By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
I have immersed myself in the study of the ontogenesis and
manifestations of fascism since Buhari started to bare his ferociously fascist
fangs. One of the world’s most insightful writers on fascist totalitarianism is
George Orwell. As he himself pointed out in his 1946 essay titled “Why I Write,”
“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written,
directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism….”
His most famous works, Animal
Farm (published in 1945) and 1984
(published in 1949), were not just devastatingly searing fictional critiques of
totalitarianism, they also offer enduringly accurate insights into how
absolutist fascism works. The
significance of Animal Farm to
understanding Buhari’s monocratic excesses are already too obvious to deserve expounding.
Orwell’s 1984 is
the most helpful in unpacking the unfolding phase of Buhari’s next-level
fascism. In this phase, the regime wants to not just impose ironclad strangulation
on basic liberties; it also wants to exercise absolute control over the limits
of the meanings of everyday words and expressions. I call this intangible
but nonetheless visible forms of symbolic fascist violence.
Words and expressions such as “revolution,” “terrorism,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “soft target,”
“defeat,” “technical,” “hate speech,” etc. no longer mean what they are
universally understood to mean in the Anglophone world; they now only mean what
Buhari and his fascist honchos want them to mean, as I will show shortly.
In Orwell’s 1984,
we learn that the fictional totalitarian country of Oceania invented a new
language called newspeak, which strips words of their habitual significations,
constricts the semantic boundaries of existing words, narrows the range of
vocabularies people can use, and privileges, indeed insists on, the meanings
the state imposes on words and expressions.
All fascist regimes understand the power of language in
birthing, nurturing, and naturalizing tyranny. Orwell recognized this fact in
another famous, oft-cited 1946 essay titled “Politics and the English Language.”
That is why the Buhari regime now wants to impose limits on what words can mean
and not mean. Take, for instance, the increasingly variable and arbitrary
meaning of the word “terrorism” in Buhari’s Nigeria. Every organized resistance
against the government is now “terrorism.”
The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), whose mode of
campaign for separatism is demonstrably non-violent, was formally declared a
“terrorist” organization and proscribed.
Shiite Muslims, who
have remained remarkably pacifist and restrained even in the face of the
unjustified extra-judicial mass murders of their members and the continued
incarceration of their leader in spite of several court judgments to release him,
have been declared “terrorists” and their organization “proscribed.”
The regime labeled IPOB and Shiites “terrorists” only
because of their sustained, constitutionally guaranteed civil protests against
the government, which will go down in history as the most thin-skinned collection
of boneheaded crybabies.
Omoyele Sowore’s nationwide #RevolutionNow protests, for
which he is being illegally detained, were also declared “terrorism” and“treasonable felony.” Ironically, between 2013 and 2014, many of the founders
of the APC vigorously lobbied the US government to not designate Boko Haram a
foreign terrorist organization. On June 10, 2013, Lai Mohammed said Goodluck
Jonathan administration’s proscription of Boko Haram was overly broad and did not “pass the Constitutional test.” Buhari is also on record
as saying that military action against Boko Haram was an attack on the “North.”
To this day, the Buhari regime has never officially declared
Boko Haram a terrorist group let alone proscribe it. On the contrary, Boko
Haram’s captured members are often washed up, deodorized as “repentant,” and
even enlisted into the Nigerian Army, which explains why our soldiers are now
sitting ducks for Boko Haram terrorists.
Murderous marauders known in the Nigerian news media as “killer Fulani
herdsmen” or " armed bandits" have been called “the
fourth deadliest known terrorist group” in the world by the Global
Terrorism Index, but the Buhari regime has said absolutely nothing about this
group much less designate it as a terrorist group. If anything, members of the
group are being featherbedded and emboldened by the regime.
But harmless, unarmed, defenseless groups who resist the
regime’s tyranny peacefully are quickly labeled “terrorists,” detained,
harassed, and ultimately “proscribed.” This is particularly interesting because
Buhari rode on the crest of the wave of civil disobedience to climb to power.
In fact, in 2011, during a stump speech, he did actually commit what amounted
to a terroristic incitement to violence when he unambiguously told his supporters
to extra-judicially murder political opponents.
“Ku fita
ku yi zabe. Ku kasa. Ku tsare. Ku raka. Ku tsaya. Duk wanda ya taba ku halaka
shi!” he said in Hausa. Rough idiomatic translation: “Go out and
participate in the election. Cast your vote. Protect it. Accompany it (to the
collation center). Wait for it (to be counted). Whoever tempers with (the vote)
kill him!”
And scores of people, including youth corps members, were
extra-judicially murdered in several parts of the Muslim North as a direct
consequence of his incitement. That was real terrorism for which he was never
brought to justice. Terrorism is defined as "the unlawful use of violence
and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political
aims."
Similarly, although Buhari, Bola Tinubu, and many APC
henchmen had used the word “revolution” in the past to characterize their
resistance to the reigning government, the word is now practically banned in
Nigeria. It can now only mean what the government wants it to mean. By
“revolution,” Sowore clearly meant prolonged mass protests that would so
overwhelm the government that it would be compelled to accede to the demands of
the protesters.
That was precisely the sort of “revolution” Buhari praised
in Egypt and which he enjoined Nigerians to emulate. The Arab Spring was not a
revolution through the ballot box, as his defenders are insisting; it was a
series of unrelenting, organized mass protests that caused the deaths of many
people. It was its aftermath that birthed the pretense to democracy that was
quickly thwarted in the country.
Any intelligent person knows that Sowore’s isolated
references to overthrowing the government weren't literal. In media law, it’s
called rhetorical hyperbole, and it’s not actionable. Calling someone a “criminal,” a “thief,” a “fraudster,”
a “conman,” etc. is mere rhetorical hyperbole, but saying they stole “500
billion naira in 2018” is a specific, verifiable fact and may constitute
grounds for libel.
Sowore and his group
have no capacity to overthrow the government. It’s the government’s own acute
self-consciousness of its transparent illegitimacy that is causing it to see
threats in even the most innocuous forms of resistance. English philosopher
Bertrand Russel had hypersensitive, illegitimate regimes like Buhari’s in mind
when he said, “Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks
itself secure.”
While any physical protest against the Buhari regime is now
“terrorism,” the definitional boundaries of the term “hate speech” have also
been squeezed to now only mean any strong criticism of the government’s
trademark incompetence and fraud.
But hate speech is conventionally understood as speech that
denigrates or incites violence against a people on the basis of their social,
cultural, ethnic, religious, etc. characteristics. Cambridge Dictionary defines
it as “public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a
person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual
orientation (= the fact of being gay, etc.):”
That means government or its officials can’t possibly be the
target of hate speech for just being in government. But the point of
controlling the meanings of the words we use is that the regime wants to invoke
its invented meanings as linguistic justification for physical violence and the
naturalization of fascism.
Nigerians must not only resist the Buhari regime’s
repression, they must also fight its Orwellian newspeak, which excludes
Nigerians from the power of naming. In his influential book titled Challenging Codes, Italian political sociologist
Alberto Melucci, whose country birthed the original fascist ideology Buhari is enamored
with, tells us that, “The real domination is… the exclusion from the power of
naming.”
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