One universal trait of Nigerian social media warriors is an entrenchment of political amnesia, which manifests itself in an inability to persist with any social cause to resolution. This makes us highly susceptible to the ‘dead cat’ strategy, which is illustrated in the following quotation cited by Isabel Hardman:
‘Your best bet in these circumstances is to perform a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as “throwing a dead cat on the table, mate”.
‘That is because there is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout “Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!”; in other words they will be talking about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.’’
So rather than sticking with issues like the plummeting economy, food crisis in the North East, due process failures, massive abduction, infrastructural failure, institutional decay, security paralysis, we are talking about the dead cat of a marriage spat that may or may not be stage-managed… we will allow ourselves to be distracted, and we focus on anything, anything at all, except for the failings of the government. Because who wants to talk about the things that matter?
THE END
