By Abdul Mahmud
George Orwell’s Animal Farm gives us Squealer, Napoleon’s most accomplished defender, a pig whose particular talent lies in making the indefensible sound reasonable. Whenever Napoleon changes his mind, breaks a promise, abandons a principle, or behaves in a manner that would once have been condemned, Squealer appears with an explanation.
The facts may change and commandments rewritten, but Squealer remains faithful to one proposition: Napoleon is always right.
Nigerian politics has developed its own Squealers.
They are not confined to the ruling party, nor are they the exclusive megaphones of the opposition. They are found wherever political loyalty displaces judgment and the defence of a politician becomes more important than the defence of an argument. Some occupy formal political positions. Others are journalists, activists, lawyers, intellectuals and social media commentators.
Many more are ordinary supporters who, having invested deeply in the political fortunes of their preferred candidates and parties, come to regard criticisms of those figures as a personal affront. For these Squealers, political argument has a curious starting point. They do not first ask whether an argument is true, a policy has failed, promises broken, or whether politicians have acted contrary to earlier positions.
The questions are about the persons advancing the arguments. Who is paying them? Who have they met? What have they been promised? How much is in their pockets? Who are the politicians behind them?
The accusation of being bought has become one of the cheapest currencies in Nigerian political discourse. Critics of the government are either dismissed as opposition hirelings or working for the ruling party.
Journalists who refuse to praise a favoured politicians are said to have received envelopes. Activists who question the strategies of an opposition coalition are branded government agents. Supporters who object to the conduct of his own political camp are told that their pockets have been stuffed with “corn”.
The metaphor is almost too perfect. The animals have been fed, therefore the animals must now repeat whatever the farmer wants them to say. The tragedy is not that politicians have defenders.
Political leaders need defenders, just as governments and opposition parties have every right to explain, justify and defend their positions. The problem begins when defence becomes an obligation to defend everything, including the indefensible. At that point, political loyalty ceases to be a relationship of persuasion and becomes a relationship of blind obedience. Squealer would recognise the method immediately.
The ruling party has its Squealers, summoned whenever a failed promise requires a new explanation, an unpopular decision needs a patriotic gloss, or a political reversal must be presented as evidence of wisdom. The opposition has its own Squealers who are equally capable of transforming contradiction into strategy, defeat into tactical brilliance and political miscalculation into evidence of statesmanship.
Yesterday’s criticism of a political practice can become today’s defence of the same practice when the politician being defended changes.
The partisan allegiance changes. The method does not.
A government supporter may spend the morning explaining why citizens should be grateful for a policy that has impoverished them and the evening accusing anyone who says otherwise of being an enemy of progress.
An opposition supporter may spend years denouncing the abuse of state institutions and then discover, when his preferred politician gains access to power, that the same conduct has suddenly acquired a respectable name. The politician changes as their moral vocabulary changes with him. Such politics leaves very little room for principle.
The Nigerian Squealer is not necessarily an official propagandist. He may genuinely believe what he is saying. That makes the phenomenon more interesting and, in some respects, more dangerous.
Propaganda becomes powerful when the propagandist no longer knows that he is propagating it. The most committed partisan does not always defend his politician because he has been instructed to do so. He defends him because admitting that his political hero is wrong requires him to reconsider his own political judgment. This is where partisan identity becomes a trap. Once a citizen has invested his reputation, friendships, money, time and political hopes in a candidate, criticism of that candidate begins to feel like criticism of himself.
The politician is no longer merely a politician; he has become an extension of the supporter’s political identity. Defending him therefore becomes a form of self-defence.
The Nigerian social media has made the condition worse. Cheap data has democratised political participation, but it has also industrialised political abuse. Citizens now mobilise netizens before breakfast to descend upon anyone who has written an inconvenient truth about his preferred politician.
Facts are buried beneath insults. Questions are posed with hashtags and arguments drowned by coordinated outrage. The mob arrives before the evidence.
The irony is that both sides often believe themselves to be fighting propaganda while producing their own version of it.
A government critic who refuses to acknowledge anything good because the government has become his political enemy is no more intellectually serious than the government supporter who refuses to acknowledge anything bad because the government is his political camp.
An opposition partisan who excuses every contradiction from his leaders is practising the same politics of intellectual surrender as the ruling-party loyalist who explains every failure as the fault of the previous administration.
The danger is that Squealer has no permanent political home. He follows power, proximity and partisan affection. However, the deeper danger lies in what this does to citizenship. Democracy requires citizens capable of saying to their own side: you are wrong. It also requires the capacity to praise an opponent when he is right and condemn an ally when he is wrong. Without that capacity, politics becomes atavistic and tribal; and politicians become objects of devotion. What emerges here is that public debate becomes a poor contest in loyalty rather than a contest of ideas.
A healthy opposition must be willing to interrogate its own leaders, just as a healthy ruling party must retain the courage to question the government it supports.
Serious journalism requires the freedom to criticise power without being branded an enemy, and to commend a sound policy without being absorbed into its political camp. Intellectual integrity also demands the freedom to change one’s mind without having one’s character placed on trial.
The Squealer instinct destroys all of this.
Once critics are presumed to be sponsored by an enemy, every defence becomes suspect. Reduce every political disagreement to the question of who paid whom and the substance of politics disappears.
What remains is a country divided between competing armies of defenders, each insisting that its own Napoleon is right. Perhaps that is the most Orwellian feature of Nigerian politics: not that we have produced our own Squealers, but that we have produced them on both sides of the political divide.
The farmer changes. The pig changes sides. The corn changes pockets. The language remains the same.
Napoleon is always right.
*Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for Pointblank News