Information - Whom to believe

Bode Agusto's column in NEXT is becoming one of my favourites. His piece on the 2008 Annual Report of the Central Bank of Nigeria illustrated something I have worried about for years. Our governmental agencies (in this case ex-Governor Charles Soludo's CBN) are forever releasing information and statistics that are at odds with observable reality.

Nigeria is not the only country in the world where business and political leaders engage in "spin" ... or in outright lies. A major war was launched against Iraq based on falsehoods propagated by the governments of two permanent members of the UN Security Council; and the prior president of one of those countries famously (infamously?) over-parsed the meaning of the word "is" to avoid a simple admission that he lied about an affair.

So this is not about Nigeria-bashing. The world has more than enough people who talk about Nigeria as if nothing good ever happened, and as if every bad thing in the world has a Nigerian passport. They make life difficult for people who want to make constructive critiques, because it is then easy for supporters of the status quo to sweep everyone together into a single pile of negativity.

Nevertheless we cannot escape the fact that the quality and quantity of information, and its effective dissemination, are vital for a country in Nigeria's position. As citizens we are all agreed that the federal republic is not where it should be, but we cannot get from where we are to where we should be without information.

Indeed, a big part of the reason our progress has been slower-than-necessary is the information on which we the people individually and collectively make our decisions. For example, when people discriminate against each other on ethnic, regional or religious bases, they are acting in what they believe to be their best interests based on beliefs that are built on a lifetime of the information they have absorbed about themselves, about the supposed ambitions of other sections of the Nigerian populace, about why things are they way they are and who is the cause of things being that way, and so many other issues. What seems from the outside like a self-defeating decision or action actually makes sense if you are thinking from within a particular prism of information.

Information shapes the sociopolitical ideology of the citizenry, and as such it would influence their voting. This might not seem important right now, given we have yet to embrace substantive democracy, but the sociopolitical ideology of the citizenry influences our peace and security even in the absence of democracy. We have lived with the effect of our current ideological framework since the 1950s; what has happened since then (and specifically the mass violence of the 1960s) would not have been possible if we all didn't have certain opinions of each other.

Our ability to bring true democracy to life, to make the federal republic work better, or to institute a social contract binding our peoples to a common goal, these are all things that will be decided, yay or nay, by the magnitude, degree and depth of the sociopolitical opinions held by the mass of the citizenry.

On a practical, economic, level, information influences investment and consumption decisions. One of the biggest drivers of economic decision-making at the micro and macro levels in Nigeria is pervasive uncertainty. Whether it is difficulty in obtaining credit and loans because of a paucity of credit ratings for individuals and firms, or indigenes of a town or village reacting negatively (sometimes violently) to the perception that "outsiders" are taking over their land (with no security net to speak of, and no predictable expectation of employment levels conducive to economic safety, Nigerians will fight to the death to control ancestral lands and grazing rights, concrete things they know they can squeeze subsistence from if all else fails -- and nobody trusts the governments or the courts or the broader economy to ameliorate their economic situation).

Much of the bribery, nepotism, man-know-man and other wuruwuru that exists in our economic sector is driven by firms' and individuals' desire to hedge against uncertainty. It has reached a point that many firms and corporations do not necessarily trust the university degrees that our young people spend years earning. Many football fans mentally add two or three years to the "official ages" of football players, just to be on the safe side. Nobody trusts any census, and EVERYONE walks around an inflated assumption of the numbers of their own particular ethnic, regional and/or religious group (in the space of a couple of weeks in the 1990s, I met an Igbo man who believed there were 60 million Igbos and a Yoruba man who believed there were 60 million Yorubas, which was hilarious, because the estimated population of Nigeria at that time was 120 million!).

Nigeria is defined by pervasive uncertainty. It is one reason we the citizens are not cohesive -- we are too scared to put our trust in each other, and if something goes wrong, we see nothing (not the courts, not the polls, not the elders, not anything) that will rescue us from an accident of misplaced trust.

We cannot downplay, ignore or write off our shallow, inaccurate, untrustworthy system of information gathering and dissemination. It is imperative that Nigeria work on improving the substance, the quality, the quantity and the accessibility of information.

This issue came to mind this morning when reading the latest news of the Boko Haram violence. The police apparently executed suspects extra-judicially shortly after detaining them, or in some cases instead of detaining them. The media have noted the extra-judicial execution of the Boko Haram leader, and that of the group's alleged financier. In both cases, the police flat out denied executing the men, insisting the men had either been dead or dying before they came into police custody. Evidence then came out, in the form of a picture in the first case, and a video in the other, proving that the police had simply, clearly and unambiguously lied.

Not that anyone was surprised.

We should separate issues now, so we don't confuse one thing with another.

There are (unfortunately in my view) a large number of Nigerian citizens who favour or at least tolerate the idea of summary justice without trial. Each year there are confirmed and unconfirmed reports of lynchings and other vigilante violence against alleged "armed robbers" and other accused persons, even for alleged crimes as mild as pickpocketing. In the last 10 years since the restoration of civilian-led rule, many (far too many) vigilante milita have arisen to great (if temporary) acclaim in the public for supposedly fighting armed robbers, kidnappers, and other criminals; the acclaim tends to die down when the militia attach themselves to a politician or political party or faction, and become a more violent version of the "youth wings" from our political past (one of the days, someone is going to seriously investigate the spate of assassinations we witnessed since 1999). Some citizens have even asked a federal minister to support and ensure the continued existence of their local vigilantes.

A lot of this is due to desperation. Citizens perceive their lives to be insecure, and do not trust the police, the government or (significantly) the judiciary to pro-actively safeguard public safety. We hide in police and army barracks when "communal violence" breaks out, but do not expect the institutions of state to prevent it in the first place. Even where suspects are arrested, there is no public confidence that justice will be served; the innocent languish in prison for years "awaiting trial", while the guilty roam the streets as free men.

Unfortunately, the police and army have as little confidence in the system as the citizens, and also share the citizenry's tolerance for extra-judicial violence against those perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be guilty of violent crime. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising; soldiers and policemen are sons, husbands, brothers and fathers who come from the same communities, families, villages, towns, cities and sociocultural groups as the rest of us. They also perceive themselves to be insecure and do not trust their political, judicial and in-force superiors to do the things that would improve their security or at least bring the perpetrators of violence against them to book.

Take the well-covered news of the extra-judicial execution of the leader of what was described as a militant faction in the Niger-Delta; the man was arrested one day, and extra-judicially executed the next day. The man in question, and his gang, were the principal suspects in the killings of 12 policemen....

.... the same killings that led to the destruction of Odi Town by Nigerian military forces, an act of collective punishment and extra-judicial revenge against innocent citizens. Collective punishment is a relic of the colonial era policing and pacification that is still alive in 21st century Nigeria. Why must entire towns like Odi and Zaki-Biam pay for the crimes of a relative handful of town indigenes? How does it help the army or police to create or further stoke anger against the respective forces among citizens who didn't participate or approve the original violence against the forces? It makes no sense.

I don't understand why these things are done. How does it help the police or army? How does it help Nigeria. Read my comments on the police officers who killed a 3-year-old girl while firing their guns to intimidate a bus driver into paying them a =N=20 bribe. Far from being apologetic, the police threatened and harassed the late little girl's father, because in their opinion he had embarrassed them by talking about the incident to the media. Several extra-judicial killings are mentioned in this article.

But the problem, the lack of confidence in institutions, goes much deeper than all that. Take the "militant leader" accused of masterminding the killing of the 12 policemen. Before he became a "militant leader", he was a paid party political thug in the employ of a faction of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party in Bayelsa State. Men like him helped the PDP to "electoral" victories of near-100% of the vote in a region where near-everyone hates the PDP. The policemen who extra-judicially killed him likely believed putting him in jail would only result in his eventual release as part of an "amnesty", despite the deaths of their 12 colleagues.

This is the insidiousness of a system where nobody trusts the system; the police are meant to be the enforcers of the system's rules, but even they don't trust the system they are sworn to uphold.

The reaction of the Obasanjo administration to the killings was to deploy the army to destroy Odi town. In the meantime, the actual suspects alleged to have committed the crime remained free for another ten years, working for PDP factions at election time and bunkering oil the rest of the time. Perhaps the police killed him ins an act of extra-judicial revenge. Then again, with everything the "militant leader" knew about senior factional leaders of the PDP, perhaps there were political forces who felt it would be inconvenient if he was subjected to a publicly visible trial.

Who knows. Information is scarce to begin with, and unreliable where available.

Rumours thrive in Nigeria, and suspicion is rife. But what do you expect in a country where the police can look you in the face and flat out LIE? Citizens end up speculating about what really happened, which each person's speculation reflecting prejudices they held long before the incident on which they speculate.

Many officers and men of the police and military forces have done valuable, under-appreciated, poorly remunerated work. Some have stood between us citizens and those that would do us violence. It is who go into the streets to restore order when we citizens go after each other in bouts of so-called "communal violence". They work in dangerous places, amidst wars in Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Sudan.

But we have to stop the extra-judicial killings.

Statistics are not published on the number of citizens the police shoot dead every year. And if statistics were published, they would most likely be lies.

No one cares, no one investigates, no one follows up on these incidents of police killing. If the media happens to pick up on any particular shooting, the police declare the person was an "armed robber" killed in a gunfight with police (if they were killed outside of the cells) or say that they were shot "while attempting escape" if they were killed inside the cells.

Do not misunderstand me.

The Police and Army have a constitutional duty to protect and preserve the security and safety of the Nigerian citizenry. And in many cases, extra-judicial killings happen after police officers or soldiers have been murdered in cold blood.

But extra judicial killings in Maiduguri did not make Maiduguri or Nigeria safer. It die d not make police officers, banks, prisons and police stations any safer in northeast of the country. While devout Muslims rushed to shave off their thick beards because the police and army were treating anyone with a beard as a Boko Haram suspect, the actual members of the group remained at large. How many of those killed in Maiduguri had never committed any crime? And how did their extra-judicial deaths make any of us safer?

This is not right.

And then they had to lie to us, as if they don't know that they have lied so often, we assume everything they say is a lie. Do they understand how much that weakens their authority and their ability to do anything substantive when they really need to?

Information influences sociopolitical and socioeconomic decision-making. Nigerians for the most part are NOT members of violent or extremists groups, but far too many of us take political positions that make it difficult for the federal republic to be what we need it to be, which makes it easy for extremist groups to emerge and thrive.

How can we change this dynamic, when there are no leaders who command the trust of the majority of the populace? No one willing to speak the truth to the people and to the power, with the credibility needed to make it count? We all know the fiercest critics of the status quo metamorphose into rabid defenders of the same status quo once appointed to a cushy political job or given access to an economic niche from which they can prosper. Being a local, regional or ethnic strongman means you are the machine-boss of a minority among hundreds of other minorities. And being a president or prime-minister chosen because you are not a threat to entrenched power structures makes you inherently unable to convince the citizenry that your words are anything more than empty rhetoric, because we know the powerful forces behind you have no interest in the policies and reforms you profess to believe in.

We do not even have the luxury of "learning from the past so we won't repeat it", because we cannot so much as agree on what the recent past actually was! We argue with each other over contradictory hearsay, rumours and propaganda. Universally accepted information on our recent history is in short supply.

I have reached the point where I have moved beyond the uncertainty of who did what, when and how. I pay attention to what I know to be true -- which is the outcomes of whatever decisions and actions the protagonists took. We can see the outcome, touch it, feel it. And since our historical figures are not proud of the outcomes, they lie to us about what they did.

And the lie becomes the foundation and platform of the next round of problems we have to deal with.