Nigerian politicians are liars. They are also shameless! These two short sentences were generalized verdicts by Babangida Aliyu declaring that Nigerian politicians are liars while Aliyu Wamako said they are all corrupt and a corrupt person is a shameless person. The character traits of Nigerian politicians amaze me. I don’t understand them. A man knows the truth and he knows that you know the truth even more than him yet he expects you to believe his lies because he has the print and electronic media that publish or broadcast his lies consistently to register in public consciousness. When the lies die as a result of the ascendancy of truth, you would expect the politician to feel sorry and shameful. But that cannot happen as far as Nigerian politician is concerned. He would rather browbeat his way to stardom as a political juggernaut misunderstood by his people. And you start feeling sorry for having misunderstood him. Nigerian politician speaks from the pit of hell. He has no restraint in his private and public speeches. Whether in his bedroom or at the soapbox whatever enters his bemused mind got spit out regardless of whose ox is gored. The golden rule that in public speeches, the speaker’s words should be soft and easy just in case he has to swallow them is not for him because Nigerian politician is shameless and can without qualms or public opprobrium licks his vomit.
Literature on politics and politicians posits that politics is an honourable vocation that ought to be held in very great esteem, comparable to other vocations such as priesthood or professions of law, medicine, engineering, journalism, soldiery and teaching. Of the vocations capable of impacting society and indeed civilisation for good or worse irreparably, it is politics. And there are numerous examples in world history to point to for guidance. The political transformations point to facts and circumstances resulting in Greek city states (Sparta, Athens, Macedonia, etc) or the Roman Republic to an empire, the metamorphosis of Britannic state into the Empire of Great Britain and the Isles, the Bolshevik revolution that established Russia culminating in the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the great acts of the founding fathers in the founding of the United States of America after architecting the 1787 US Constitution considered one of the greatest invention in last millennium. All these human feats were and still are the products of politics and works of politicians. How could a people capable of wondrous acts of public good be also of evil nature of the shameless? Now if these great human feats are the products of politics and invariably the works of evil politicians such as Nero, Emperor of Rome, Hitler, King Louis IV of France, King Charles 1 of England, President Maynard Nixon of USA, Stalin of USSR, President Idi Amin of Uganda, President Bokassa of Central African Republic, President Mobutu of Zaire and some former heads of State of Nigeria since 1960 whose politics were defined by lies and shamelessness leading to great disruptions of society and destruction of lives and property? What we can take by way of answer is that politics is variegated and so it accommodates both the good and the bad that shape and determine the fate of mankind. In a way, the good and bad politicians and their politics’ works and end products cohere in the same pod like kolanuts cotyledons. Good works, great deeds and baleful legacies of evil acts tend to go together. For instance, how can anyone explain that the same person that lifted up the crestfallen spirits of Germans after the devastating and excruciating reparations Britain imposed on Germany after the First World War by rebuilding German industries and buoying up their economy as exemplified by the national policy of affording every German family a car leading to the establishment of Volkswagen motor works that manufactured family Sedan Nigerians nicknamed the Beetle was also the man who concocted the vile social ideology of Aryanism and the atrocities that went with it, especially Jewish Holocaust that consumed over six million Jews. In every political community, the existence of this class of politicians and their politics abound and in some instances, it is not even the case of distinct division between the good and bad politicians rather it is even that the same person or group of persons exhibit these vile political character traits. For instance, Nigerian politicians’ conducts were responsible for the cut throat politics of the 1962-1966 that tried to subjugate Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his Western Region which evil plan boomeranged leading to January 15/July 29, 1966 military coups, pogroms against the Igbo and the Biafra War the after effects Nigeria is yet to recover from.
Now, if we say that politicians are mostly liars and shameless, do they think and see themselves as such? In established democracies, the norm is fairly established that politics shouldn’t be a vocation of liars, and that if you adopt lies as a standard practice in your politics you should expect to be publicly censored and shamed even if you are shameless. And we have seen this norm that is not even statutorily entrenched but only a convention attracting serious consequences and social stigma. President Nixon’s Watergate scandal or Prime Minister Blair’s lies about Iraq and woe betides that Japanese politician who is corrupt, his shame will end in hara-kiri. However, in Nigeria, that stricture against politics of lies has not taken roots. Otherwise, Babangida Aliyu would not admit in an interview that every Nigerian politician is a liar or Senator Aliyu Wamako admitting that every Nigeria politician is corrupt. It is admitted that lies has defined Nigerian politics since 1947 but we can cut off the First and Second Republic and interrogate the politics introduced by Nigeria military rulers from 1989-1999 political transition programme that tried to train politicians in the art of politics. This politics was tagged ‘newbreedism’, that’s trying to break off from the First and Second Republics political traditions. But that did not work as the programme after series of bans and meanwhile, the old guards of First and Second Republic have either died or rendered infirm by age and diseases they were benched off or retired. So what remained were their acolytes and former military politicians (that is former military men disengaged from military rule and armed forces that had no other meaningful occupations or business to engage their idle hands and had to fall back on politics as an occupation. The most prominent of these military men was Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, deputy to General Obasanjo’s rule (1976-1979). The politics introduced by this military class of politicians was one that takes politics as war and in war you must either kill or get killed. This military strategy was the ruling norm of politics in Nigeria since 1999. Rules of military tactics and strategy in war are deployed – lies, deception, violence and subjugation. But one aspect of military tradition which is honour to accept defeat and surrender was not infused in Nigerian politics by this class of politicians Arthur Nwankwo identified as ‘militricians’. The defining feature of this class of politicians has been a tour of duty in lies and shamelessness. We have cited Governor Babangida Aliyu’s confession that every Nigerian politician is a liar while his political brother Senator Wamako says every Nigerian politician is corrupt. And the Holy Bible tells us that every liar is a thief. And one must be corrupt to be shameless. So, in effect, every Nigerian politics is a thief. For one to be a thief, he has overcome the sense of shame which thereby transforms him from a rational human being given to a sense of shame to that amoral being that is shameless and could absorb any act of shaming such as dancing naked in the market as was the standard penalty in most communities’ native law and custom.
These acts of lying and shamelessness was most pronounced during the Abacha years when many notable politicians were lying and swearing with their lives that Abacha was their messiah and if Abacha was not allowed to transmute to civilian ruler, Nigeria will die and they would not mind dying or going into exile. Fortunately or unfortunately for them, Abacha died in 1998. Abdulsalam Abubakar took over and introduced the Transition Programme but instead of these politicians that swore with their lives to die for Abacha to show their love and loyalty or go into exile as they publicly declared, they ran to Abdulsalam Abubakar, took over the politics of his transition programme and became the chieftains of the Peoples Democratic Party and the All Peoples Party. When PDP won, the APP partisans and the entire politicians and political parties except Alliance for Democracy (AD) then led by authentic Awolowo political tradition switched camps by defecting to PDP. Later, AD collapsed when Bola Tinubu formed Action Congress which party cut a radical departure from the AD tradition by embracing the PDP and APP’s political traditions of ‘anything goes’ since 2007 when the major political parties got mixed up and became one entity and one soul. Politics has lost its essence and meaning as the parties and their partisans remain indistinguishable. It is in the context of this lack of distinction that we can explain the flow of ideas and praxis between PDP and APC since 2014 leading to the 2015 general election that produced General Muhammadu Buhari as President and Bola Tinubu as APC National Leader. While APC was gearing to remove President Jonathan in 2005 they went to Generals Babangida, Obasanjo, TY Danjuma and Abdulsalam Abubakar and Asiwaju Tinubu was on record to have gleefully boasted that those who make presidents in Nigeria have endorsed their party and their presidential candidate, General Buhari.
Now after the 2015 general election, Obasanjo fell out with Buhari over his misgovernance which irked Tinubu. In the 2019 general elections campaigns, Bola Tinubu mounted the soapbox to castigate Obasanjo as an “election rigger” and useless. Now, in 2022, it was the same Asiwaju Tinubu that gathered the ‘greats’ of Yoruba land to visit Obasanjo in his house to beg for support or endorsement for his presidential ambition. Any normal person not being a Nigerian politician who had at the back of his mind all the vituperations of earlier years and in particular the condemnation of Obasanjo as an ‘election rigger’ and being useless” would not condescend to the level of going back to his vomit by asking the same condemned man for support for whatever political ambition. And this takes us to the confession of Adam Oshiomhole before President Goodluck Jonathan that his attacks against him were not borne out of any patriotic duty to Nigeria but rather actuated by malevolent and selfish motives to remove him from power on the basis of lies. So, how do these men of politics and power see Nigeria? A plaything in their hands? Or Nigerians as fools helplessly absorbing their asinine lies and follies? Well, 2023 political season is on and it lies in the hands of Nigerians, particularly the youths to put a stop to this culture of lies and shamelessness by telling them: “Enough of these shenanigans.”
