On Saturday, June 23, Dr. Sylvester Ugoh, former Minister of
Education, sent me a video clip of Chimamanda Adichie delivering a speech as
the Harvard University 2018 Class Day Speaker.
It was
the quintessential Chimamanda at her literary best – evocative and enchanting.
She was selected by the Harvard students, as it is the tradition, to act the
role, another validation for the lady of letters who has become Nigeria’s
foremost 21st century literary
ambassador.
I don’t know what informed the leitmotif of her speech which she titled, “Above All Ese, Do Not Lie,” but she handled the concepts of falsehood and truth in a uniquely fascinating way asking some fundamental questions such as: “Should we call a lie, a lie? When is a lie, a lie?”
She didn’t exculpate herself from the delinquency of lying but was quick to admit that, “The biggest regrets of my life are those times when I didn’t have the courage to embrace the truth.”
*President Buhari |
I don’t know what informed the leitmotif of her speech which she titled, “Above All Ese, Do Not Lie,” but she handled the concepts of falsehood and truth in a uniquely fascinating way asking some fundamental questions such as: “Should we call a lie, a lie? When is a lie, a lie?”
She didn’t exculpate herself from the delinquency of lying but was quick to admit that, “The biggest regrets of my life are those times when I didn’t have the courage to embrace the truth.”
But in
admonishing everyone to embrace the truth, she was not naïve about the outcome.
“Telling the truth does not mean that everything will work out. Actually,
sometimes it does not. I am not asking you to tell the truth because it will
always work out,” she told the starry-eyed students and quickly added, “But
because you will sleep well at night and there is nothing more beautiful than
waking up everyday holding in your hand the full measure of your integrity.”
And then,
the clincher: “Sometimes, the hardest truths are those we have to tell
ourselves.”
When I
read the Federal Government’s reaction to the latest carnage in Plateau State , Chimamanda’s words that, “At no
time has it felt as urgent as now that we must protect and value the truth,”
concentrated my mind.
We have
simply lost the capacity to be outraged by anything no-matter how despicable.
On
Sunday, June 24, the Plateau State Police Command confirmed that 86 people of
the Berom ethnic nationality were killed by herdsmen in Riyom, Barkin Ladi and
Jos South council areas. Eye witness accounts say the casualty figure may well
be over 200.
Over 200
people slaughtered in one night in a country that claims not to be at war and
the government is pathetically wringing its fingers in self-pity?
Unbelievable!
Hear
President Muhammadu Buhari: “No efforts will be spared to bring the
perpetrators to justice, and prevent a recurrence/reprisal attacks … The
grievous loss of lives and property arising from the killings in Plateau today
is painful and regrettable … We will not rest until all murderers and criminal
elements and their sponsors are incapacitated and brought to justice.”
Haven’t
we heard this before? Such rhetoric has become deja vu and I don’t know how
many Nigerians still believe the president has the will to walk his talk on
these killings. Nigerians are simply no longer interested in politicians’
well-worn platitudes such as this.
The theatrics of the security services that will suddenly become hyperactive
after each episode of bloodbath is even more absurd. We end up with frenzied
motion, but no movement.
As they
are wont to do, Buhari’s spin doctors, a day after the carnage, blamed it on
some unnamed politicians, who they accused of orchestrating instability and
chaos in the country with an eye on the 2019 polls.
“We know
that a number of geographical and economic factors are contributing to the
longstanding herdsmen/farmers clashes. But we also know that politicians are
taking advantage of the situation. This is incredibly unfortunate,” the
president’s Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said.
He didn’t
stop there. Some local thugs took advantage of the violence, Shehu claimed,
“Turning it into an opportunity to extort the public, and to attack people from
rival political parties. There were reports of vehicles being stopped along the
roads in the state, with people being dragged out of their cars and attacked if
they stated that they supported certain politicians or political party.”
Even
falsehood and indecency must have limits.
Only the
president can explain why the government decided to politicise the crisis by
laying emphasis on the “number of dead bodies thugs had killed, lying along the
road,” assuming there were such corpses, rather than the hundreds butchered by
the herdsmen.
The
president and his spin doctors know for sure that the so-called thugs are
aggrieved citizens protesting the wanton violation of their inalienable right
to life and government’s inexplicable helplessness.
But that was not the first time the government would make this egregious claim.
In a syndicated article on Sunday, April 22, 2018, Shehu said the government
had evidence that most of the attacks were sponsored by politicians trying to
blackmail the government.
And he is
not straddling this boulevard of untruths and obfuscation alone.
During an
interview on Arise TV on Wednesday, June 20, Femi Adesina,
presidential spokesperson, also blamed the opposition lusting for political
supremacy for the killings.
In April,
Brigadier-General John Agim, Director, Defence Information, said the military
was strategising on how to go after the herdsmen and their sponsors.
“We want
to say this to the killers and their sponsors that the military is coming for
them. We are going to get both the killers and their sponsors very soon.”
Hot air!
Sheer obfuscation aimed at wheedling the unwary.
What is
going on beggars belief. I don’t know how public officials manage to sleep at
night with truth so insouciantly sacrificed on the altar of mendacity.
There
should be a moral and psychic cost to whimsically rationalising ethnic
cleansing.
Now, a
president that told the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, during a
meeting in London
on Wednesday, April 11, 2018 that the former Libyan president, Muammar Gaddafi,
who died in 2011 was to blame for the bloodbath, is now trying hard to create
the patently false impression that he is also a victim in all this.
He
conveniently forgets that he had earlier admonished visiting Benue
elders to take in and accommodate killer herdsmen as fellow countrymen.
Truth be
told, no depth is too low for the Buhari government to sink in its determined
effort to elevate falsehood to a statecraft.
So, what happened to Defence Minister Mansur Dan-Ali’s theory, supported by the
Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, that the carnage in the Middle Belt
is the inevitable consequence of anti-open grazing laws, the abrogation of which
is the only condition for peace?
Has Plateau State ,
whose governor, Simon Lalong, indicted and mocked his Benue State
counterpart, Samuel Ortom, over the killings also enacted the law?
If the
government is sure of its claim that the opposition is behind these killings,
what is stopping it from doing the needful? Why is Buhari refusing to deploy
the bully pulpit of the presidency in addressing this issue?
This
finger pointing tactic, a tiresome trick, only proves one thing – Buhari’s
approach to governance yields nothing but smallness.
As
Professor Wole Soyinka noted on Thursday, entire communities have been erased
from the national landscape, thousands of family units thrown into mourning and
survivors scarred and traumatised beyond measure, yet the President and
Commander-in-Chief of the Federal
Republic says there is
nothing he can do.
“There is
nothing I can do to help the situation except to pray to God to help us out of
the security challenges. What has happened is a very bad thing, the bottom line
is that justice must be allowed to take its course,” Buhari reportedly told
Plateau leaders of thought on Tuesday in Jos.
Really?
How will justice take its course? The truth is that in this conflict, our
president lacks the courage to embrace the truth.
What is
happening is ethnic cleansing. And land grab is the name of the game. If Buhari
says he does not know that many communities in Benue
and Plateau states are occupied by Fulani herdsmen after sacking the indigenous
population, then, he is lying to himself.
If he
claims he is doing enough to solve the problem, he is not telling himself the
truth.
Just as
the hardest truths are those we tell ourselves, the worst lies are also the
ones we tell ourselves.
By
theatrically throwing its hands up in the air, pretending there is no solution
to this carnage other than indigenous people ceding their ancestral lands to
invading herdsmen, the Buhari government is travelling on a low road. The
consequence of such tomfoolery is predictable.
*Ikechukwu Amaechi is the Editor-in-Chief of TheNiche newspaper
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