Nestor Chukwuorie Nzeribe PhD
Dream–reality confusion or DRC, is a state whereby one encounters difficulty or an impossibility to determine whether an event or an experience took place during wakefulness or if it was the content of a dream. For instance, you had a dream and upon waking you are unable to determine whether a particular incident you had witnessed was actually in real life or in your dream. This is a dream-reality state of confusion.
Sometimes too, in trying to connect a real life event or incident appropriately in time, you experience some difficulty as your thoughts keeps flipping between reality and dream. In a state of DRC, because your mental notes relating to the incident in question have become fuzzy, your mind is rendered incapable of rationality and precision in decision making. Poverty and economic deprivation both are highly potently instigative of dream-reality confusion.
Closely related in some ways to dream-reality confusion is psychosis. It is another mental state when people lose some contact with reality. Psychosis sometimes involve seeing or hearing things that other people cannot see or hear (hallucinations); and believing things that are not actually true (delusions). It may also involve confused (disordered) thinking and speaking. Dishonest or misguided persons may yield to delusions fed them to achieve a set agenda. So too could a citizen hard pressed to provide for their family at a time of diminished economic opportunities.A price for their judgement and conscience could be found and paid to vulnerable people to make them fake to hear, feel or see what others cannot see. Conversely, hard pressed persons could also be asked for a fee, to deny what others see and are experiencing including the very things that even situations do testify to.
Unfortunately, being paid a fee to deny reality, never insulates those who are deluded from the impacts of the existent adverse social conditions they agree to repudiate. Those who are experiencing dream-reality confusion or delusions, hallucinations or disordered thinking as a genuine mental condition should be shown sympathy and help. But the ones who pitch against the truth for personal gains are dangerous. They deserve nothing less than an open condemnation.
When you deny the existence, truth, or validity of something despite proof or strong evidence that it is real, true, or valid, it is known as denialism; and then you become a denialist. Denialism can be systematic when there is a methodical rejection of a body of what is established by facts in favour of make-believe. The art of make-believe is often employed by dishonest politicians when they are in power, to produce the wrong impressions and deceive the gullible. When they do this, politicians conjure up things like AI generated imagery of things and situations that are non-existent to evoke the feelings of their desire as a counter to the things that do exist. This is the cardinal purpose of propaganda which is always conducted to weaken opposition.
Governance is conducted often in Nigeria without due accountability. It therefore, is a popular approach amongst poorly performing political leaders, to become not just evasive but outrightly denialist when confronted with the reality of failure to govern well. Instead of being accountable for their actions, an unconscionable elevation of the art of denial of the existent reality of poor performance is always rather the case. This practice serves so well to the extent that at will, they can either obliterate what is glaringly existent by it, or create and put on open display, what is totally non-existent with so much confidence.
The Nigerian politicians’ mastery of the art of double standards is evident in so many areas. For instance, they fondly preach about a badly damaged Nigerian economy and easily inflict harsh economic policy regimes on the people in the name of recovery measures. However, they continue to live like kings, persistently ignoring the need that they themselves, curtail their own free spending habits in order to show that they truly mean well for the country. While continually verbally acknowledging that the national economy needs to be recovered from its poor state of health, they deny by their hypocritical lifestyle that the situation is truly dire. They wallow in a lifestyle that put a lie to their claims. In this way, they have not only weaponized poverty in Nigeria, turning it to a manipulative tool, but have also made spreading it become something akin to a state policy.
This is how dream-reality confusion, delusions, hallucinations, disordered reasoning and denialism have all become plagues afflicting the masses of Nigeria. They have become the dominant conditions currently dictating the public attitudes of Nigerians. But it was forced on them and the polarisation induced by ethnicity and religion has made issues even worse. The reality that the common Nigerian people are over pressured with inadequate basic needs, and that they can no longer live well because survival options have become drastically reduced, are all combining to achieve a mephistophelian objective. In a country with tens of millions of citizens who live below the two dollar daily mark, citizen’s conscience is now worth no more than a couple of thousands of naira. This is why an anti protester could walk the streets of our cities protesting against their own welfare without knowing it.
Thanks to the impact of ruthless economic policies, the worsening condition of the ever fragile Nigerian economy has so affected it’s social situation. It has become a sad reality that those who deny the country good governance can now also purchase the loyalty of its citizens, not by working to better their lots but by dropping a few plates of scarce food. Hunger has become a deliberate weapon for oppressing and suppressing the country’s poor such that to escape it, you have to see or say what you neither can see nor can feel. And when the coin is flipped you can also deny the things you can vividly see or feel.
The careless management of the national economy, have put the Nigerian people at the mercy of their heartless leaders. To be in a position to buy a people’s conscience, you have to first make them feel saleable as a leader. Having their economic capabilities severely curtailed, their natural confidence shattered and their psyche thoroughly thrashed by the poverty you impose on them, you drastically reduce their value. Poor leadership have succeeded in diminishing the street value of the ordinary citizen’s conscience to a sellable and therefore, buyable commodity. And worse of all, these leaders determine the worth of a citizen’s conscience because they leave them with no options, no bargaining power.
As it stands now, poor Nigerians are in a state that the wasters of the national resources of Nigeria wanted them in. They are hungry, voiceless, and powerlessly susceptible. Like pawns yielding to the nefarious manipulations of the power thirsty they have lost all resistance. It is a state of vulnerability to the manipulations of politicians when a bowl of grains is what decides how the poor citizens thinks, what they say or what they do! This heartlessly contrived situation is what has strangely reset the street mentality of the average Nigerian. So a good number of them can be bought, mobilized and paid in cheap cash to counter the protest and.mass demand for good governance.
The Nigerian counter or anti-protester is a product of hunger and oppression. They knows no ideology and therefore, are driven by none except their human survival instincts. Those are the instincts which tell them to fear hunger and avoid any worse state, to protect something, or to want something better than hunger and abject suffering. Their understanding and definition of something better is, to kill the conscience or debase values, if those are the things they have to do to guarantee their immediate survival. They feel no pang of conscience in believing in lies, saying things that they know are not true, nor in fighting on the side of their oppressors. They do not even think it’s cowardice. They have been paid to believe that living in denial is an option, the only safe option left.
Poverty in Nigeria has become a kind of opium, a powerful anesthesia and sedative. It has deadened the conscience of erstwhile patriots, it has shifted the focus of nationalists off the goal of nation building and it has sent our highly prized African values on a flight from our land. We are doomed unless we can muster enough willpower to halt the drift! Unfortunately, religion which in its pure form ought to serve a helpful purpose in times like this, have also been washed into the flood of debasement.
The need for an honest national self assessment that would lead us naturally to self remediation has never been this urgent. Highlights of the 2022 Multidimensional Poverty Index survey reveal that: 63% of persons living within Nigeria representing 133 million people, are multidimensionally poor. It is most likely that today’s figures will reveal that the numbers have spiked alarmingly. Nigeria still tops the charts as the world’s poverty capital. Whereas deprived Nigerians continue to bemoan their ever increasing burdens of poverty, the level of opulent extravagance being displayed by the current managers of the nation and it’s economy is mind boggling. It is apparent that the big idea is to so impoverish the people, over-awe them with a continual display of strange stupendous wealth until their self worth and greatest aspiration is reduced to a mere attitude of survivalism.
They have paid his bills and the anti-protest citizen is on full blast. Let’s see how long his windfall will last him. The clock is already ticking!