During Germany’s 3rd Reich, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels famously made the remark, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” This propaganda technique, which was successfully trialled during the 1930s and 1940s using the German population as Guinea Pigs, later found its way across the Atlantic into Africa where it became the mainstay of dictatorship after dictatorship. Name them – Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Mobutu Sese Seko, KaMuzu Banda, Sani Abacha, Ibrahim Babangida, Jerry Rawlings, Charles Taylor, Samuel Doe, Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, Muammar Ghadaffi, Hosni Mubarak, Muhammadu Buhari, Omar Al-Bashir, Paul Kagame, Yoweri Museveni – the list continues on and on.
Each and every one of these African dictators has governed using some variant or the other of Goebele’s “Big Lie” propaganda technique. In some cases, the Big Lie was so powerfully propagated that much of the population still believes it, even after the dictator’s death. In Nigeria for example, it was a variant of this “Big Lie” that convinced the population that the preferable choice to make in the 2015 election was a former military dictator who was a 3-time coup plotter as well as a renowned illiterate and ethno-religious demagogue. This “strong man” would “fix” Nigeria in all his strong, unquestionable, unilateral and process-free wisdom, unlike the weak democratic incumbent. Of course as always, the “Strength” turned out to be the only noteworthy thing about him. All of the promised strength, but none of the expected benevolence. But I digress.
The real issue today in November 2021, following the release of the Lagos State #EndSARS Judicial Panel report is that the iteration of the “Big Lie” which Buhari’s junta began promoting last year – “The Lekki Massacre did not happen” – appears to have fallen flat on its face and completely failed to have the Goebbelsian impact. The Buhari junta is scratching its head and wondering why. Campaigning and governance exclusively by lies and propaganda is all it has ever known how to do, and it has always worked. Why is this particular incident proving so stubborn, and why are Nigerians for some reason not buying the Big Lie this time?
The “Big Lie” had an addendum
The thing about the oft-repeated quote from Joseph Goebbels is not that it is wrong. It is that it is incomplete. In the full quote, the following statement follows the one above, “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
The ability of the Big Lie to remain believable and powerful in the minds of the public is directly proportional to the ability of the state to maintain the ecosystem that makes the Big Lie believable
What Goebbels was saying in other words, was that the Big Lie on its own cannot stand, much less stand in for actual governance and state capacity. The ability of the Big Lie to remain believable and powerful in the minds of the public is directly proportional to the ability of the state to maintain the ecosystem that makes the Big Lie believable. The 3rd Reich for example, was a highly industrialised and economically powerful society where Hitler’s German state had actually achieved a formidable level of credibility in the minds of the German people. This important piece of context is often omitted when German WW2 era history is discussed.
Hitler in fact, did not simply issue propaganda statements and hope that they would on their own, do the magic of governance and making him credible in the eyes of Germans. Hitler – abominable as he undoubtedly was – in fact was relatively competent in practical terms. Under his leadership, Germany went from the doldrums of the Great Depression, to becoming the undisputed economic hegemon of mainland Europe. It was Hitler’s government that came up with the economic rocket fuel that was the Autobahn – a high-speed federal highway system that revolutionised trade and commerce in Germany.
For as long as Hitler’s 3rd Reich could maintain this trajectory of economic growth and burgeoning international respect for a German state humiliated by the Versailles Treaty and its loss in WW1, Joseph Goebbels would be able to tell as many Big Lies as he wanted, and get away with it. Make no mistake, however, what made the German people key into his Big Lies was not the quality of the lies themselves, or the intensity with which they were promoted. It was the simple fact that life was better for them under Hitler than it was before – and thus if he said anything, then it must be true.
Nigeria’s “Big Lie” – A mosquito that thinks it is a bird
Nigeria in 2021 does not have the state capacity of Germany in 1939. This is a statistical fact that can be verified using HDI ratings, GDP per capita adjusted for inflation, access to electricity, access to clean pipe-borne water, access to all-weather roads, security, justice systems and so on. Germany in 1939 was objectively a better place to be a German, than Nigeria in 2021 is to be a Nigerian. This is a fact. Everyone reading this article who has lived for any significant period of time in Nigeria has a series of terrible stories to tell – again, just facts.
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Whereas Germany was carrying out nuclear research in 1939, Nigeria has not figured out how to provide reliable electricity supply to its population 82 years later. Between 2015 and 2019, the visible and alarming deterioration of physical security, economic prospects and basic social cohesion under the Muhammadu Buhari junta has been visible to the blind and audible to the deaf. Many including yours truly have voted with their feet. Mr Buhari’s wife in fact, lives in Dubai. For emphasis, I will repeat – the First Lady of Nigeria has also metaphorically uploaded the Sola Sobowale “Welcome to a new dispensation” meme and disappeared into the Diaspora sunset.
With this little state capacity, what exactly was it that convinced the Buhari junta that putting out a Big Lie about the Lekki Massacre, which 130,000 people watched on a livestream, was ever going to be a reasonable idea? When Hitler was able to brainwash Germany’s population into seeing 6 million Jews as their enemies, there was real social capital for his government to exploit due to its economic and geopolitical achievements. What are Mr Buhari’s economic and geopolitical achievements? Is it becoming the first Head of State in Nigerian history to take the country into recession on at least 3 different occasions? Is it watching Cote d’Ivoire wrongfully imprison and eventually kill an innocent 23-year-old Nigerian woman? Was it spending 100 days in a UK hospital? Where did the audacity come from?
Perhaps Mr. Buhari and his co-travellers do not realise that the members of the Lagos State panel are also human beings who are suffering from his egregious mismanagement of the country. Perhaps he does not realise that they too have their own stories of encounters with Nigeria’s feral police and armed forces. Perhaps it did not occur to these geniuses that the panel simply had no other possible outcome than reporting what we all saw happen, if its members wanted to retain any semblance of societal status and respect they may have previously had? Perhaps he imagined that every Nigerian is as unthinkably dishonest and contemptibly dishonourable as Segun Awosanya, the pro-regime panel member?
Ultimately, the amusing reality of the situation, especially in the light of the comical shock that has followed the release of the report is that yet again, people in power are demonstrating how impossibly detached they are from Nigeria’s actual reality. They live in a fantasy world where they can copy Joseph Goebbels’s tactics and maintain the illusion indefinitely, because Nigeria – the $2,000 per capita GDP world poverty capital without electricity – is the country that will somehow find state capacity to do so. These people clearly, are the proverbial mosquito that thinks itself to be an eagle, and this ultimately is what will be their downfall.
Tick tock, Mr. Buhari.
Tick tock.
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