with Sowore in a July 29 video during which Sowore called for a “showdown” adding that,
“except Nigerians bundle these guys out of our National space….and don’t ask me whether I am afraid of the legal implications of what I am saying, I am carrying out an historical duty, only history can judge me, not a prosecutor or a federal judge”. His lawyer nodded in approval.
Sowore is, however, being quoted as saying DSS will not exist after his Revolution, but in a video reviewed by ETN24, we found that he was actually quoting what someone told him he said to a DSS operative who mentioned that the DSS is aware they want to “shut Nigeria down”.
Few days after charges were brought, a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja ordered the DSS to grant him bail on the condition that he submits his international passport within 48 hours.
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