#NigeriaDecides: It is a part of a campaign - Anything but the truth is what we need

Enough of it

Yesterday evening, after watching as many sickening lying tweets pass my timeline that veers from exaggeration, through embellishment to outright falsehood, I had to react to one particular one about Transparency International.

The tweet suggested Transparency International data made a comparison between the present and a period 8 years before Transparency International came into existence. For the record, Transparency International was founded in May 1993.

The worst comes forth

Now, I would have ignored the tweet as noise, but the person who I have not met before, however, respect as a 'journalist' who runs a newspaper as an Executive Editor is someone I respect for reasons difficult to explain since we have never met. The fact is people project a personality on social media that you grow to like and generally follow and engage.

What has bothered me is this electioneering season in Nigeria has brought out more of the worst of than the best of people. The propaganda with sensationalist headlines has reached a crescendo that the whispering truth and facts have been lost in the cacophony of the malevolent.

Desperate times

The air is rife with conjecture and conspiracy, the opinions rock perspectives like a small boat tossed about in turbulently rough seas, we are literally left at the mercy of the hope that we still have our wits about us to be breathing for the wish for discernment and discrimination is long far gone.

All I can say is these are desperate times, the chaps in charge, in a Nigeria that was barely functioning to its potential would have hardly scraped entry-level management, but they have found themselves holding Nigeria’s purse strings.

With literally untrammelled power, wealth and opulence beyond their wildest dreams, these people are not going away without the dirtiest political battle for office Nigeria has ever witnessed.

Their being in office supports the most aggrandised company of gluttonous pigs with their snouts in trough of the national largesse, the prospect of change is fearsome and terrifying for them because not only will they go hungry, they risk incarceration for their heretofore excused and celebrated criminality.

It is a part of a campaign

Indeed, we have a Nero who fiddles as Nigeria burns, thinking like the man in the street that has never left the street, he pardons the corrupt, elevates the questionable, excuses the inexcusable, utters the intolerable, celebrates the reprobate and redefines corruption with platitudinous acceptance. He does not give a damn.

With that kind leadership, it is no wonder that when I challenge someone about tweeting lies and creating tales represented as fact, I am told, "It is a part of a campaign."

That is the danger we face in Nigeria, "It is a part of a campaign." Anything goes, without consequence because reputations count for nothing if your patron is in charge to give you the semblance of normalcy and success whilst offering the delusional Utopia of everything is well in Nigeria.

They promptly take credit for the successes of others despite them and even more rapidly apportion blame to others for the failures they are responsible for.

"It is a part of a campaign." That is one thing I will remember of those who abandoned principle, virtue, honesty and truth for political expediency. I am beginning to lose my respect for people I once respected, but "It is a part of a campaign."