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Crying more than the bereaved

By Kenechukwu Obiezu, Abuja, FCT
28 March 2017   |   5:29 am
When public officers turn on the waterworks in public for whatever reason, an alarmed public usually seeks the interpretation of those tears in line with the occasion on which they flowed. Tears coming from a breed which power has made impervious and who are in a position to wipe the tears....

Sir: When public officers turn on the waterworks in public for whatever reason, an alarmed public usually seeks the interpretation of those tears in line with the occasion on which they flowed. Tears coming from a breed which power has made impervious and who are in a position to wipe the tears of their people would almost always be suspect.

Tears are as old as humanity and as humanity has mastered the many subtleties of self-expression, tears have come to assume a language and symbol of pain, sorrow, compassion and even joy. Indeed, in the watery language of tears, a thousand words find the symmetry of a flood.

Thus it recently happened that during a public prayer for Nigeria`s President Muhammadu Buhari, whose continued absence form the country ostensibly on vacation has continued to stoke uncertainty and anxiety in the country, a very public officer was reduced to tears. While it is okay to cry when our hearts are so prodded by pain or sympathy, there is nothing wrong with our public officers sharing crucial puzzles of information with a public mostly famished for credible information from the highest corridors of power.

Nigeria is a country of poor information management and even poorer image management. In spite of the Freedom of Information Act, Nigerians still struggle to get information about how their country is run and even when such crucial information is supposedly passed down, historic suspicions moulded by questionable antecedents mostly preclude objectivity and open-mindedness with very valid reasons.

While those who are responsible for this information gap would most readily allude to security reasons or even privacy rights, it has happened before that the paucity of information was deployed as a weapon to achieve nefarious ends. Indeed, the truism that “information is power” has held true countless times.

In the face of grueling economic conditions and rising waves of killings and insecurity all over the country, Nigerians do not in the least deserve to have their already high levels of anxiety spiked even further by the withholding of information and unnecessary show of emotion in public. What Nigerians deserve and rightly so too is to be and stay informed about the state of their country and its leaders.

Let those who serve as the gatekeepers of the information let open the gates instead of smiting us with confusion and crocodile tears. Besides, it is Nigerians who are wincing under the excruciating burdens of the current economic difficulties and official uncertainty and not a select few with far-reaching connections to the corridors of power.
Kenechukwu Obiezu, Abuja, FCT

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