PRESIDENCY, THE CARDINAL AND MANY TRUTHS

Maturity is the capacity to hold more than one truth at once, contends JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA

The trouble with our public conversation is not that people disagree. It is that too many of us have never made peace with a simple fact of adult life: more than one truth can exist at the same time. You can respect a man and still tell him he is wrong. You can praise a stance on Monday and puncture a different one on Friday. You can love your country and criticise its government in the same breath. None of this is contradiction. It is the ordinary texture of an honest mind. Yet we now live in a country where this has to be taught, and taught, of all people, to some who host our morning shows.

Take the matter of Cardinal Onaiyekan. When His Eminence sat for that Arise TV interview and drifted into claims that bordered on the partisan, questioning the independence of INEC as though something in its structure had changed since the last time we voted, he stepped off the pulpit of the statesman and onto the platform of the partisan. Presidential aide Temitope Ajayi responded with a statement he titled “Cardinal Onaiyekan, Abuse of Clerical Privilege.” I said, in reply to that piece, that the moment a statesman is seen to be partisan, he forfeits the immunity of neutrality and exposes his flanks to counterattack. That was not an attack on the Cardinal. It was an acknowledgment that Mr Ajayi, like any citizen, has the right to answer back. A robe does not exempt an argument from scrutiny. It never has.

Here is where the comedy began. A self-styled journalist decided that my position contradicted an earlier tweet in which I had praised the Cardinal. He went digging, and he surfaced my old words as though he had caught me in a lie. When I pointed out the poverty of that reading, he dug again and found yet another tweet, this one where I had commended him, the journalist, for doubling down during an interview. He presented it as a gotcha. I told him what I still believe: only a certain kind of mind reads an autopsy and goes looking for compliments in it. It takes a specific poverty of self-regard to comb through a critique in search of a pat on the back.

The deeper problem is not one confused man on a television set. It is a professional space where, on account of naked partisanship, some who call themselves journalists, and I will concede that a few of them are, have retreated into a bubble of their own truth. Not a perspective. A bubble. A closed room where their side is always right, where every criticism is a betrayal, and where the ability to hold two ideas at once has quietly atrophied. A truth that cannot survive contact with a second truth is not truth at all.

Let me turn to a heavier matter, because the same intellectual laziness shows up where it does real damage. When President Trump made his notorious remark about our country, I was in North America, and I spent that time defending the dignity of Nigeria to people who were only too eager to believe the worst of us. That work matters. Since then, the President and the United States government have become partners in progress, which is how diplomacy is supposed to work: you defend your house, then you build with your neighbour.

So imagine my astonishment when Peter Obi, reaching for something with which to wound President Tinubu, chose to reach instead for the insult that President Trump once hurled at our country. He repeated it. He took a foreigner’s slur about Nigeria being a disgraced nation and he put it back into circulation, in his own mouth, as a weapon in a domestic quarrel. How does a man who aspires to be President of Nigeria recycle an insult against the very country he wishes to lead?

Let us be clear, because clarity is the whole point of this piece. You are free to have a go at your President. I have done it in these very pages. Some of the columns I have written here are direct criticisms of President Tinubu’s policies, and I will write more, because that is what honest citizenship looks like. I have knocked governments and praised the same governments later, sometimes in the same year, and I make no apology for it. Consistency is loyalty to the truth, not loyalty to a side. But there is a canyon between telling your government it is wrong and telling the world your country is worthless.

Not knowing the difference between those two things is one of the many reasons Peter Obi will never be President of Nigeria. The most he will ever attain is what he has already attained. “Peter Obi is my President” is a sentence straight from the book of coping mechanisms, a consolation chanted by people who mistake a hashtag for a mandate. More than one truth can exist, and here is one of them: a man can seemingly mean well and still be temperamentally unfit for the highest office, undone not by his enemies but by his own inability to tell a domestic disagreement from a national disgrace.

I will close with a smaller example that carries the same lesson. Whenever I write that the government must fight harder against fake drugs, a certain crowd materialises to have a go at me, as though the campaign against counterfeit medicine were a plot against legitimate business. They cannot hold the two truths in one hand. A government can wage war on the poisonous, criminal underside of an industry while fiercely protecting the honest industry itself. Fighting fake drugs is not an attack on pharmacy. It is the defence of every Nigerian who swallows a tablet and trusts that it will heal rather than kill.

Maturity is the capacity to hold more than one truth at once. Its absence is the quiet crisis of our public life. We would argue far better if more of us simply learned to say: both of these things are true.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing