These rights ensure that you can assemble freely, be it for owambe, political rallies, waazi or Holy Fire Crusade and Osun Festival too. The Constitution, unfortunately, made no timetable or schedule for when and where one group may congregate or when and where the other group may not. In any case, this should not be a recipe for disorder, if, as human beings, we honoured the millennia old saying ‘live and let live’. In exercising its rights to assemble or right of religion, you find a political party, church or mosque, closing entire streets, not buildings, streets! If you are an adherent of the religion concerned and you criticized this, you are considered an apostate. Same goes for the noise pollution occasioned by these worship houses, early morning calls to prayer, vigils with loud speakers in residential areas, rowdy motorcycle races during political rallies.
Ours has always been a case of ‘give a mile and the people take ten’. You have one right and you unlawfully and unreasonably arrogate more to yourself. It was the account that a religious sect in the Northwestern part of Nigeria was holding a procession and prohibited motorists from using the road. Interestingly the motorcade of the then Chief of Army Staff was caught up in this rascality. What did the military do? They took law into their own hands.
They invaded the community occupied by this sect, demolished structures and allegedly killed some adherents. There are parts of the city you cannot drive through on Fridays and Sundays because worship centres block the road. This is an overreach and an outright infringement on the rights of others.
The last right to be addressed in this article is the almighty freedom of expression and the press. I think this right is the most abused by people and the most breached by the government. The Constitution allows every person to freely express themselves, hold opinions, receive and impart ideas and information without interference.
So irrespective of how you express yourself; sign language, artwork, skit, social media or verbally, you are well within your rights. It would not matter what the topic is, whether politics, atheism, sex, finances,
music, astrology or dental health, you are free.
This right is as limitless as it is limited. The most common boundary is defamatory statements; where you say things that are untrue, derogatory and capable of embarrassing or demeaning another person in the estimation of other members of society.
That is why you cannot, with all your freedom of expression, call anybody a fraud, without proof, or call a professional a quack without proof, or call a nun a prostitute without proof, or accuse a married man of infidelity without proof.
It is important to caution that some things you consider as true or facts are not legally so, and you must be careful not to attract needless liabilities to yourself. Anything you may want to accuse anybody of, which if true would be a crime, must first be found by a Court of Law to be a crime before you can call it so. A man you caught shoplifting in a supermarket is not a thief, until he has been tried by a Court of Law and found guilty, then he is a thief, a rapist, a fraud or murderer as the case may be. If by any reason whatsoever a man is tried and is found to be innocent of charges against him, any accusation of crime would be defamatory.