Prof. Wole Soyinka, Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate, has warned that fake news concocted by a Nigerian may trigger a Third World War.
Soyinka spoke on Wednesday at the Congress Hall of Transcorp Hilton Hotel in Abuja at a BBC Conference on: “Countering Fake News.”
In attendance were journalists, media trainers and politicians.
The Nobel laureate spoke extensively on the adverse effects of fake news, describing those who fabricate false information as cowards who are “sick in the head”.
During the panel session, Soyinka cited occasions where he had been on the receiving end of misinformation and when he was reported on the internet to have made statements he never uttered.
He said: “Let us get into the nitty-gritty. I’ll give you an example, apart from the fact that I’ve been killed on so many times, literarily. Last year, I had telephone calls asking me, ‘where are you?’ I said, ‘I’m in hell. Join me here. I know why you are calling… because you thought I was dead.’
“Now that’s one, you deal with that. You enjoy that actually, reading about your obituary; but then imagine waking up one day and finding a statement attributed to you in a kind of language which you will never use. For example, during the last presidency, statements attributed to me were saying that I said that it served President Jonathan right for marrying an illiterate woman. I never made any comment whatsoever about that lady, and suddenly there it is staring me in the face.
“And at other times a card is created, and from time to time that card comes out on the internet, is sent to me, and it says Professor Wole Soyinka says anybody who votes for this person, one, must be stupid, two, must be mentally retarded, three, his mother must be a goat, four, his father must be a gorilla… under Wole Soyinka’s name. And this goes on all the time.
“So I don’t want to understate the numerous motivations we go into this but basically I think the commonality is that those who create fake news are sick in the head and they are also cowards because they lack a conviction of their own and so they transfer to other people what they really are thinking.”