NEOLOGISM: DOUBLESPEAK AND OPEN LETTERS.

''You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” -Maya Angelou.

                                     “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.''-Aristotle.

In recent times Nigerian newspapers and online media are buzzing regularly with over-exaggerated exuberance of letter writers and doublespeakers in a meaningless deceptivity cocooned with neologism, potraying to us a landscape of pain, anguish, and disenfranchisement.

 

They often claim to have the magic wand or panacea to all our existential problematics in the preface of their treatise so we do not have to take the pain of looking at the conclusion since the ultimate solution has been provided in the introductory section heralded with all funfare.

We have internalise the conduct of inventing stories "Fabu" over-exaggerating our fictional characters with the belief that the process of fictional hypnotism would have taken over the discerning logical capabilities of our listeners or readers turning them into zombies, hallucinating over our manufactured meaninglessness.

We now have self appointed ombudsman, town criers, self-flagellating their assumed importance obligated by their so called being the eyes, noses and ears of the common man on the street. I wonder who, how, where, when they cornered those responsibilities of being (BA OBA JIRO OF NIJALAND).

They talk, write as if they have the panacea to the resolution of the myriad of socio-economic challenges our beloved country is experiencing right now. What is so baffling is the fact that they have suddenly forgotten how brutish life was under the previous administration and that what took 16years to destroy cannot/wouldn't be rebuild in a jiffy.

They make categorical statements that they know the feelings of Nigerians or peddling falsehood in an attempt to seek relevance in the name of speaking for the common man on the street or by ''accidental association'' with people at the periphery of socio-economic ladder. This to me is tantamount to demagoguery and over exaggerated self-aggrandisement.

We are impatient, chaotic, we want things done magically. We seek spiritual interventions, deliverances, mysticism to our existential challenges; We assume we have elected a magician, messiah, finally we lived in our cocooned world of fantasies.  

These are understandable phenomena because we are living in a bubble of hypnotic political hysteria not able to distinguish between appearance and reality of our socio-economic challenges.

                             "Good things come to those who wait."-Cassandra Clare

 

It is important to note that our people are traumatised socio-economically and the effects of that can be seen in psychological/psychiatric health risk observable. Note, that is not to say anguish and pain pervade the lives of our people rather I see hope, expectations of a better tomorrow, vibrant Nigerians willing to make the sacrifice necessary but those in authority must also lead by example sacrifice making wise.

When people lived in an environment associated with the pre-existence of chaos, anarchy, unorganised, unstrucutured administrative governmental processes that have become an orthodoxy registered in their psyche it becomes very difficult to flip an ingrained mentality overnight to a new consciousness with emphasis on meticulousness, orderliness, probity and accountability in governmental administrative processes because this would be mis- interpreted as a cumbersome red-tapism slowing down the speed at which dividend of democracy ought to be flowing to the people.

Here I must suggest that government must take the initiative by engaging in what Noam Chomsky & Edward.S.Herman called (Manufacturing Consent) which is a legitimate instrumentarium to counter the ''Fabu'' or over-exaggerated fictional characters and inventions peddled by doublespeakers and letter writers presenting manufactured meaninglessness.

''The point is that in a ... totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter what people think because ... you can control what they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force and when the voice of the people can be heard, ... you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda. Manufacture of consent. Creation of necessary illusions''.-Chomsky Noam/Edward.S.Herman (Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media).

My message to the letter writers and doublespeakers is that they should accept that nothing is perfect, what ought is not the same as what is, appearance is different from reality, they need to acknowledge their own imperfections and simplistic postulations about governance,  government actions and inactions because from the periphery of power looking into the centre you cannot comprehend what efforts momentum wise people inside are exerting to achieve result.

                   “Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.”-Molière.

If you are smart enough to doublespeak or write open letters it is commonsensical to decipher that the points you are making are also well known to the receivers of your letters. Therefore smart people do not think others are stupid.

In conclusion, Rome was not built in a day. Hence, patience is of the essence if we are going to achieve our Eldorado.

     (ONI SURU NI O FUN WARA KINIHUN).  (AKIN KANJU LA OBE GBIGBONA).   

       

“Patience is power. Patience is not an absence of action; rather it is "timing" it waits on the right time to act, for the right principles and in the right way.”-Fulton J. Sheen. 

    

OTUNBA ADE ILEMOBADE is a philosopher

Twitter: @pearl2prince