Oyo State Governor, Engineer Seyi Makinde on Tuesday denied media reports which indicated that South West Governors had at a recent meeting held in Lagos votedi n favour of a clampdown on social media.
He stated that the existing cyber-crime act should be able to deal
with issues that might arise from the use of cyberspace adding that
efforts must be made to rebuild the trust deficit that currently
exists between the government and the citizens.
He further stated: “And I said in various fora that we are fully aware
of the trust-deficit in the system right now between the government,
leaders and the ordinary citizens. There is a lot of anger in the
land. There is a lot of hunger as well. And we all have that
responsibility to calm things down and to reduce that trust-deficit.”
He decried what he called the prevalence of fake news adding that
those who want to play politics with other people’s emotions should
note that “what usually goes around usually would come around.”
He explained that the state had signed an MOU with the University of
Ibadan to enhance human rights administration in the state.
“Just yesterday, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the
University of Ibadan to collaborate with the Oyo State government in
the training of police officers and officers of other security
agencies in criminal justice and human rights enforcement.
This is with a view to eliminating incidents of police brutality, unlawful
killings, extortion, and violation of human rights, amongst other
vices.
We have gone that step further because, again, we noticed that
we do have a serious gap between the knowledge that the police have
about their rights and how to treat ordinary people on the street.
We need to be aware of how the system works. Change takes time,” he said.
