By Iyoha John Darlington
I
have always made plain my aversion to lies and falsehood and I dislike it as it
constitutes a deliberate affront to my intelligence. As I navigate through life
and encounter one who lies to me, which I honestly do not anticipate, I would
be morally bound to lose my bearing thereby making it impossible for me to
calculate my true position. This, I dare say, hurts my soul!
 |
| *President Buhari |
President
Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption crusade is equally a war against lies in
high places from which millions of our hard earned money was allegedly
‘siphoned’ from the national treasury. If the lies never existed no money would
have exited the treasury. In a similar vein, in the run up to the 2015 general
elections, one of the reasons given by the All Progressives Congress
(APC) for the ongoing insurgency was youth unemployment. When people are
unemployed they become potentially vulnerable to manipulations and this was
exactly what they fell prey to when they were recruited and took up arms
against the country in the hope of actualizing a sovereign Islamic state.
Lying is tantamount to theft. When you tell me something which I take to be true and, as a result, I invest my time, or my money, or even my care, you have stolen these things from me because you obtained them under false pretence. That was how they shot themselves to power after false promises that they only possess the magic wand to reconstruct the country – a country that never stood in dire need of their services after all!
APC with
Buhari as the flag-bearer, we have it on good authority, promised a N5000
monthly state stipend which was a welcome development considering the exchange
rate at the time. I, too, in my ignorance applauded the initiative since that
would put us on a par with the welfarist scheme here in the Old
World where citizens enjoy unemployment benefits and the
introduction of that package in my country of nativity would be a right step in
the right direction, I opined.
Buhari,
some people have often said, is a man of integrity and transparent honesty
which of course is none other than a terminological inexactitude. His party’s
partisans and diehard apologists often deify him as a Homer that never nods.
But today he leads a government that shot its way to power by deceit, monstrous
and hydra-headed lies; I have never known anyone who wants to be so deceived.
For you to have campaigned and promised a monthly stipend to the unemployed to
get their support and later reneged on the promise is nothing but a massive
fraud!
The
historic merger that gave birth to the ruling All Progressives Congress, I
wrote in one of my pieces, was a massive fraud designed to bamboozle Nigerians
by self-styled grandees who are bent on personal aggrandizement. The product of
that merger is nothing short of a party founded on lies and deception – I had earlier
written before now.
A fraud is a lie where the damage to me is quantifiable in money. Even those lies which the law does not define as fraud tend to fit the same definition: a knowing false utterance which the mark is intended to rely on to its harm. The only differences are of degree, for example, when we cannot assess the loss in money.
