The scene is that of a hurriedly built and averagely maintained public establishment somewhere in Lagos. It is on an untarred street, which may possibly have been tarred once upon a time, maybe 35 years ago – nobody remembers or cares anymore. The street is speckled with carcasses of broken-down vehicles, like an open-air long term storage unit for the mechanical victims of a terminal vehicular illness.
Inside the poorly painted establishment sit two men having an animated discussion about politics at local, state and national level. Both men look, for lack of another term, weather-beaten. Between them, many a day has clearly been spent dealing with 35 degree Celsius heat and acute humidity without the benefit of air conditioning.
On the table before them, a cheap styrofoam takeaway pack sits quietly while its hot contents steam away happily. One of the men flips open the lid of the pack and smiles to himself as he contemplates the feast before him – a finger of roadside-roasted plantain and a boiled strip of cowhide seasoned with pepper. Unknown to them, this little meal of ‘boli’ and ‘ponmo’ is in fact the sole topic of their conversation. They don’t know it, the thousands of social media viewers who will later see this picture don’t know it, and in fact, the person writing this article also did not know it. Until now.
The Buhari Twitter Voltron question
Unlike thousands of our compatriots who have seen the now-infamous “boli and ponmo” photo shared on Twitter by a known pro-government lickspittle, my first reaction was not amusement at the spectacle of an unprovoked self-own, but a sharp realisation. For the first time, I felt something approaching sympathy. This was not because the individual in question deserves sympathy on the basis of his quality as a human being, but simply because the sheer lack of options in life inadvertently revealed in that photo helped to better contextualise his life choices up to that point.
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Over the past year, we have witnessed the Buhari media machine sound increasingly deranged and detached from any semblance of coherent arguments and sound reasoning in defence of a regime that guns down peaceful civilian protesters and tries to muzzle Africa’s most populous country. Individuals like the fellow in question have been central to this effort, with their practised avalanche of bad faith arguments, ad hominem and sealioning. Until very recently, the existence of individuals like this worried me very much, but for the wrong reasons.
To my mind then, every Nigerian who can afford to be online constantly and can stomach the relative intellectual rigour of Twitter should be able to think and express their thoughts at a certain standard. Why on earth would anyone who fit this profile agree to take on the most malodorous, unwanted and undesirable tasks such as Lekki Massacre Denialism in defence of a terrible government? Was this the manifestation of a terrifying new type of Nigerian anti-intellectualism that actually used the tools of intellectualism to bolster its apparent insanity?
Why did people who sounded so intelligent manage to constantly and consistently make such horribly conceived and poorly presented arguments in service to obvious lies? Was this yet another manifestation of the global Trump phenomenon where otherwise intelligent people manage to convince themselves that the U.S. government is actually one big child-eating conspiracy and Joe Biden surgically swapped his face with Donald Trump? Was Nigeria heading into a post-truth dystopia without even passing through its own truth-based Enlightenment like other civilisations did?
I was overthinking it – It’s just poverty!
What I immediately realised within 15 seconds of laying eyes on the cheap plate of food and its haggard-looking owner was this – I was in fact massively overthinking the whole thing. The problem of pro-government social media voices diving into the sewer to bring out absolutely any kind of poorly-considered and faulty illogic in their “defence” has nothing to do with the intellectual or emotional stability of the Nigerian civilisation. It is in fact, just a problem of naira and kobo.
What the poverty multipliers currently occupying Aso Rock know better than almost anyone else is how to effectively harness and weaponise poverty. This ability to identify the right kind of poverty and to discover how best to incentivise it to dance to any tune whatsoever that you want, is practically the Buhari administration’s only party trick. It was a mistake to think that such weaponisation happened only to people named “Abubakar Suleiman” and not to people called “Lekan Adigun.” Now, I know better.
It really wasn’t anything especially significant, after all. It was actually the poverty all along. The Buhari government has found the perfect sweet spot between poverty, basic intellectual erudition and absolute desperation, which leads to servility under a pseudo-intellectual banner.
It was just the poverty.
