By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi The Buhari government’s battle to strangulate the masses through petrol price in...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
The Buhari government’s battle to strangulate the masses through
petrol price increase and other infernal neo-liberal policies is being fought
on both the existential and semantic planes. Like past governments, this
government is deploying intentional obfuscation, evasions, and outright prevarications
to pollute national discourse and disguise the uncomfortable truth of its war on
the poor. This column will lay bare some of these linguistic deceptions.
Some people may wonder why, since last week, I have been
concerned with uncovering the deceit in the political language of this
government instead of writing about everyday grammar and usage. Well, learning
to read between the lines, not just on the lines, is an even more useful skill
than mastery of the mechanics of language.
As eminent American linguist William D. Lutz once said, “There
is more to being an effective consumer of language than just expressing dismay
at dangling modifiers, faulty subject and verb agreement, or questionable
usage. All who use language should be concerned whether statements and facts
agree, whether language is, in Orwell's words 'largely the defense of the
indefensible' and whether language 'is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.'"
Devious, manipulative language by government has real
material consequences. It can literally kill. We are already seeing the prelude
to that in Nigeria. People have been so thoroughly manipulated by the
doublespeak of this government that they are even willing to commit
self-immolation in defense of government’s oppression of them.
In 1975, an American linguist by the name of Terrence P.
Moran wrote a thoughtful, widely cited linguistic essay on a scientific
experiment conducted on rats. In the experiment, a group of rats was deliberately starved
for an extended period. After the period of the starvation, the rats were
divided into two groups. The first group was fed with a sugar-and-water
solution, and the other group was fed with a mere non-nourishing-saccharine
solution. Both groups felt “satisfied” after being fed, although saccharine
solution doesn’t nourish. The saccharine-fed rats merely experienced an
illusion of satisfaction. As you would expect, the rats fed on saccharine all
died while the ones fed on sugar and water lived and thrived.
“This experiment
suggests certain analogies between the environments created for rats by the
scientists and the environments created for us humans by language and the
various mass media of communication. Like the saccharine environment, an
environment created or infiltrated by doublespeak provides the appearance of
nourishment and the promise of survival, but the appearance is illusionary and
the promise false,” Morgan wrote.
Can you find parallels between the experiment on rats—and
Morgan’s profound extrapolation from it—and the current situation in Nigeria?
If you haven’t, let me help. Government first engendered a deliberate,
cripplingly severe artificial scarcity of petrol for weeks. During this period,
petrol prices went through the roof. People got habituated to the scarcity and
to the extortionate prices. Just then, government made the products available and
increased the official price, which is significantly lower than the
extortionate prices of the scarcity period, yet way higher than the price in the
pre-scarcity period.
This created a sensation of relief for everybody. But, as it is true of the experiment with the rats, there are basically two groups of
Nigerians: the wealthy and the poor. The sensation of satisfaction that the
poor felt—and still feel— in the aftermath of the availability of petrol, which
caused some of them, especially in the north, to demonstrate in favor of
“petrol subsidy removal,” is false and illusory. It is mere suspended animation
created by government propaganda and wily manipulation of language with the aid
of the mass media. To quote Morgan, “an environment created or infiltrated by
doublespeak provides the appearance of nourishment and the promise of survival,
but the appearance is illusionary and the promise false.”
Wait and see what will happen to the poor, helpless people
who have not only internalized their oppression but are defending and
celebrating it. Marxists call this false consciousness.
The demonization of
“subsidy”
One of the biggest linguistic casualties in this undeclared
but nonetheless noxious war on the poor is the term “subsidy.” Government
propaganda has gone on rhetorical overdrive to demonize the word, to make it
into what American scholar Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr called a “devil term.”
(Weaver later said, "A society's health or declension was mirrored in how
it used language.")
When you demonize a good word, strip it of all its approbatory
associations, you prepare uncritical minds to accept actions that are inimical
to their interests. In their book Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam
Chomsky perceptively show how the ruling elite in the United States contort the
English language to blackmail the poor. Institutional benefits for the poor are
ridiculed, and terms like “social welfare” are now invariably said with a tone
of disapproval. But welfare packages to the rich and the powerful are called “bailouts”
and have a tone approval about them.
As they pointed out, in
democracies “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.”
Just like the American ruling elite have used the media to demonize
“welfare,” the Nigerian ruling elite is launching a sustained, all-out
linguistic attack on subsidy.
But what’s wrong with subsidy? At its root,
subsidy, derived from Anglo-Norman French subsidie
(ultimately from Latin subsidium),
means “assistance.” In modern usage, it means “a sum of money granted by the
government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price
of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive.” According to
Investopia.com, “subsidy is usually given to remove some type of burden and is
often considered to be in the interest of the public.” What’s wrong with that?
Up until this year, “subsidy” was a positive word in
Nigeria. In fact, during the 2012 mass revolt against petrol price increase, a
protester in Kano inscribed this pithy, profound words on the back of his shirt:
“Subsidy is my soul.” Of course, subsidy is the soul of poor, struggling people.
Without it many of them will simply wither and die. This is true not just in
Nigeria but all over the world. Every government in the world, especially in
the West, subsidizes basic goods, including petrol and agriculture products. As
I pointed out in a previous article, America spends more than $10 billion
yearly to subsidize petrol for its citizens and another $20 billion to
subsidize agriculture, in addition to sundry economic liberties for its
citizens. The European Union also spends billions on subsidies.
One of the sneaky ways this government tries to hoodwink
people into thinking that subsidy is bad for them is to associate it with
corruption. But that’s a false association. There is nothing in subsidies in
and of themselves that makes them corrupt. Corruption in subsidy is failure of
government. Government has a responsibility to ensure that corruption is curbed
in the administration of subsidies so that poor people who are the intended
beneficiaries of the subsidies aren’t robbed of them. Any government, not least
one government that derives the social and moral basis of its legitimacy from
its anti-corruption credentials, that can’t eliminate corruption and ensure that
people who need subsidies get them, has no reason to exist.
Based on the fuzzy, fraudulent association of subsidies with
corruption, the federal government announced late last week that it has removed subsidies on fertilizers. It later “clarified” that it will only remove the
subsidies after it has “met farmers` conditions of prompt availability and
affordability of the commodity." Same difference.
After fertilizer subsidies, other subsidies will follow, and
the World Bank/IMF dream of “rolling back the state” in Third World countries
would be complete--at least in Nigeria. But what is being rolled back is the obligation of the state
to its citizens, not the privileges the ruling elite enjoy.
Since the political
elite consume more than 80 percent of the state’s resources, what would their reason
for being be? How about the subsidies they enjoy? Who will roll those back? Why
do poor people have to suffer because of the corruption of the rich? Why does
the government that has sworn to protect all citizens say it’s incapable of
fighting elite corruption that stands in the way of delivering help to people
who need it?
Deregulation/Liberalization:
When Channels TV asked Ibe Kachikwu to explain to Nigerians what exactly the
government was doing with its petrol price hike, he was caught flatfooted.
"I try not to get into the semantics of deregulation or no deregulation
but the reality is that we are liberalizing.” Steady, Kackikwu, whoa there! Whoa!
It was French philosopher Voltaire who once said, “If you
wish to converse with me, define your terms.” Kachikwu can’t define his terms, doesn’t
know if what government is doing is “deregulation or no deregulation,” but he
is certain that they are “liberalizing.” Talk of obfuscation.
Related Articles:
Unraveling the Monumental Fraud in Petrol Price Hike
Petrol Price Hike: Time to Occupy Nigeria Again
Fuel Price Hike: The Language and Grammatical Illogic of a Regulated Deregulation
Biggest Scandal in Fuel Subsidy Removal Fraud
Photo Essay of Occupy Nigeria Protests
Why Ordinary Americans Are Also Angry with Goodluck Jonathan
Labor's Treachery Against the "Occupy Nigeria" Revolt
The Grammar and Vocabulary of Fuel Subsidy Removal
"Premium Motor Spirit Otherwise Known as Petrol" and Other Petrol-Inspired Grammatical Boo-Boos
Petrol Price Hike: Time to Occupy Nigeria Again
Fuel Price Hike: The Language and Grammatical Illogic of a Regulated Deregulation
Biggest Scandal in Fuel Subsidy Removal Fraud
Photo Essay of Occupy Nigeria Protests
Why Ordinary Americans Are Also Angry with Goodluck Jonathan
Labor's Treachery Against the "Occupy Nigeria" Revolt
The Grammar and Vocabulary of Fuel Subsidy Removal
"Premium Motor Spirit Otherwise Known as Petrol" and Other Petrol-Inspired Grammatical Boo-Boos
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