Election season brings out different kinds of people with different brains, different eyes, and of course different ears. Some with brains. Some with half brains. Some with hollow brains. And yet some with vacated brains.
Election season provides a political bait for spokespersons and supporters of President Bola Tinubu to interpret maladies of Tinubu’s failures, snafus, and outright lies.
No matter the different shades of deception, all political falsehoods are the same. It wasn’t a surprise to see one unknown defiant, obstinate, pigheaded Obafemi George on Arise News analyzing maladies of Tinubu’s performance.
George’s malady interpretation ranged from basic spin to completely fabricated realities. George piously engaged in spinning half-truths, the most common form of dishonesty.
Making excuses for Tinubu’s performance when grilled by the Arise News analysts, George said it’s unfair and too soon to expect transformation of Nigeria by Tinubu.
Here comes George: “It took the President of Rwanda over 20 years to develop the country. Dubai started its transformation process in 1974 but didn’t gain global recognition as a tourist destination until 2014.
“It took China about 40 years, it even took God 40 years to personally lead the children of Israel from slavery to the promise land. Nigerians have just been religiously conditioned to expect the nation to be transformed overnight.”
Arise News Reuben Abati shot back: “Are you saying President Tinubu should remain in power for the next 40 years before we see transformation?”
It’s not George alone who believes it would take eternity for Tinubu to transform Nigeria. Majority of Nigerians drink from the same political opium of interpreting maladies of a failed president.
With arguments based on puerile, pedestrian, and obfuscation, they argued that Tinubu shouldn’t be evaluated or judged by his performance because he’s been in office for only three years.
George and others would always argue that Tinubu “met so much rot on ground, that the treasury has been looted to the bottom, that he didn’t know it was that bad, that there’s only a little he can do, that he can’t be everywhere, and that he’s not a miracle worker.
We have heard the same lame excuses before. It is the same tired, old, worn out defense for Muhammadu Buhari’s leadership failure.
George and other uninformed Nigerians filter the performance of a president from the lenses of partisan politics and ethnicity. No doubt they are ignorant and illiterate of what transformational leadership is all about.
It doesn’t take forever for a leader to transform a country. Each president makes an incremental transformation during his presidency. In order words, there will be measurable, visible, and impactful progress.
This is why Americans set the first 100 days as a benchmark for any American President to make a lasting impact on the lives of Americans. The first 100 days are indicative of how much the president would accomplish and how well he would succeed. And surprisingly, the first 100 days benchmark has been prophetically true.
When Buhari, the Butcher of Aso Rock was president, the same moribund argument made by George was fed to Nigerians by diehard Buharists. After eight years of Buhari, nothing was achieved for the betterment of poor Nigerians.
Instead, life became more brutish, more miserable, more dangerous, more painful, and more unpredictable for the poor masses. With the spate of killings and kidnappings by Fulani terrorists, there’s no amount of slicing and dicing that can interpret the narrative otherwise.
Why is it that only in Nigeria people defend the failure of leaders with illogical reasoning? Why is it that some Nigerians believe it should take eternity for a leader to perform in office? Why are Nigerians so unrealistic in holding their president accountable?
After all, it didn’t take Chief Awolowo 40 years to build the Old West into a modern nation state. It didn’t take him eternity to fulfill his campaign promises that changed the fortunes of Yorubas for life.
It took Awo only four years. The same thing with the late Lagos State Governor Lateef Jakande nicknamed Action Governor for the incredible achievements of his administration within four years.
The presidential election campaign has unofficially begun.
The quadrennial contest for deception, misdirection, misinformation, disinformation, fact-bending, half-truths, and downright lies, are meant to confuse Nigerian voters by twisting their hearts and minds to vote for the wrong candidate.
Lies and different types of interpretation of different political maladies will reach its apogee in the coming months.
Stay tuned!
Bayo Oluwasanmi; bjoluwasanmi@gmail.com
