It is just as well that the phenomenon of fake news has finally reached the hallowed portals of top state actors in Nigeria. These merchants of fabrication are at the zenith of their inventive malice. They are so unruly and disruptive of order that nothing is sacred or sacrosanct anymore. Anybody and anything moving is fair game. If it were not so seedy and malignant, it would have been quite hilarious.
Wole Soyinka, himself a serial victim of merciless scurrility on the internet, noted with apocalyptic premonition that the phenomenon of fake news is quite capable of igniting a new World War. And according to him, the global altercation is most likely going to be triggered by a Nigerian.
Yemi Osinbajo, the Vice President, intoned rather glumly that his wife once called him to alert that he had been seen in the company of strippers. Hints of an orgiastic future for a model cleric and famed man of God ? For a man of such antiseptic and almost prudish public comportment, it must have been a near death experience.
Not even the Head of State has been exempt. For a long time, and even up till this moment, the fake news is that General Mohammadu Buhari has joined his ancestors and has been replaced by a well-cloned and well-appointed Sudanese. Even where and when this malarial concoction has been convincingly proved to be an assault on common sense and reality, the perpetrators persist to the chagrin of just about everybody.
In human history, from Hitler to Stalin and Saddam Hussein, the use of doubles to deceive, to dissimulate and to tactically wrong foot the enemy has been a normal practice. Many rulers have used the ploy to devastating effects.
But Nigeria must take a first in inventive malignancy. It is the first time in history that the alleged double of a dead ruler will be ruling the living in perpetuity. This surreal concoction would make the masters of magical realism wince in envy and admiration at the fictional possibilities inherent in the Nigerian post-colonial imagination.
To be sure, the phenomenon of the double has already found its way into the Nigerian fictional firmament. In The Remains of The Last Emperor, the crazed Emperor Samusangudu often employs multiple doubles to perform some of his arcane, sublimely cruel rituals.
Just to test the resolve and resilience of his captive subjects, the madman, as a matter of routine, sometimes sends his doubles in a Cavalcade of Carnage to the Quarters of the Destitute to see how they are holding out. The carnage of broken limbs and mangled flesh is better imagined.
Yet it is a cause for regret that like all those things connected to Nigerian officialdom, the Abuja summit chose to view the phenomenon of fake news from the perspective of personal victimhood rather than taking a holistic and critical view of its social origins and historical roots. This makes for sensational headlines but it hardly makes a dent on the problem.
Fake news is not a recent phenomenon. It has been part of human history from time immemorial. Its power of societal penetration and dynamism depends on the state of technology and the cohesiveness of the society in question.
The current explosion in the fake news industry and its prodigious capacity for societal disruption is due to the revolution in communication technology, particularly the advent of social media. It has democratized the mode and pattern of news production, dissemination and consumption. Anybody with a phone or a computer is an instant news baron.
Fake news in Nigeria actually has an ancient and terrible history. Shortly after the first military coup of January 1966 which saw to the virtual elimination of the ranking military and civilian members of the northern oligarchy, crudely doctored pictures of the assassinated Sardauna with a grinning Chukwuma Nzeogwu superimposed on them began making the rounds in offices and market places.
Needless to add that it was the height of callous insensitivity. It was to form part of the leitmotif for the gruesome massacres, the savage revenge coup and a subsequent civil war which led to the death of at least two million Nigerians. Our young internet warriors and irresponsible bloggers may be too obsessed to appreciate this fact, but given the alarming rate with which adult Nigerians lap up and reproduce heinous fake news, we might be dealing with a national emergency.
In the aborted Third Republic and particularly after the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential elections, fake editions of the radical, hard hitting Tempo magazine hit the newsstand after it was officially proscribed by the Babangida military junta. Often, the two editions, both and fake genuine, coexisted in the same market. But Nigerians were not deceived as to the real McCoy.
As he was about to be liberated from Abacha’s dungeon, the soon to be Senator Olabiyi Durojaiye drew attention to some strange midnight noises emanating from an underground cell below his own. When security men finally accessed the crypt, they met a man with a Nebuchadnezzar-like beard so badly dehumanized by protracted incarceration that he could only crawl and moan.
It was Moshood Fayemiwo, now a proud owner of a doctorate degree in Divinity. The young man had been betrayed and abducted from neighboring Benin Republic from where he had been offloading his angry pro-democracy newsletter called Razor on the home country.
Snooper finally caught up with the chap in Tampa, Florida in the very last week of 1999. His tale of piecemeal torture in the hands of the dreaded rogue Colonel Frank Omenka was as horrendous as it was heartrending. Two decades after, Fayemiwo still gives his fatherland a wide berth.
Fake news has taken its time to berth and naturalize on these shores. With social sadism as a state policy, the current Nigerian reality is so outlandish and improbable that imaginative recalls of hell has become a poor copy. In his preface to his famous novel titled A Man Without Qualities, the great German novelist, Robert Muslin, noted tersely that his novel would not attempt to enter into any competition with reality.
Echoing Muslin, Franz Kafka, the comprehensively displaced German-speaking Jew born in Czechoslovakia, noted wryly that he wrote the way he wrote because actual reality has become unrealistic. In other words, lived factual experience is of such strangeness and nightmarish absurdities that fiction could no longer cope.
This is why fake news is thriving in contemporary Nigeria and perhaps in other modern hellholes. Without fictionalization, reality is already so outlandish. So what you have is further fictionalization of an already fictive reality or the novelization of an already truly novel situation or further fabrication of a fabrication.
In the event, the peddlers and purveyors of fake news have their work cut out for them. While we should truly rein them in as an interim measure, what we should criminalize is the social condition which gave rise to the phenomenon in the first instance.
Those who hide under the anonymity of the cyber-jungle or the obscurity of rogue newsletters and other cockroach publications to inflict such grievous damage on their fellow citizens and on the tenuous and fragile fabric of the nation are probably too badly dehumanized and psychologically damaged to appreciate the clear and present danger they pose to the society. But then those who sire evil children must be prepared to piggy-back them.
The merchants of fake news are enemy nationals, psychologically maladjusted individuals and veterans of hate campaigns who are bent on bringing down their nation as a result of some ancestral resentments and historic prejudice. But rather than being treated as permanent outcasts what they need is urgent social and political rehabilitation.
Political orgasm is the pleasurable joy derived from actively participating in the progress and wellbeing of one’s society while fake political orgasm derives from watching fellow citizens and a nation roiling in pains and trauma as a result of political inequity and social injustice arising from unresolved national contradictions.
Only a state policy of social and political amelioration which addresses the root causes of acute disaffection can bring solace and succor to these traumatized citizens. No national border is ever drawn in permanent ink. All national boundaries are subject to adjustments or downright reconfigurations.
After triggering two world wars and enduring a brief partitioning in the process, Robert Muslin’s Germany finally made its peace with itself and the rest of Europe as well as the civilized world, while Kafka’s Czechoslovakia has since disappeared in the sand of time. Nigeria will do well to take note. Fake nationhood is more damning than fake news.