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By Azu Ishiekwene
Parents, students, and indeed anyone with a conscience is still shocked at the killing of Deborah Yakubu in Sokoto over allegations of blasphemy.
The brutal termination of the life of a promising young Nigerian in a school will again pass with lamentations and condemnations as has become the norm, but most likely, without the consolation that justice would be served.
As we flip over this page and move on, we would most likely overlook the real problem that led to this tragedy. The small cause, the little speck, that has produced a big effect, an explosion and other unintended consequences.
In spite of the curfew imposed by the Sokoto State government, many residents and their properties and businesses – all of which had nothing to do with the alleged blasphemy – were attacked with potential for escalation well beyond the borders of the Caliphate.
All of these troubles are derived from annoying indiscretions and abuse of social media platforms. Practically every member of a WhatsApp group must have come across a set of rules crafted by an unknown Samaritan on what to and what not to post in a group chat.
Some groups even evolve their own domesticated set of rules and observances – often applying sanctions where there are breaches. But zealots live on higher sanctimonious precepts. They have their own standards and presume to want to impose salvation by fire by force – the attitude that leads to the invasion of group chats with contents not related to the group’s subject matter.
In further blatant disregard of other members’ sensibilities, there are members who appropriate the chatrooms for their businesses, for religious purposes, for spreading fake news, sensation and even for sharing violent or gruesome content without advising viewer-discretion.
Trivial as this seems, it is so serious that one has witnessed the psychic shock and trauma inflicted on individuals simply by viewing gruesome images or videos carelessly shared in group chats.
Interestingly, the culprits so generous with such disturbing and often inappropriate content are often the least forthcoming with ideas and contributions regarding the objectives of the group.
Deborah Yakubu became the unfortunate victim of challenging such rude infractions and invasion of group chat rooms with unrelated contents. She was hunted down– not by strangers, but by her own compatriots, course-mates and group members for calling them out to do the right thing – or stop doing the wrong things – deliberately.
She can be heard in a voice note telling one of her course-mates that the group was created for academic purposes such as assignments, coursework and not the extraneous subjects they chose to post. If she had resisted the bait of further exchanges with the culprits beyond this point, perhaps tragedy might just have been avoided.
The word in the air is ‘blasphemy’. But the prelude to it is not referenced. The murderers of Deborah were the first to cross a redline by misusing a group platform, and this should become a warning in this era – a red flag in other WhatsApp groups.
If we remain flippant about this as we are wont to be as a people – taking others for granted and flaunting that brazen audacity of the okada man and his Keke counterpart, then a new frontier of tragedies may just have been opened to us by social media.
For the sake of plain talk, let’s state explicitly that a problem which started as a disagreement in a WhatsApp chat group is what led to the unfortunate and brutal murder of Deborah Yakubu, a student of the Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto.
She dared to remonstrate with other students for sharing irrelevant posts in their academic WhatsApp group. It started small, but has left a pool of blood and the shrieks of hounds who, not satisfied with the bestiality, proceeded to burn the remains of the dead! This is the reason we need to interrogate our actions and their unintended consequences.
In all things, moderation is the best advice for all citizens in a multireligious country and secular state. Without moderation, many will die as victims of impunity with the murderers emboldened by the state’s nonchalance.
The summary execution of Deborah is not the first of its kind in our culture of religious intolerance and impunity, but it is the first, in recent times, to have arisen from people appropriating social media platforms for purposes other than the original aims and objectives.
Excerpts from the article authored by Mr. Ishiekwene, the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP
