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Truth, falsehood, justice, dystopia, By Biodun JeyifoSPECIAL REPORT: Jigawa villagers link declining farming output, urban drift to abandonment of damSPECIAL REPORT: Katsina farmers lament impact of climate changeTruth, falsehood, justice, dystopia, By Biodun Jeyifobirthday of WS, our own WS, for inviting me to give the keynote address. Presently, I shall speak about the celebrant but for now, permit me to make some opening remarks about the theme of our symposium.
Finally, we must consider the fact that in social life, sometimes facts and lies, truth and falsehoods are so intertwined that it is all but impossible to tell which one is the truth and which is the lie. And as if this is not enough of a conundrum, sometimes truth is opposed, not by a lie, but by another truth! Indeed, institutions such as Law and Literature owe their existence to their ability to milk to the utmost this occasional but endlessly repeated ambiguity between truth and falsehood.
It’s essential to acknowledge that news production incurs expenses, and we take pride in never placing our stories behind a prohibitive paywall.Before I give my response to this question – which shall be a “No” – I wish to draw your attention to the fact the war between truth and falsehood is one of the most ubiquitous themes of proverbs, tales, myths and scriptural texts in all the world’s communities, languages and literatures.
To clarify what I said earlier about an aspect of Soyinka’s accomplishment that is so baffling as to lead to wonderment, I now propose that we must see Soyinka as both Master and Servant of the Word. This is partly because he is supremely gifted in his use of language, partly because he cannot and will not stop writing, but primarily because among the most prominent writers in the world – and definitely among living Nobel laureates – Soyinka has no equal in polemics and polemicizing.
Before I move away from this particular issue and turn to the concluding sections of my lecture, I would like to point out that WS and his social media antagonists do share at least one thing in common and that is – justice, the demand for justice. The most resonant and unforgettable sentence in all of Soyinka’s writings is that quote fromthat stands as the epigraph for this lecture: Justice is the first condition of humanity.
I mention Musk and Trump here to underscore crucial differences between the lies that the respective richest and most powerful men in the world produce in comparison with the falsehoods produced and consumed in the social media in a country like Nigeria in which, for the most part, it is the weak, the jobless, the despised and hungry that depend on the social media for their resistance, their quest for justice, most of them very young people unlike Musk and Trump and their followers.
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