At the end of 2017, the Oxford Dictionary of English named the word “gaslight” as the word of the year. Coming after the first full year of Donald Trump’s antics, it was not hard to see how that word had entered the public lexicon. For the first time, many Americans had a word to describe something which they may have been familiar with on a personal level, but had never seen their prescient doing before. If that were the case for us in this part of the world.
We may not have known the word, but we definitely have had an experience or ten of state-sponsored gaslighting multiple times in our lifetimes. It is both big and small things. It is the soldiers and civilians who get slaughtered by Boko Haram only for the government in Abuja to deny the incidents or lie about the death tolls. It is the capitalised, bright red “FAKE NEWS” watermark that the Nigerian Army’s Twitter handle brands factual stories with.
It is the Nigerian government overseeing a military massacre of dozens of civilians at a public location, and telling all of us who watched the massacre livestreamed on Instagram that we did not actually see what we just saw. It was Candidate Buhari claiming in 2014, that Sani Abacha whom he served under, “never stole any money” despite the Swiss government having refunded not less than $2 billion of said loot to Nigeria so far.
In other words, you cannot dialogue with these folks. They have all the intellectual good faith and ethical standards of a faceless Nairaland troll. They are not interested in your common sense, well researched opinions, educated statements, economic literacy, pro-democracy ideals or human rights.
Gaslighting at the hands of the Nigerian government is everywhere around us, which is why I am writing this column. In as few words as possible, I will outline two of the most basic countermeasures for Nigerian citizens to utilise when dealing with a bad faith government like this one.
Know your enemy
Last week, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab published the results of an extensive investigation into the Nigerian government’s response to the #EndSARS protest hashtag on social media. Laid out in black and white, the extent to which the government went to attempt to suppress a global organic phenomenon was not surprising, but infuriating.
One could go as far as to say that it was in fact the characteristic cack-handedness and incompetence that mercifully ensured the failure of that effort. The intent however, was definitely there. The key thing revealed by that report was not that certain pro-regime Twitter accounts are in fact controlled sock puppets used for astroturfing by a regime obsessed with trying to control narratives that it has no capacity to.
What was really important about that report was that it showed that right from the get-go, before the #EndSARS protests even metamorphosed into sit-ins and public demonstrations, the regime already had its mind made up. There was only one thing it ever had on its mind, and that thing was to suppress young Nigerians and get them to shut up by fair means or foul.
The reason this realisation is so important is that it destroys the myth that there can ever be some sort of “civil discourse” with a Buhari government. As I have pointed out several times in this column, Mr. Buhari and the coterie of night creatures surrounding him wear a toxic, unapologetic and indelible brand of disingenuousness as their trademark. If agreeing that 1+1 is 2 might contradict them in any way, these fellows are prepared to spend thousands of dollars creating sock puppet echo chambers on Twitter to attempt to muddy the scientific narrative of addition.
In other words, you cannot dialogue with these folks. They have all the intellectual good faith and ethical standards of a faceless Nairaland troll. They are not interested in your common sense, well researched opinions, educated statements, economic literacy, pro-democracy ideals or human rights. The only thing that they know is that they want to be in power, and anything that contradicts any position of theirs is an enemy to be figuratively terminated. Your intellectual argument is wasted on them.
Which brings me to the most important part of this article.
Always resist the urge to ‘shalaye’
In the immediate aftermath of the Lekki Massacre, the Nigerian government deployed its gaslighting machine to the fullest extent possible on social media. Fresh from witnessing what was probably the most livestreamed and live-tweeted mass murder incident in human history, we were suddenly deluged with a wave of ‘skeptical’ takes from both sock-puppet accounts and respected voices such as former Channels TV presenter Suleiman Aledeh.
Many well-meaning people then spent the next few days going through various stages of exasperation as they tried fruitlessly to “prove” to these “skeptics” that the live event watched by 300,000 people actually happened. Every new video or photo was shared breathlessly with said “skeptics” in a long and extremely unsuccessful attempt to make them recant their near-blasphemous stances.
All of this was a mistake. In fact, giving an audience and an extended back-and-forth to a Nigerian government-sponsored internet troll is possibly the worst possible response to the regime’s gaslighting. What said trolls feed on is publicity, exposure and engagement. Engaging with them (even if it is just to call them stupid or make a joke about their obtuseness) only helps them spread their poison further. In the world of the government-funded internet troll, there is no such thing as a bad engagement.
Instead, the right way to deal with these types is to completely ignore them and continue with your own narrative. This incidentally, is exactly what made the #EndSARS online protests so successful even as the regime tried fruitlessly to divert and misdirect the conversations and narratives. People genuinely believed in the protest’s cause, so every other thing took a back seat.
Going forward, this is the template to adopt. We must understand that it is impossible to wake up anybody who is pretending to be asleep, and that as long as a (wo)man’s wages depend on them not understanding something, you could get Neil DeGrasse Tyson to explain it to them and they would still never get it. They are a waste of time, and their job is to waste your time while carrying out their amatur gaslighting operation. The social media-savvy Nigerian must learn to ignore, mute, block and report liberally the plethora of sock puppet accounts deployed by the regime to push its gaslighting agenda on us.
To coin a famous Nigerian social media aphorism, ‘Always resist the urge to shalaye.’
