MY first inclination was to ignore Festus Keyamo’s ignorant tweet on patriotism and attribute it to the pathologies of the character called Squealer in George Orwell’s Animal Farm for Keyamo is Nigeria’s current Squealer incarnate whose paid job it is to turn night into day, day into night, and feed a generous amount of red meat to the Buhari herd.
George Orwell’s Squealer, it must be said, was not created in a vacuum. Squealer is a composite of all characters elected by history to serve as inglorious servicers of official propaganda. In the 20th century, you will find Squealer from Joseph Goebbels, Head of Nazi Propaganda, to Kellyanne Conway, modern-day inventor of “alternative facts” for the extreme rightwing regime of Donald Trump in Washington. If you study these real-life Squealers, you will see that nothing Festus Keyamo is doing today is original or innovative. He is scrupulously borrowing a page per day from the playbook of all historical Squealers before him.
Because the role of Squealer calls upon you to sustain and feed the personality myth of the leader while dumbing down the intelligence of the public through a cocktail of daily falsehoods and intense psychological warfare, the first thing all Squealers do is to arrogate to themselves the singular authority to define patriotism and designate who is a patriot and who is a villain.
From George Orwell’s fictional Squealer to Kellyanne Conway via Joseph Goebells, the strategy has been the same throughout history: equate the country with the persona of the leader, create a personality cult of the leader, define him as the earthly embodiment of all that is good. Once this is done, it is easy to define patriotism as slavish, unquestioning subscription to the manufactured persona of the “good leader”. Remember that in the psychological engineering of Squealer, the country has already been replaced with the persona of the leader.
Once they achieve the operation in which leader and country are indistinguishable, they create a space in which it becomes possible for them to launch a full-scale assault on the civic foundations of genuine citizenship. Every critique of the leader is hate speech; every questioning of the leader is unpatriotic, for Squealer has successfully sold his delusion to the people that he and he alone is mandated to define patriotism and the patriot; he alone determines the principles of engagement and the modes of asserting one’s civic sentience with the body politic; to him belongs the power to label and criminalize on account of the leader.
Hence, you hear Festus Keyamo – in the good old tradition of Squealer, Goebbels, and Conway – declare that to engage, list, and apprehend the daily tragedies of Nigerian life over which his employer tragically superintends is to be an unpatriotic lover of negative news. This funny, deluded fellow is not done yet. To critique his boss’s colossal failures without offering solutions is also unpatriotic.
Again, nothing is original here. It is from the playbook of his illustrious and far more intelligent official predecessors in Squealerdom. Blackmail is a weapon Squealer wields. However, Squealer’s blackmail – in this case Keyamo’s blackmail – is successful only with those who do not know how to pick the coconut of ideas and enlightenment and crack it on Squealer’s head.
I hinted that I was going to ignore Keyamo’s tweet initially, convinced as I was that it was going to gain traction and receive thousands of retweets only among the converted – President Buhari’s herd. However, an old warning by Chinua Achebe in The Trouble with Nigeria sensitized me to the fact that Keyamo’s spurious attempt to arrogate to himself the power to define who is a patriot should not go unanswered. Chinua Achebe is worth quoting in some detail:
“There will always be some people whose personal, selfish interests are, in the short term at least, well served by the mismanagement and social iniquities. Naturally they will be extremely loud in their adulation of the country and its system and will be anxious to pass themselves off as patriots and to vilify those who disagree with them as trouble-makers or even traitors. BUT DOOMED IS THE NATION WHICH PERMITS SUCH PEOPLE TO DEFINE PATRIOTISM FOR IT. Patriotism is an emotion of love directed by a critical intelligence. A true patriot will always demand the highest standards of his country and accept nothing but the best for and from his people. He will be outspoken in condemnation of their shortcomings”.
The capital letters are mine, not Achebe’s. Yes, doomed is the nation which allows beneficiaries of Nigeria’s prebendal system such as Festus Keyamo to define patriotism for it.As long as I have a voice and spaces of public expression, I have no intention of allowing such characters to define patriotism for me.
Incidentally, as I read Keyamo’s tweet, two headlines jumped at me from the online newspaper, The Cable: “Inside Ogoni village where oil spills wipe off 10 persons every week”; “The anguish, pains of Osun women who travel long distances to deliver dead babies”.
Mr. Keyamo, these headlines speak for themselves. They speak of the colossal and tragic failures of your principal. Will people you cannot intimidate continue to talk about these things? You betcha! I am afraid you have very little choice in the matter. I should also school you a little bit on the deontology of critique and civic engagement. You are a lawyer and a SAN to boot. My suspicion is you already know these things because you were trained in the humanities. You just must pretend ignorance to be able to play your current paid role effectively.
Well, critique in the civic process does not come with the obligation to profer solutions, failure to do which the critic becomes unpatriotic. Very often, what you seek is self-evident in the critique you are dismissing. Your boss has a habit of commissioning half-finished projects that are hardly ever used after all the fanfare. If I decry that practice, don’t freaking ask me what the solution is! Isn’t it obvious?
Your boss marketed himself as having the solutions. That is why he was elected in 2015. He is marketing himself anew as the possessor of solutions. You are employed to market him as the bearer of solutions. Why are you looking under your pillow for citizens to label unpatriotic for failing to offer the solutions your Oga claims to have?
Mr. Keyamo, as we say in Nigeria, please borrow yourself brain and stop criminalizing citizens holding your boss accountable. That is their civic, patriotic duty.
and then