The ill thought out remarks by Presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, to the effect that rodents had damaged the President’s office, forcing him to work from home should not come as a surprise to discerning Nigerians and neither should we blame Mr. Shehu for the infantile lie.
You see, once the decision had been reached at the highest levels to be less than transparent about President Muhammadu Buhari’s health situation, there was really nothing much that his media aides could do. If I was Garba Shehu, what I would have said is that the President has a backlog of work and so had to cancel FEC and focus fully on clearing this backlog from home! It would not be a lie being that the President is always on call 24/7. As a Presidential spokesman, lying is the last thing you want to do.
Your job is to find creative, but not dishonest, ways to make the bitter truth palatable to the general public. Lack of creativity is a greater liability to a Presidential spokesman than lack of funds. And the remark itself (“Following the three months’ period of disuse, rodents have caused a lot of damage to the furniture and the air conditioning units”) reminds me of the iconic movie, Of Mice and Men. Of Mice and Men is a 1937 book by John Steinbeck, which got made into a movie.
It tells the tale of of two California migrants workers who roam from town to town during the Great Depression in search of greener pastures. How fitting that the lie told by Mr. Shehu should dovetail into Steinbeck’s classic. Just like in Of Mice and Men, we have a migrant President who moves back and forth from London to Abuja. And again like Steinbeck’s classic, he does so in a depression.
The only difference is that while George Milton and Lennie Small were the victims of a depression caused by others, President Muhammadu Buhari is not a victim but a perpetrator of the fastest negative turnaround of an economy from the third fastest growing economy in the world to an economy in recession. There are many other parallels one can draw from the movie and the comedy the Buhari administration is unleashing on the nation, but one has to be careful in drawing attention to them especially in these days that the military is scouring social media for “anti-government and anti-military information”.
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