“What was she wearing?”
“How can Nigeria import so much rice when we have all these farmlands?
“How can someone wake up and fabricate fews news that will go viral on social media?”
“How won’t Nigeria have a debt crisis when only twenty people owe 67 percent of AMCON’s N5 trillion?”
Taken individually, these questions are all taken from distinct and unconnected conversations about Nigeria’s social, political and economic situation. On closer inspection, the discerning viewer will realise that these questions – disparate as they may seem – are in fact all answers to the same problem – how people wielding power destructively can derail important conversations that threaten to expose their malfeasance. A closer examination also reveals that this is a motif that recurs at every level and layer of Nigerian society right up to Aso Rock.
This targeted disingenuity is a terrible thing for Nigeria’s future prospects as a country, and I will attempt to explain why as we go further.
“But you’re at fault too”: Using false equivalency as a Weapon
Every so often, the issue of Nigeria’s prevalent culture of masculine-dominated sexual violence finds its way into public discourse. Predictably, a large number of women typically join the conversation, recounting their bitter experiences of sexual harassment and violence at the hands of men. Also predictably, just when it seems that the conversation might be achieving a critical mass that forces presumably innocent men to consider their own culpability in aiding and abetting a rape culture, a self-appointed “voice of reason” pops up to inform the victims that they are in fact at fault, and hey – “Men get raped too!”
This voice helpfully informs the complaining women that they should focus on “protecting” themselves instead of complaining about men. “Criminals will be criminals, so why not focus on protecting yourself from them instead…” On the surface, that may seem to be a useful sentiment that encourages women to protect themselves instead of becoming victims. In reality, all it does is to shift a much-needed conversation away from its true focus – the violence and entitlement within Nigerian male culture – to a useless academic discussion about how women can “protect” themselves against something which is statistically impossible to defend against.
Available statistics around the world show that of the roughly 91 percent of sex offenders who are male, 90 percent of that number are people known and trusted by the victims including family members, religious leaders, friends and colleagues – people who they would not and often cannot “protect” themselves from. In other words, except we want women to permanently interact with the world from inside bulletproof Kevlar pods “protecting” them from all men including their fathers and brothers, the only sensible solution is to fix what is obviously wrong with male culture. Shifting the conversation away from this only serves the interests of the group in power by preserving the status quo.
This is the same tactic used by law enforcement officials who pretend that the daily stories of harrasment, illegal detention, torture, extortion and extrajudicial death are in some way exaggerated or even deserved. Rather than fix the basic problem, which is that the recruitment and training of law enforcement personnel is fundamentally broken, the comfortable group in power instead choose to sermonise about “dressing responsibly” and “speaking carefully” to incompetente, often inebriated officers.
Sophistry and rehearsed ignorance as a tool of (bad) governance
At national level, Nigeria’s government employs similar methods to force through ruinous economic policies and clamp down on our already restricted social freedoms. Where all the evidence says that Nigeria’s primary economic inefficiency is the cost of doing business due to lack of power and poorly-maintained, inadequate public infrastructure, Nigeria’s government insists that the biggest problem is actually imported rice. Tackling actual problems like power generation and a horribly inefficient route to market – that adds as much as 60 percent to the cost of locally produced items – cannot be done by fiat. It requires thought, consultation, funding and a political will to follow through – none of which are renowned strengths of PResident Buhari or anyone around him.
So instead we get knee-jerk policies like border closures, followed by a massive effort to derail the conversation by appealing to emotions and uninformed gut feelings on the subject of importation and exportation. As I have mentioned in this column previously, Nigeria still has an annual balance of trade surplus – imported rice is neither “depleting our national reserves” nor is it “killing local producers.” Those are narratives that have been carefully curated by this administration’s media armada because they sound correct to the uninformed.
Knowingly building a bad-faith argument around a position that is not true, but is believable enough to seem true is known as sophistry and unfortunately, Lai Mohammed and his fellow exponents of this particular genre of dishonesty are just products of Nigerian society. We are taught to practise sophistry right from our primary and secondary school debate clubs, so that by the time we become Minister of Information, we can dress up an imminent crackdown on widespread dissent as “necessary action against fake news purveyors.”
The dishonesty hurts everyone eventually
Ultimately, all the insidious dishonesty described above is merely an exercise in self-defeat. This is because the only way to make progress as a country and as a society is to start solving our problems and fixing our cultural flaws. To do this, we have to first establish what these problems are and how to tackle them. When we use false equivalency, sophistry and contrived comprehension failure to derail, demean, mock and dismiss every conversation that threatens to upset the status quo, we are effectively giving our assent to the version of Nigeria that exists and threatens all of us every single day.
When we refuse to engage honestly with women who inform us that the behaviour of men as a group is harmful to them, instead using false equivalency, victim blaming and pretend-stupidity to dismiss conversations that make us very uncomfortable, we should not imagine that our own daughters, wives, girlfriends, sisters, aunts and female friends will somehow be spared from the effects of living in an unreformed rape culture. When law enforcement personnel pretend to be unaware of the atrocities their colleagues commit everyday, the pendulum eventually finds its way into their lives through the general lawlessness these actions generate.
At this time in our national history, we need to stop seeing the truth as a moral virtue or luxury, because the cocktail of lies we have brewed for decades is starting to drown us already. For decades we aided and abetted a brewing rape culture by being dismissive of women’s concerns and deliberately dishonest about our role within the rape culture. Today, our sisters, wives and female colleagues in Abuja cannot walk without male companions because the AEPB – a sort of SARS-for-women rogue outfit – regularly abducts and sexually molests them with total impunity.
Our law enforcement establishment spent decades pretending not to see and understand the brewing lawlessness and insecurity they created. Today, they do not wear their uniforms while traveling interstate by road because it is dangerous for them to do so. Our government has spent several months desperately pretending that closing Nigeria off from international trade has boosted local production. The wave of inflation we are starting to experience begs to differ as usual, because that is how truth works.
Truth does not need to respect us. We are the ones who need to start respecting it.
DAVID HUNDEYIN
