I have chosen a rather difficult but appealing subject to announce my return as a Guest Columnist with YES INTERNATIONAL! Magazine. The truth is that YES is always the expected score of truth. God, philosophy and religion enjoin all men to always say YES to truth, alas mortal man accentuates his variegated tendencies by excusing his foibles and failings at the detriment of truth. Man argues, ‘to err is human’.
We deny the truth for a morsel of bread, we mortify the truth for a mess of porridge, we kill the truth for power, we bury the truth in service of greed, we cremate the truth in furtherance of our perfidious proclivities, and we banish the prick of truth by presenting the mendacious, albeit surreptitiously, as truth. But you know what? The truth will always be truth.
What therefore is TRUTH? Various Lexicons and Lexicographers have attempted this question. To them, the truth is often surmised as the state or quality of being true to someone or something. Some were rather simple in declaring that the true or actual state of a matter is truth. Others would have us accept that conformity with fact or reality, and that the verity of an issue or subject is truth.
Truth was given a twist in the audacious effort of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary which chose to adumbrate TRUTH in types and kinds. Yes, we see such audacious adjuncts like, Actual Truth, Aesthetic Truth, Contingent Truth, Empirical Truth, Ethical Truth, Formal Truth, Gospel Truth, Ideal Truth, Half Truth, Home Truth, Metaphysical Truth, Normative Truth, Transcendental Truth, Twofold Truth and Logical Truth as thoughts evoking profuse debate. For me, however, truth is truth, truth is not the path of the whole, but the whole, whether as a path or as the whole. Therefore, half-truth cannot itself be truth. Why this studied dialectics on truth, my readers may ask? I shall hasten to answer that because we live in a nation that is highly deficient in truth, and because we inhabit a space where falsehood, chicanery and perfidy are now kings, one cannot begin or pioneer an ethical cum moral revolution without first defining the ideal.
We have set falsehood as the template in defence of government actions and inactions; we excuse mediocrity by falsely comparing and judging the past with the present, without juxtaposing in our tabulations the prevalent realities and variables; we overlook the humungous funds fleeced and the monstrous resources stolen in the process when we declare albeit untruly that ‘it has never been this good’. Until we elevate our moral and ethical margins, until we deepen our thinking, until we look beyond the bias of tribe, until we soar beyond the prejudice of religion and until we mortify the dichotomies of creed and of clan, we may continue to lead a lie and celebrate the benumbing half-truths of ethnicity and sectionalism, thus overlooking the truth. Yes, the truth is that those who oppress us are united in thieving and looting, they are in cahoots irrespective of their ethnic and religious differences.
We cannot overcome the festering problems that torment our peace and blur our path to progress until we confront the falsehood that spin doctors and conceit ideologues trade on our socio-political amphitheatre. The truth is that the ‘privileged Yoruba’, the ‘privileged Ibo’, the ‘privileged Hausa’ and the ‘privileged Minorities’ are united in the despoliation of the Nigerian State, and most fecund is the fact that those who MUST fix Nigeria must rise beyond the banal cocoons of creed and of clan.
TO BE CONTINUED.