How do you tell your elder that he is lying? That is the cross that many of us, who grew up in our traditional African village setting have had to carry all our lives. You watch and shudder as your ‘very respected’ elder lies through his teeth, but you can’t do anything, lest you be chastised for being rude.
I can, therefore, appreciate the plight of the journalists whom President Muhammadu Buhari addressed, as he emerged from the Eid prayers in Daura on Monday.
“I want Nigerians to realise that what this government inherited, after 16 years of PDP government, was no savings, no infrastructure, no power, no rail, no road and no security,” PMB had said.
So, what journalist would tell the president that he had slightly overstated the facts? Who would tell him that the Abuja/Kaduna rail he recently commissioned with fanfare was literally completed by the Goodluck Jonathan? Or that GSM is actually the mother of all infrastructure? That he did not meet a zero foreign reserve?
Of course, the PDP governments at the centre were worse than prodigals, but we have spent almost one and a half years of our four years permanently looking backwards and, therefore, not sparing as much as a glance to see our front and where we’re headed. How do you tell an elder he’s being economical with the truth? So, we continue to live the lie.
Long before the new administration happened on the scene, we all knew that our politicians – whether in the executive, legislature or judiciary (yes, there are now many politicians in the judiciary) have all been taking us all for a ride. However, the new captains in the presidency (executive), who, for some reason, are not comfortable with any form of legislature, suddenly began to spin a lie. They said the legislature was a drainpipe on the economy. That the lawmakers are thieves, who not only unilaterally allocate themselves salaries, but also pad budget to skew capital expenditure. We, in our bloodthirsty search for who to hang, swallow the lies. We never interrogate the fact that it is not up to 5% of the money we’re looking for that can actually be traced to the legislature, nor that the infamous jumbo salary was fixed by the executive.
But we soon blackmail the legislators into approving everything the Presidency wants, so that they may not be seen as clogging the wheel of the president’s progress. And now, that we have turned the legislature into a virtual rubber stamp, we are still not satisfied. Or is that not why we’re toying with emergency powers? And floating the idea of scrapping the Senate? But everyone is turning a blind eye, as we are determined to test the depth of a river by stepping in with our two legs.
The lies continue. The denial continues.
No doubt, since the APC government came on board, Nigerians have been placed on a steady diet of lies and anti-PDP rhetoric. Of course. Initially, we wrongly called it propaganda. But we have since realised that we’d be doing English Language monumental injustice to describe what the spin doctors of the PMB government have been dishing out to us as ‘propaganda’.
We should know a lie when we see one – and we must make bold to call it what it is; blatant lie!
Incidentally, I’m not really bothered by these APC antics, for if the tables were to turn today, the PDP would say even worse things about the APC.
However, there is one big problem with telling lies; if you tell it so often, even you soon begin to believe the lies. This now appears to be the fate of the new ruling party. It is beginning to believe its own lies. That probably explains why PMB has forgotten that even the planes in the presidential fleet, which he is jealously holding on to, despite an initial talk about selling them off, were all inherited. Inherited from the PDP government.
Of course, PMB is not the only victim of sustained lies. Even former president Olusegun Obasanjo was so sold that he soon joined in the demonisation of the immediate past administration, simply because he was unhappy with Jonathan. But he forgot the wise saying of our fathers that partridge that laughs away while the hunter dissects the fowl forgets that partridges are ultimately butchered the same way the fowl is butchered. Now, Buhari emerged from prayers on Monday and lumped Obasanjo and Yar’Adua together with Jonathan and delivered a damning verdict on all of them.
The lies will come back to haunt us if we continue to live in denial. That is why, for instance, I’m convinced we have not heard the last of the postponement of the Edo guber election.
Who can say he honestly knows the reason the election scheduled for penultimate weekend was postponed? How many of us believe the security and terrorism tale spurn by the security operatives? Was anybody in doubt that, before the public posturing of DSS and police, advising INEC to shift the poll, the Presidency was in full picture? If so, what was all that drama about Presidency and the APC being as shocked as the PDP at the news of the curious security advice to shift the poll?
Well, sooner or later, we’ll get to know the real reason the Edo guber poll was shifted. For now, we’ll continue to live the lie of ‘security reasons’
Of course, there was also the original lie. That first lie was that the past administration stole all the money voted for the purchase of arms to fight Boko Haram, and did not buy any arms. Of course, there was mindless looting of the defence vote and other funds meant for procurement of arms. The only baffling aspect of the tale is that the new government, which had not as much as purchased one bullet, still had enough arms to battle the insurgents for almost a year.
Surely, the PDP government was a national rape, but there sure were a few things worth celebrating. And if we must tell a lie or two, to ensure they do not return to power anytime soon, could we, at least, make the lies a little more believable?
..More lies?
When did it suddenly become the responsibility of the voter to fulfill the campaign promises made by politicians, after the latter have been elected?
In fact, until the launch of that campaign last week, I never truly appreciated the fact that Nigerians are indeed on their own, in this new dispensation.
They started by telling us, after the election, that the change would take some time before it comes; that they needed a few more years to give us the change that we voted for (although, I didn’t vote). Now, they’ve told us to go look for the change ourselves. Indeed, the CHANGE begins with me. Now, I have to go find my own change.
Of course, PMB has since taken his own CHANGE – in the form of a better lifestyle, a presidential fleet that has enough jets to float a national carrier and other perks of office. He is now asking us to go manufacture our own CHANGE. True talk! But this is definitely not what we agreed on. When, during the campaign, they told us to come aboard the CHANGE bus, nobody told us it was a one-chance bus. Now that we have all boarded, the tune has suddenly changed. Indeed, the change begins with me. And the lies continue to unravel.