Etokowo Owoh
A time was when a lie required some courage. Not because people were necessarily more truthful, but because society still possessed shame. A man could lie, but he was worried about being discovered. A politician could make a false allegation, but he was scared his conscience, his community, the media, his elders, or simply the judgment of history might call him to account.
Something appears to have changed. Today, the political lie often travels faster than the truth, arrives better dressed than the truth and, occasionally, is received more warmly than the truth. We seem to have entered an age in which a politician does not always need to demonstrate that he can build the bridge. He may only need to persuade us that his opponent cannot build it. He does not necessarily have to explain his own record. He can spend the afternoon excavating the alleged sins of another man.
And if there is no sufficiently damaging sin available, he creates one. That is where the search for innocence begins. Not innocence in the biblical sense of a world without sin. Rather, innocence as the moral restraint that prevents political competition from becoming a licence to destroy another person’s name.
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Politics has always been competitive. But competition has rules. The athlete does not ordinarily win a race by poisoning the shoes of his opponent. The surgeon does not improve his reputation by secretly injuring another surgeon’s patient. The student does not become brilliant by tearing pages from another student’s textbook. Why, then, should political competition require the destruction of another person’s reputation?
Perhaps, the answer lies in our changing conception of politics. Politics has gradually become a marketplace in which attention is currency, outrage is advertising, and reputation is sometimes treated as expendable ammunition.
Instead of the politician saying what he can do, he says: “never mind what I can do. Let me tell you what the other man supposedly did.” Therein lies the moral mutation. The contest for public office begins as a competition of ideas, but could degenerate into a competition in narrative manufacture. It has become a pre-occupation of producing the most frightening story; creating the most damaging insinuation; attaching the most poisonous adjective to an opponent’s name. It has become a factory for the manufacture of an allegation that can travel farther than the evidence.
The tragedy is that reputation is not made of rubber. Once torn, it does not always return to its original shape, and this is why the political field should not become an arena for arsonists.
There is a difference between criticism and character assassination. Criticism interrogates what a person has done. Character assassination is making people believe you are unworthy. While the former belongs to democracy, the latter is democratic moral vandalism.
A politician has every legitimate right to interrogate another politician’s record. If a governor borrowed money, let the documents speak. If he left debts, let the debt register speak. If he built roads, let the roads speak. If he failed, let the evidence speak.
But when evidence becomes inconvenient, political discourse sometimes moves into the darker territory of insinuation. That is political arson. The arsonist does not necessarily need to prove that his opponent committed a crime. He merely needs to create enough smoke for the public to begin wondering whether there was fire.
And once the smoke enters the public imagination, the damage may already have occurred. That is why lies about human beings can be more dangerous than lies about statistics. A wrong number can be corrected. A damaged name can spend years trying to recover and may never even recover.
The recent political exchanges involving Peter Obi and Chukwuma Soludo illustrate an important distinction. There have been public disputes over what obligations the Anambra government inherited, with the Soludo administration making claims about liabilities associated with the previous administration and Obi rejecting those claims and challenging the government to substantiate them. Whether a particular debt claim is correct is ultimately a matter for records, dates, contracts, audited accounts and other evidence, not mudslinging.
Equally, a disputed claim is not automatically a lie. Neither is an official statement automatically the truth. Bring the documents, the loan agreements, the repayment schedules, the audited accounts, the debt records, the dates, the balances, the evidence. Democracy becomes safer when politicians are required to replace adjectives with documents.
Nigeria has seen several fabricated political stories. In one recent case involving Governor Soludo, a publisher publicly apologized and retracted stories concerning Soludo and members of his family, acknowledging that some of the material had been fabricated and was not based on verified sources.
A politician may be falsely accused. It may make a genuine accusation. Only evidence can tell us which is which. That is precisely why the preservation of truth must be bigger than our affection for any politician.
Nigerian politics desperately needs to learn that a question is not a conviction. There is nothing illegitimate about asking whether public office holder’s credentials are genuine, for instance. Citizens have a right to know. Journalists have a duty to investigate. Political opponents have a right to scrutinize qualifications. Questioning authenticity of a certificate is in order. It is an invitation to investigation.
But the moral line gets crossed when that exercise indicts a person long before a verdict is reached. That is immoral. Investigation is not evidence to warrant conviction. The danger is that social media has virtually abolished the waiting room between allegation and conviction. A question is raised in the morning; by afternoon, it has become an accusation. By evening, it has become a “fact.”
By the following morning, somebody is producing a graphic declaring the accused a criminal. No court has sat. No evidence has been tested. No witness has been cross-examined. But the sentence has already been pronounced in the court of public opinion. That is how a democratic society slowly acquires the habits of a mob. The phenomenon is not peculiar to one political camp. It is a general political banditry.
The lesson from the certificate controversies is therefore larger than Tinubu, Obi, Atiku or anyone else. It is that a person’s credentials can become political ammunition long before the public has established what the underlying evidence actually proves. The question then ceases to be merely whether the certificate is genuine. It is what we are doing to one another with the allegation.
A certificate deserves scrutiny if a doubt is raised. Its holder does not deserve humiliation merely because of an allegation. An allegation may deserve investigation without the accused becoming a convict. These distinctions bring civilized behavior into democratic practice. This way, lying will not acquire the character of a business model.
Perhaps, the most frightening development is that lying is no longer merely political. It has become commercial. The digital ecosystem rewards attention. Outrage generates engagement. Sensational claims attract clicks. The lie therefore acquires an economic incentive. A truthful headline serves to inform the public.
A sensational falsehood may make one click. Social media then gives it wings. A rumor can travel across Nigeria before the person accused has even heard it. By the time the denial arrives, the original falsehood has already reproduced itself hundreds of times. The correction walks. The lie flies. That is the asymmetry.
Take the case of electricity numbers. In 2025, a claim was made about Nigeria having reached 6,003 megawatts of available generation capacity. Fact-checking subsequently pointed to an important distinction between available generation capacity and actual peak generation and noted that the figure could not independently be verified from the available operational data.
The lesson is not that every ambitious government statistic is necessarily a lie. It is that definitions matter. We should be able to differentiate between installed capacity and available capacity. Between peak generation and average generation. Or electricity actually delivered to consumers.
These are not interchangeable. A government can legitimately celebrate increased generating capacity while citizens legitimately ask whether that capacity translated into reliable electricity. Both questions can coexist. That is why in public policy, precision is part of honesty.
The temptation to turn a technically accurate number into a politically larger claim is another form of the same problem. That is stretching reality until it fits the desired narrative. Truth is, the most dangerous lie is the one we want to believe. But politicians alone cannot be blamed. The public has become part of the machinery. We forward before we verify. We condemn before we investigate. We believe allegations that confirm what we already believe and reject evidence that threatens our preferred political narrative.
The citizen sometimes becomes both victim and accomplice. We have created a political tribe in which truth is occasionally judged not by whether it is true, but by who said it. If my political hero says it, it is “fact.” If your political hero says it, it is “propaganda.” If my side produces a document, it is evidence. If your side produces one, it is manipulation. This is how a society loses its epistemological innocence. When truth becomes partisan, it turns to problem because truth is perpendicular.
Blackmail is a version of the broader moral interrogation. It is not always that blackmail requires a demand for money. Sometimes the currency is political submission. Sometimes it is to keep one silent. It could be deployed to humiliate the victim. It could simply be to destroy another person’s standing in society. The language is: if I cannot defeat your argument, I will damage your credibility.
”If I cannot answer your record, I will attack your character. If I cannot prove the allegation, I will repeat it until repetition begins to resemble proof.” This is the psychology of political blackmail. The intention is unholy. It is “I may not be able to defeat you intellectually, electorally or morally, but I can make your name dirty enough for the public to hesitate.”
Reputation deserves protection even in politics. Political opponents are not fictional characters. They have families. They have children. They have histories. They have human dignity. After the election has ended and the microphones have been switched off, they should be able continue living with their names unsoiled.
There is a crisis here. It is not simply the prevalence of falsehood. It is the disappearance of the social cost of falsehood. A society survives partly because people fear moral consequences. Not necessarily litigation or prison. An accusation that has been disproved should damage the accuser’s credibility. That is civilization. Lying should be not be seen as mere deviation, an “exciting distraction”. Otherwise, it become a method.
Democracy gives us the right to accuse. But civilization requires us to substantiate. The freedom of speech is not a freedom from consequences. Nor is political competition a suspension of morality. A democracy without ethical restraints can gradually become a market where the loudest allegation wins the largest audience. That is a dangerous place. Because once citizens become accustomed to political lies, they begin to demand increasingly spectacular lies.
You see, Nigeria is not merely in search of good politicians. We are in search of political innocence. That is where an opponent may be wrong, but not necessarily evil. Where one disagrees with another, without inventing facts about him. The innocence to allow an opponent to remain human. More importantly, the innocence to lose an argument without destroying the person who made it.
This may sound naïve; but every civilization worth preserving begins with something that cynics consider naïve. Things such as truth, fairness, restraint, dignity, shame, conscience, those nimble characterizations that add up morality.
There is an old philosophical idea that a society is held together not only by laws but by habits of conduct. Our search for innocence must begin, not with the fantasy that politicians will suddenly become angels. Not with the expectation that political competition will become a Sunday-school picnic, but with the recovery of one small and endangered principle where you can fight your opponent without manufacturing his guilt. That way, the politician defeats his opponents while the society preserves its innocence.
Owoh is a Management Consultant, Researcher and Public Policy Analyst.
