How to react

A distant acquaintance of mine has taken up a new job. Lets say it a public relations job with a quasi-governmental agency. The "agency" in question is very public, very well known, possibly the best known agency in the country, so I am being deliberately vague; any more information than what I have given above and you will immediately and instantly know who (and what) I am talking about. I don't want to personalize it; it is not about him, and I don't want to sound like this is a comment on him.

The thing is this:

My acquaintance is someone whom I have relied on to give me the unvarnished truth. His previous job gave him access to the truth about certain things; not everything, not even most things, but certain, specific things. He gave away enough of what he knew to the public to be good at his job (one of the best in the country actually), but by his own admission kept most of what he knew unpublished; to do otherwise would mean losing his job, losing his access to off-the-record information, dire financial consequences for his family and possibly worse.

Nevertheless, I had access to some, by no means all or even most of what he knew but would never publish. It was not much, but it was valuable ... to me anyway.

We citizens of the federal republic are kept in the dark about so many things. We simply do not know. The frightening thing is life goes on and you have to make very important decisions every day in order to move forward in your own life, so we are compelled as citizens to form very, very firm opinions about things that we are actually ignorant of. It is maybe part of the reason wuruwuru has taken hold in our society; we are trying to bend the rules so we guarantee a specific outcome, since we have no foundation from which to build towards that outcome in a normal. With so many things utterly uncertain, we cheat to introduce a measure of (self-defeating) certainty.

I will be honest and hold up my hand and admit to my lack of information. I have written many posts on this blog about the "Toxic Asset" problem in the Nigerian banking industry, and if you have read all of them, you will notice that I have been scrounging around for information, have been making educated guesses on what little information they have allowed us to have, and have frequently raised doubt on what they tell us are the official numbers (it is either their numbers are mutually contradictory, or the numbers are a bit like telling a person that you harvested a bumper crop of cassava when that person knows for a fact that maize was the only thing you planted and maize was the only thing that grew on that farm all year -- if you are going to say it metamorphosed into cassava, you have to offer some kind of explanation or facts to people so they can see a rational connection between facts that point one way and statements that point another).

Yet, we still have to form opinions on these things. We have to ....

.... though in practice we don't. Most Nigerians are perfectly willing to let the government do whatever it wants to do.

If they like the person who happens to be leading the governmental entity (too often for reasons that have nothing to do with job performance) they react to every utterance with praise, and react to anyone questioning the leader's decision-making with scorn.

Conversely, if they do not like the person leading the governmental entity (again, too often for reasons that have nothing to do with job performance), they react to everything he says and does with unfounded accusations and suspicions (everything Sanusi Lamido Sanusi does, for example, is greeted by certain commentators with accusations he is punishing ethnic groups XYZ and ABC, and empowering a "cabal" from ethnic group LMN).

But when you listen to what we citizens say or read what we write, you realize we are forming these opinions based on little or nothing in the way of empirically substantiated fact. More importantly, because we allow the powers-that-be to do whatever they want anyway, it does not really matter whether our opinions as citizens are right or wrong. The decision-makers and policy-designers do not care what we think, and do not respond to our opinions; and we do nothing to make them responsive.

Anyway, this is my conundrum.

My acquaintance has a new job that (within the operating context of Nigeria) is a massive career boost for him, both professionally and financially.

Part of me is happy for him.

But part of me is sad, because it is now his job to be the spin-doctor of that agency. Instead of feeding me with little snippets of behind-the-scenes factual information, he will now receive a monthly salary in exchange for making up the lies that he used to infinitesimally expose.

Okay, okay, obviously he is not going to be lying the whole time. I know that. He doesn't really have to. We Nigerians take so little interest in what our governmental and quasi-governmental agencies do, rarely questioning what they say or measuring what they say against what they should be saying (and more importantly doing), so my acquaintance could basically get away with repeating the bland, meaningless, nothings that people in his (new) position are paid to repeat ad nauseam to the public.

It is just such a change from being someone who (secretly) questioned the nothing that officialdom fed us to being someone who creates and provides the nothing on behalf of officialdom.

This happens a lot it seems. People who were critics of the way things are done when they were on the outside instantly transforming into defenders of the very things they criticized once they are on the inside.

It would be fair of you to ask if I would do the same if I had the opportunity.

The thing is, I did have the opportunity. As I have mentioned two or three times on this blog, I was offered a well-paying, fantastic, Abuja-based job some years back. If you looked at the job description on paper, it was a dream job for me. But regardless of what was written on the job description sheet, the practical truth is had I taken that job I would have been working for a man who was paid to rig elections. This is not an impression or a suspicion but a fact. I can't go into detail, but this was something I saw and experienced for myself, and immediately said "I can't do this". I've spent my whole life opposed to the practice of election rigging. How could I close my eyes and pretend to myself that I didn't know? How could I take a pay cheque every month while compromising myself like that?

Please don't tell me about "working from within" to change the system. All that happens is the system changes you. I hadn't even agreed to take the job, and I was already surrounded by a bunch of yes-men who were hailing my would-be boss, kissing his arse, for doing things that should have been criminally prosecuted! I was expected to join them and hail him, to join them and laugh at his stupid jokes about what he was doing. How many years of doing that before it becomes part of your true personality? Those men were not born arse-kissers, and at some point in their lives they may actually have desired a better Nigeria every bit as much as I do. Yet, there they were, hailing a man for doing the opposite of what our country deserves.

Come to think of it, the man in question lost political favour a couple of years afterward, and ultimately lost his Abuja job. If I had taken that job, if I had been working for him, I would have been obliged to tenaciously defend him because if he lost his job, I would by default lose mine. It is why so many previously sensible people spend so much time defending crooks and vagabonds once they are admitted inside ... and it is why my acquaintance will start making up lies rather than telling truths that could lose him his new job.

So I am happy for him. I really am.

But I am kind of sad too.

Can't say I blame him. It is not like there is some sort of alternate political force he, no, we could throw our support to. As things stand, you either play ball by the rules of the existing system, or you suffer outside it.

I was in a position (financial and otherwise) to turn down that job. Most of my fellow citizens are not. In some respects that is even more depressing.