In Animal Farm, George Orwell seems to have seen ahead how, in Nigeria, officials of government would upstage the character of Squealer in the art of passing the buck while defending the commander-in-chief.
By Ogochukwu Ikeje
I read Animal Farm as a teenager in secondary school and consider it an all-time bestseller. But there’s something intriguing about its British author, George Orwell. No, it’s not that he was born in Bengal, India, nor that his real name was not George Orwell. Our man was born Eric Blair. As a young man he would pick up any job that suited his fancy, either for economic reasons or to gain some insights into what he would be writing on. For instance, he joined the British Police because he felt the money was good. Then he quit and became a dishwasher in Paris. One of his early novels, Down and Out in Paris and London, drew heavily from his associations with people of the lower cadre of society but he published the book under the name George Orwell, not Eric Blair, in case it turned out to be a total failure. It got good reviews.
When he travelled to Catalonia to fight on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, a sniper shot him through the throat. He survived.
So, what’s intriguing about Mr Orwell? It is the clarity and precision with which he captured, in his novels, some atrocious ways people were governed. Today, those atrocities described decades ago are still playing out almost exactly as he described them. Mr Orwell died of tuberculosis on January 21, 1950 aged 46.
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In his novel, 1984, he wrote about how the Brotherhood in government, through an electronic device, monitored where people were and what they were doing at any particular time. Government surveillance is still a widespread pastime. Big Brother, the reality TV show, borrowed from George Orwell.
In Animal Farm, George Orwell seems to have seen ahead how, in Nigeria, officials of government would upstage the character of Squealer in the art of passing the buck while defending the commander-in-chief. The animals on a barn yard had just chased out the oppressive owner, Mr Jones, in a revolution they achieved earlier than they imagined. But soon after expelling Mr Jones, and adopting certain anti-human maxims and codes by which they hoped to live as free and equal brothers, it was found that the sharpest of them, the pigs, had developed a thirst for Mr Jones’ ways. When the animals complained that the leader of the new republic, Napoleon, was cornering the milk and wind-fallen apples contrary to their agreement. Squealer, his mouthpiece and minister of propaganda, would jump in, “skipping from side to side”.
With his persuasive skills and a knack for “turning black into white”, he would announce that milk and apples “contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig”. He would tell them, “Many pigs actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself…It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples”. Then he would silence them with the argument that Napoleon is a patriot and was acting in the best interests of the animals. Anything that puts the leader in discomfort would bring back the oppressive Mr Jones. No one wanted Mr Jones back.
When, driven by the fear of rivalry, Napoleon got rid of Snowball, everything that went wrong on the Farm was blamed on Snowball. Squealer told the animals that Snowball was indeed the enemy within from the start and had been collaborating with Mr Jones.
Animal Farm is on my mind. The naira is near worthless, unable to fetch anything meaningful, whether food items, petrol or anything else. Hunger sparks protests and a scramble for free food wherever it might be found. About seven persons died last week in one of those scrambles. From the government, there is a shifting of blame. The only difference between Nigeria now and the barn yard is that whereas Squealer had the sole task of blaming Snowball, Nigeria’s president Bola Tinubu has a number of officials doing the Squealer work for him.
Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, for instance, is a master in the game. In his days in the PDP, he once blamed the rival APC for a power outage when his party was having a public function in Lagos. Six years ago, he said the APC government led by Muhammadu Buhari spent two years blaming the preceding government. Now in the APC, Mr Akpabio said last week in Rivers State: “There is hunger today because of the policies and actions that the past government took”.
At a public event in Abuja, also last week, the vice president Kashim Shettima said the government had discovered 32 routes through which food items are smuggled to neighbouring countries. He described those smugglers as “some of our countrymen who are still in political mode…practitioners of violence, forces hell-bent on plunging this country into a state of anarchy…desperate people who could not get to power through the ballot box”.
Neither Mr Akpabio nor Mr Shettima reserved any of the blame for President Tinubu who announced the removal of petroleum subsidy on May 29 and then allowed the naira to float like a leaf on a fast-flowing river.
George Orwell’s Squealer couldn’t have done better.