Confronting the Half Truths in their Mouths

The baccarat began on Sunday, October 29, 2017, when a Weekend Newspaper published what it called a fact-check and screamed this headline: “81 of Buhari’s 100 Appointees are Northerners.”

The following Saturday, November 4, 2017, a counter list, adjudged full list by the media, was released by the presidency through its spokesperson, Femi Adesina. The accompanying statement to the list released by the presidency came with this warning: “To claim, suggest or attempt to insinuate that the President’s appointments are tilted in favour of a section of the country is simply untrue and certainly uncharitable.” Neither the government’s claim nor that of the newspaper was true.

The president’s handlers had wanted to show that their principal’s appointment was balanced but only ended up portraying the president as one who, for inexplicable reasons, had appointed more Southerners than Northerners in his administration. For doing this, they were equally uncharitable to the president as the Newspaper.

Both of them portrayed our president as a sectional leader, a violator of the constitution he has sworn to protect. By deliberately bloating the number of appointees from the South, the president’s spokesperson had his eyes only on the gargantuan political harvests that would accrue to the president by showing how detribalised he is to the extent that most of his appointees are from the South. He was less concerned by the constitutional breach which the president’s “love” for the South entailed. Were Adesina’s list to be true, the president would be needed to justify to Nigerians the federal character balancing of his appointment where Ogun State produced 21 appointees and FCT produced none, Imo and Kano 15, while Abia and Kebbi had 2 and 3 respectively?

Thankfully, the only difference between the two publications is the inconsequential fact of number of appointees which was put at 81 by the newspaper and 159 by the presidency. More fact checks have shown that they both lied on the figure. But the smell of the presidency’s lie is more acrid.

The reason for saying this is because the presidency is expected to know better. They have records of all appointments. And it is inexplicable that with all the resources at their disposal, the presidency could for one whole week only produce a list that made mockery of the president, and in the end portrayed the president as a careless herder who has lost count of the number of his cows.

For the sake of national pride, I will toe the better line in this debate. Instead of assuming that the presidency has no record of the number of appointees they have made, I want to believe that the omission of some high profile appointees from the presidency’s list is only because the presidency has a thing to hide. This may be in overriding national interest, after all. But I am unable to any overriding national interest in a sharing formula where Ogun has more has more appointees than Kebbi, Ebonyi and FCT.

The states are the federating units and it is surprising that all discussions on this matter has so far focused on North/South divide. For our silence on the violation of constitution which the two lists entail, it strikes my mind that it may be wiser to suspend all clamour for constitutional amendments cum restructuring until such a time when we can prove our capacity to defend the current constitution with all that we have got. Otherwise, what use is a new constitution which no one may be interested in defending.

This is not the first time that this government has dished out whoppers as truth to citizens. When Bill Fawcet, the editor of the book: You Said What: Lies and Propaganda Throughout History, said that; “lies, when you are not the one caught telling them, anyhow, are both fascinating and fun,” I am sure that he did not have in mind lie tellers from our clime.

If he did, he may have to find explanation why our government lie tellers find their own lies both fascinating and fun. This is because one reason why they keep lying even when they have been caught so many times is due to the fact that they have possibly pulled so many through without any detection. Their first assumption is to believe that any new one would scale our watch too.

Another reason could be that governments, all over the world and not just Nigeria’s, are simply set up to lie (I am yet to see one that does not lie). Therefore, I want to suggest that the best approach to confronting all governmental lies is to doubt all their information until we have the right reasons to believe them.

 

Leave a Reply