Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet
Suyi Ayodele, a columnist for the Nigerian Tribune, is a contributor to USAfricaonline.com
Some lies protect us. Some lies destroy us. Most lies do both.
Over 10 million Nigerians received ₦75,000 each from the Federal Government, yet they are people without telephones, television sets or social-media accounts. They are out there somewhere, hidden from scrutiny by the very poverty from which the government claims to have rescued them.
That was the extraordinary claim made last Saturday in Maiduguri by Professor Nentawe Yilwatda, National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC). According to him, the government had “given 75,000 naira to over 10 million Nigerians across the country using the conditional cash transfer under the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction.” Elementary arithmetic puts the total at more than ₦750 billion!
The claim came with its own shield against verification. “Mind you,” the professor said, “these people who are poor and vulnerable don’t have telephone to make calls, they are not on social media. They don’t have television. They cannot come and challenge and discuss as we are doing here, but they are out there.”
When a man prepares to tell a lie, the elders say, he begins by announcing that all his witnesses are dead and safely in heaven. Professor Yilwatda’s witnesses are not dead; they have merely been rendered unreachable.
The government knows them well enough to identify more than 10 million of them and transfer ₦75,000 to each, but the rest of Nigeria must not expect to hear from them because, according to the professor, they own no telephones and inhabit none of the modern channels through which claims may be tested.
In Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora, an orphan grows into a genius con artist and leads an elite band of thieves called the “Gentleman Bastards.” Their craft is the elaborate confidence trick: invent the right identities, construct a believable world and persuade the wealthy to surrender their treasure. Lynch called it fantasy. In Nigeria’s corridors of power, it sometimes presents itself as public policy.
The protagonist of The Lies of Locke Lamora is Locke Lamora. The synopsis of his character says he is: “An orphan who grows up to be a genius con artist, thief, and leader of a small band of elite thieves known as the ‘Gentleman Bastards’.”
The character portrait adds that Locke Lamora’s skills show him to be “a master of disguise, languages, and elaborate long cons, targeting the ultra-wealthy of the fantasy city of Camorr. He is also known by the legendary underworld moniker ‘The Thorn of Camorr’, himself a notorious rogue, who brings the noble of Camorr to his camp and dupe them of their gold and other precious items!
The synopsis concludes thus: “The author Scott Lynch named the character “Locke” as homage to Locke Cole from the video game “Final Fantasy VI.” Some writers and their fertile imaginations! Indeed, writers of fiction are special beings. Their sense of verisimilitude is profound.
Scott Lynch is not the only author that has written about lies. Jamie Holland (September 23, 2015, based on the June 17, 1972 Watergate Scandal), Niki Mackay (March 7, 2019); Himanjali Sankar (2019); Jane Corry (2021); Katie Zhao (November 15, 2022); J.D. Barker & Richard Bailey (June 10, 2025) and Fatima Bala (July 23, 2026), all have novels with the title: The Lies We Tell, to show how resentful lies are to sane people.
For instance, today’s opening quote is taken from the promotional introduction to our own Fatima Bala’s novel, The Lies We Tell, published on July 23, 2026, by Masobe Books. The summary of Bala’s book reads:
“The Lies We Tell is a fierce, dazzling, heartbreaking collection of stories set across the motor parks, matrimonial bedrooms, and candlelit hostels of Northern Nigeria. From the dye pits of Zaria to the rooftops of Abuja, Fatima Bala pulls back the curtain on the secret architecture of Hausa women’s lives, the bargains made in silence, the truths swallowed whole, the love offered and withheld and weaponised across generations…. Written in a voice that crackles with wit, grief, and an almost unbearable tenderness, these stories ask the question no proverb has ever answered: when the lie is the only thing holding everything together, is it still wrong to tell it?
The answer to this poser: when the lie is the only thing holding everything together, is it still wrong to tell it, is provided by Helen Norton, a Professor and Rothgerber Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of Colorado School of Law, in her 2015 Faculty scholarship Paper titled: The Government’s Lies and the Constitution.
In the paper, Norton affirms that “Governments lie.” She goes further to state why they do, lamenting that “Although courts and commentators have extensively explored whether and when the First Amendment permits the government to regulate lies told by private speakers, relatively little attention has yet been paid to the constitutional implications of the government’s intentional falsehoods.”
The professor of Constitutional Law reiterates, thus: “The government’s lies can be devastating. This is the case, for example, of its lies told to resist legal and political accountability for its misconduct, to inflict economic and reputational harm, or to enable the exercise of its powers to imprison, to deploy lethal force, and to commit precious national resources.”
Then she concludes with the sad reality of the time we are in by submitting that “The number of lies, the diversity of reasons for which they are told, and the variety of their effects combine to suggest that efforts to enforce blanket prohibitions against the government’s deliberate falsehoods would be both difficult and unwise.”
The accounts of the lies the above literature tackles are as unsettling as they are shameful. Reading through them, especially the artistic depiction of Locke Lamora’s ‘Gentleman Bastards’, one cannot but find its relevance in today’s Nigeria, where, unfortunately, idiocy dons academic gown of various shades; and where sadly, shamelessness does not respect academic excellence!
Professionals in the human behavioural fields of Psychology and Sociology often ask: ‘why do adults lie?’ The summary of their findings is that adults lie to either protect themselves from reprimands after an infraction or to protect social relationships and cheer up self-image.
Decades ago, in one of his SSC 101 (Man and His Social Environment) classes, Professor (then Doctor) Kunle Ogunbameru of the Department of Sociology, Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile Ife, submitted (my paraphrase, please) that most men lie, mainly, for self-preservation, and in doing that, they cover up mistakes that could lead to shame and lower their ratings among others.
How true is Ogunbameru’s claim in today’s Nigeria? How often do our leaders lie to us? How often do those who lord it over us manipulate events in order to appear successful in the eyes of the people? Again, how often do the locusts masquerading as leaders impose their nauseating ‘white lies’ as the Biblical truth on us? How do our leaders see us whenever they emit the incomprehensible verbiage as explanations for the obvious failure of the government they run?
We use the claim by Yilwatda, another scholar, and a professor like Ogunbameru, to interrogate the retired OAU professor’s academic submission with a view to determining its veracity or otherwise.
The Professor of Digital Systems Engineering made the declarative statement of how our over N750 billion was transferred to over 10 million ‘poor’ Nigerians, the very wretched of the wretched. Yilwatda did not blink while giving out the figures. And he gave no room for any ambiguity, either.
And also, being a mind reader of sort, before we could open our mouths to say in our street lingo thus: Professor, e calm down nao, the man pre-empted us and stated that the beneficiaries are like shadows that no one can catch. They are, again, for emphasis, “Poor and vulnerable (people who) don’t have telephone to make calls, they are not on social media. They don’t have television.”
The old folks of my place call professors like Yilwatda, Ojogbon (end of knowledge). They believe that an Ojogbon is noble in all ways. They see an Ojogbon as the quintessential purveyor of truth and decency. Those old gentlemen never envisaged a day an Ojogbon would act the way Yilwatda did in Maiduguri.
Yet, in the year when monkeys have stopped attending the same market as human beings, our Yilwatda and his gang of Locke Lamora’s Gentleman Bastards gave out a whopping N75 billion to Nigerians who, in their entire lives, have never seen television, have no telephones, simply wretched and possibly don’t breathe any air!
Like the proverbial man with non-functional male organ, who claims, in any argument, that his offspring are in faraway countryside, the APC National Chairman told us that his imaginary over 10 million Nigerians, the very beneficiaries of the N750 billion pulled out of our patrimony, are all poor illiterate people who don’t know what social media is and “cannot come and challenge and discuss as we are doing here…!” God bless Ogunbameru, God bless Scott Lynch. Lamora lives here as an ‘erudite’ scholar! Phew!
What do we make of Yilwatda and his emission here? Yes, as a party man, the APC National Chairman must defend the government run by his party. But in doing that, is there no room for decency, especially when the man involved is as reputable as a university professor? How does he feel whenever he gets back to his colleagues? Do those ones poke him with his numerous un-dignifying outings like he did in Maiduguri on Saturday?
With the benefit of insights, I find the claim that the over 10 million beneficiaries of the fictitious conditional cash transfer are people without telephone. No SIR! Not in 2026! I spent close to two decades with the Nigerian indigenous telecommunication outfit, Globacom. One of the priorities of the owner of the company, Dr. Mike Adenuga Jnr. is RURAL TELEPHONY!
I recall here today, the Road Marketing Communication Strategy tagged We Live Where You Live (WLWYL), of the year 2006. I led a team of a Mobile Publicity Unit (MPU) across the six states in the South-South geopolitical zone and Ekiti. Other team members including Bode Opeseitan, Modupe Olubanjo, Celestine Amucha, Olufela King and Vincent Opareke covered the rest of the country.
Dr. Adenuga Jnr’s mandate to the team was “to pound the streets and put Globacom SIM (Subscribers Identification Module) cards in the hands of Nigerians in the remotest villages.” We did justice to that mandate. We entered villages where there were no decent hotels to sell GLO SIM cards at rock-bottom price of N1,000 while competitions were selling above N10,000. We were in rural markets, village squares and were well received by enthusiastic pastoral people.
Besides, we were mandated to identify villages and towns without a network then and send daily reports to the head office. The Roll Out Department was mobilised to link up the identified villages and communities. That was in the year 2006, Oga Professor!
So, how come, 20 years later, Professor Yilwatda still has over 10 million Nigerians who have never seen telephones in their lives? Those ones have never made nor received any calls? How were they contacted to come and take their share of the ‘loot’? Which database was used? Were they given cash? Yes, of course, someone who has never seen a television in his or her life cannot own a bank account! Shame!
Our elders submit that the mouth of a liar does not ooze out blood (enu òpùró kìí sè’jè). Otherwise, we would have easily detected whenever our leaders lie to us. The APC National Chairman wanted to pep up the masses for the 2027 election. He must tell Nigerians that the government is doing well. He needed to give a narrative only witnessed by those who are long dead and forgotten or those who are so far from civilisation that they hear when cocks crow in Never-never land! That is ok.
But what is the reality? How do we believe the professor when we all know the level of deprivation in the land imposed upon the people by the unfeeling government the APC has been running since 2015? How do we describe a hungry monkey which claims to have food in surplus (Ebi ń pa ọ̀bọ, ó ní òun jẹ kú)?
A man’s beauty, they say, is his character (Ìwà lẹwà). Where is the character in this assertion by the distinguished scholar? How do we now account for the people who received the N75,000 billion freebies? Who is keeping the records?
In what way is the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led administration different from the one led by the late acclaimed Mai Gaskiya (the truthful one), Muhammadu Buhari, who spent eight years feeding non-existent school children during total lockdown and commissioned a professor and pastor to share TradaMoni in markets for photo ops? Are we not on the same familiar path now?
These and many more are the questions the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) and other rational minds have been asking since Yilwatda came up with his spurious claims. HURIWA was definite in its position on the matter when it stated, in a statement issued last Sunday, that:
“The association also finds it curious that the government would invoke the supposed absence of mobile phones and social media among beneficiaries when Nigeria has an extensive telecommunications network and when the cash-transfer programme itself reportedly relies on identifiable beneficiary databases, bank accounts, NIN and BVN verification and electronic payment channels.”
The group added: “If these systems were used, then there should be an auditable trail. HURIWA therefore challenges the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, the National Cash Transfer Office, relevant state agencies and other institutions involved in the programme to come clean on the reported ₦600 billion expenditure. The government should tell Nigerians: How many households were actually paid?”
For me, and many other rational minds, Yilwatda and other spin doctors in the employ of this government need more lies to tell in order to convince us that indeed, over N750 billion of our patrimony had been allocated to effigies without telephone, television and have never seen anyone in a three-piece suit before!
In case Yilwatda does not know, abject poverty, deprivation and despondency, all trademarks of his party-in-government, walk on all fours on the streets. These are the monsters that await all those responsible for the present parlous state of the Nigerian people, as they hit the streets in the next couple of weeks to ask for the people’s votes.
Already, flashes of what to come have started incubating in the North. Campaign convoys are being attacked daily as the people’s frustration grows! One can only hope that the conflagration will not spread to the rest of the country.
Next lie, please!
