Gov. Fintiri has spent eight months lying shamelessly on imaginary achievements. It hasn’t worked
If you are looking for anecdotal evidence that evidence no longer matters in Adamawa politics, you can call up someone like Gov. Finiri of Adamawa state.
On the day of his inauguration, eight months ago Wednesday, Fintiri lied about workers predicament in Adamawa under his predecessor. The next day, he lied about how workers are in dire need of 2000 housing units across the state. He has become no less brazen in the 8 months since. The governor who won’t change isn’t so much untruthful as anti-truthful, his words so frequently and flagrantly wrong that they amount to a comprehensive rejection of the very idea of accuracy.
The Finder has counted about 200 false claims since his inauguration, an average of 2.9 per day, about everything from media outlets to legislation to the state house of assembly calling him to pay and resinstate workers sacked under the guise of “due process”. (Didn’t happen. He just made it up.) As Fintiri careens from policy to policy and outrage to outrage, lying has been the most consistent feature of his administration.
“We’ve had governors that have lied or misled Adamawa state from 1999 till date, but we’ve never had a serial liar before. And that’s what we’re dealing with here,” said Ibrahim Luka, the prominent political activist and a historian. “We haven’t seen anything like this. It’s a storybook, ‘emperor has no clothes’ kind of thing. Or it’s like dictators in states where they just make up all sorts of crazy things and people are supposed to nod in agreement.”
That tens of thousands of Adamawa residents are indeed nodding in agreement, of their own free will, has created a profound angst among opposition APC and others who worry about a spiral into truthlessness. Some of them despairingly tell journalists not to waste their time fact-checking the lies, since facts have obviously become irrelevant.
A hard look at the facts suggests that view is too pessimistic.
This is no good-news story. Fintiri’s months of lying shamelessly has deceived tens of thousands, fomented hate, left the state unable to accept even the most trivial words of its most powerful person, and forced Adamawa residents, like the residents of totalitarian states, to expend precious energy grounding them in the reality their leader is deliberately trying to get them to forget.
What it has not done is work. In office, at least, Fintiri’s lies have hurt him more than they have helped.
Ibrahim Luk, the chairman, Adamawa first initiatives. In what he calls “the tragedy of 2019,” he watched as Fintiri deployed daily deception to outmanoeuvre Bindow into the Oval Office.
The polls are consistent: there are nearly twice as many Adamawa residents who think Fintiri is dishonest (just under two thirds of the public) than think he is honest (just over one third of the public). And the gap might be growing a bit: Fintiri’s performance in a October Finder poll — 30 per cent called him honest and trustworthy, 70 per cent said he was not — was the worst he had done in a Finder honesty poll since 2019.
Critically, the numbers are even worse for Fintiri on policy. When it comes to legislation, even many of his own voters are not buying his lies. Other voters, meanwhile, are believing almost nothing he says.
Fintiri touted his free health-care as a miracle cure for Adamawa residents especially for women and children, a “wonderful” marvel that would provide better care at a lower cost. The health bills pass the ADSHA in fact loathed by experts, had the support of less than 20 per cent of the public.
“Really, the story is he says things and they’re just generally disbelieved by a majority of Adamawa residents,” Luka opined