Nollywood actor, Kenneth Okonkwo, on Thursday called on movie and music producers to consciously make movies and music to inform, promote and educate people on love and peaceful co-existence.
Okonkwo made the call at the 4th International Conference on Love and Tolerance with the theme “Countering violent and extremism” organised by the Ufuk Dialogue, an NGO in Abuja.
According to him, entertainment is a veritable tool with the natural ingredients of love and peace: thus, it could be used to educate Nigerians on why they should prefer love to hate.
The Living in Bondage actor said that music has no language and hardly would anyone sing a song based on hate that people would buy and propagate.
He added that the modern world has become infested with extremism and violence which was a result of an accumulated teaching of hatred to the people.
“There is no justification to teach people hatred; you can fight injustice without fighting a people or a religion.
“We as Nigerians must learn to identify the criminal element behind any happenings and call the people by the names of their crimes not by the names of their religion or ethnicity.’’
Okonkwo urged Nigerians to stop stigmatising people, in view of the recent clash between farmers and herdsmen across the country.
“There is nothing criminal in being a Fulani herdsman, but anybody that is wielding AK47, killing somebody by whatever guise is a murderer, is a kidnapper, is an armed robber and is a terrorist.
“We should call the persons by that name, and not generalising and calling him by his tribe or religion because whatever he has done, that is the crime, he is the criminal.
“We must learn to differentiate the crime from the people, their religion or tribe and we must learn to love each other and love the profession of each other.”
