Lai: Taking lies beyond borders
The Goebbels of our time has stepped out yet again. Like the German propaganda minister in Nazi Germany who persecuted the Jews under the totalitarian reign of Adolf Hitler, Lai Mohammed, our own propaganda minister, has stepped up his game.
His infamy came into full glare when he reigned as the national publicity secretary of the newly formed All Progressives Congress (APC). The party needed all the propaganda it could muster to stay afloat. It also needed to apply the tool as a de-marketing strategy. The then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was its target. The APC and its propaganda machinery descended on PDP. Unable to match APC at its own game, PDP and the administration it formed caved in. Lai Mohammed was rewarded with the job of minister of information and culture.
Since then, Lai Mohammed has never left anybody in doubt as to why he was appointed. His job is to feed Nigerians with ceaseless lies to the point of stupefaction. The idea is to leave Nigerians in a permanent state of confusion so much so that the line between truth and falsehood will be blurred.
Lai Mohammed has been doing this with gusto. For instance, no sooner had the Muhammadu Buhari government assumed office than Lai Mohammed declared that the administration had defeated Boko Haram. It sounded very improbable. There were no facts on ground to support the claim. Even a miracle could not have achieved that overnight. But Mohammed did not mind the gaps in his story. He continued to hammer it into shape with more disingenuous sophistry. In fact, the only job the minister has done since assumption of office is to lie on behalf of the government he serves. This is most ignoble. But Mohammed, certainly, sees it differently.
Last week, he ventured into Washington DC where he plied the deceitful trade without let. The minister said he was there to address international media organizations on the outcome of the 2023 presidential election. His mission would have been worthwhile, if he had been fair to truth. Instead he, characteristically, stood truth on its head. He lied freely about the February 25 presidential and National Assembly election, describing it as the fairest and freest in the history of Nigeria. But that disagreeable claim would probably have gone unnoticed if he did not bring Peter Obi into the mix. He accused the Labour Party presidential in that election of treason. He told his audience that Obi was promoting insurrection by inciting people to violence over the outcome of the elections.
Nothing could be more embarrassing to Nigeria at this time than this shameful display dramatized in an absurd scale in a foreign country by a government official. Why did Lai Mohammed think that he would make sense in this matter? Obi’s disputations, whatever they may be, are public knowledge. Nigerians, and indeed the world, do not have any record or report of what Obi has done that warrants the charge from Lai Mohammed. Why then did the minister choose to assault our sense of composure and proportion? I think that the minister wants to inflict maximum damage on Nigerians whose psyches have been assaulted by the electoral robbery that they were forced to witness.
The fact of the matter is that Nigerians have been squirming with discomfort since the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) led by Mahmood Yakubu made a mess of a national election in which Nigerians invested so much hope. Yakubu, a nation-wrecker, working in cahoots with other negative forces, gave Nigeria its worst election ever. Foreign election observers who were in Nigeria to monitor the conduct of the elections are still bewildered. They are yet to come to terms with the level of compromise that Yakubu inflicted on the electoral system. In that election, Yakubu ensured that votes did not count. He was working towards a predetermined outcome. That was why his goons in the commission shut down the result viewing portal and refused to transmit results real-time. When Nigerians reacted stridently to the breach, INEC was reticent. It did not have a ready response. When it eventually put itself together, it claimed that its action was due to technical hitches. We knew Yakubu and his cohorts lied.
But Lai Mohammed has just extended the frontiers of that undiluted lie. He told his audience in Washington DC that INEC shut down the portal for fear of cyberattack. What a contradiction. Lies are on collision course here. What a bizarre drama of contrary tales!
In all of this, nothing can be more specious than the allegation that Lai Mohammed levelled against Peter Obi. It is the worst form of brazenness. Here, shamelessness was made to wear the toga of effrontery. It is understandable if Lai Mohammed did not tell his foreign audience that Obi won the February 25 presidential election. He has to conceal this fact so that his mission will not be dead on arrival. But it is an unpardonable effrontery and cheeky to forbid a man who had been wronged from complaining. A man won an election and was denied victory. The conspirators do not entertain any sense of guilt. What they do instead is to accuse him of a crime he did not commit. The objective is to harass him and hound him into submission. They want to instill fear in the victor so that he will stop laying claim to his victory. This was what Lai Mohammed did in Washington DC. He lied brazenly against Peter Obi to intimidate him and also score a cheap political point for his paymasters.
Who sent this man outside our shores to lie on behalf of Nigeria? This man has been lying within our shores. Before now, Nigerians have watched him with astonishing disbelief as he assaulted their sensibilities with half truths and absolute falsehood. It is so bad that some people have christened him Liar Mohammed. The man has, over time, acquired a certain notoriety. He tells lies with effortless ease. He is accustomed to the dubious trade. It would appear that the pastime runs in his blood vessels. He does not worry about history and integrity. But some of us do on his behalf.
We have almost got accustomed to this propagandist of our time. We thought we should let him retire, having become visibly old. But little did we know that our indulgence of this man could diminish us further. Now he has gone outside our shores to make us a laughing stock in the eyes of the world. This is the deepest cut from Lai Mohammed, the compulsive propagandist who is billed to disappear from the public space in a matter of weeks.
