By AbdurRaheem Sa’ad Dembo
Telling lies is becoming a normal way of life among young people, especially, because they tell lies with ease and confidence; without minding the consequences. Lie, according to Oxford Advanced English Dictionary, means “a statement made by somebody knowing that it is not true”. This encompasses deception, falsehood, cock and bull story, etc. This piece is not out to arrogate righteousness to the author; rather, essentially, it is aimed at drawing the attention of the public to how telling lies or lying around is reducing humanity to nothingness.
People tell lies for variety of reasons: to gain favour, to woo a woman, to achieve certain aim, to enable them outsmart others, to cover the truth, to destroy others while to some people, it is for fun. What precipitates lie could be inferiority complex, fear, ego, insincerity, wickedness, bad upbringing, bad peer group and ignorance. If a liar can decipher the extent of damage lying would be doing to his or her life, he or she wouldn’t have ventured into it.
Many people, old and young, have engaged in lying to woo a woman up to the point of marriage; only for the woman to get to his house after wedding to discover that the man has deceived her in no small measure. The truth is, some men would study a woman very well, once they discover that she is the type that likes hyping or deception unnecessarily, they will begin lying to her. I have heard many men saying women are sometimes prompting men to tell lies because of unnecessary demands. This is true because I have encountered a woman who told me before I got married that women like to be told lies sometimes but not all the time. The lady asserted that it would be hard for me to get a woman because I was too straight forward. My response to her was that I would never live like others and that my upbringing was not predicated upon, and surrounded with, lying.
On a lighter note, my niece, Jummy, sometimes ago shared with me a story of a young man who came to woo her friend with gigantic lie during their days in the college of education. I know that her friend very well because they were close friends. The young man claimed falsely that he was an undergraduate student of medicine at a university. But not quite long that luck ran out of the young man and his lie was punctured seriously. On that fateful day, Jummy and her friend were at the academic office and a young man was being addressed that he could not be given a particular course except music. By the time they looked towards the direction of the school official making the statement they realized that it was Mr Medicine. Subsequent to that encounter the young man began to avoid my niece and her friends. But one day there was no way he could manouver his way, so they unavoidably met and the young man felt extremely dejected. The implication of this is that lying around to people would add no value to one’s life but destruction.
Lying around diminish one’s integrity and dignity as no one would believe him or her on a day he or she will be telling the truth. Like the Yoruba saying “Iro re koje kia mon ooto re” meaning his notoriety for lying already puts in jeopardy his credibility when he makes truthful statements. Indeed, it amounts to a crime against humanity to engage in such a destructive enterprise-the business of lying. Within the family circle, for instance, it is dehumanizing to be a liar because it has the propensity to getting one tagged as a black sheep of the family. When one is in tandem with lying he or she would lose respect.
In the corporate world dishing out lies is usually discouraged because the survival of the business cannot be sustained with lies but effectiveness, productivity and credibility. In Public Relations lying is discouraged because it will backfire in no distance time, thereby crippling the image of the organization. In a community where a leader tells lies effortlessly such a leader would become an object of mockery, it is just a matter of time.
Furthermore, in a family setting where the Head of the family is an expert in telling lies, he would also lose respect. In fact, they will be disparaging him even behind. So lying around has consequences that may hinder one from growing in entirety because it has an expiration like a Hausa saying “Karya fure take Bata ‘ya’ya” meaning lie only flowers but can’t bear fruits. By extension, lying around cannot be productive but destructive.
As parents we must avoid telling lies, because children imitate whatever they see their parents doing. If you are lying always as parents, it is almost automatic that you would raise good liars.
Although there are some acclaimed professions that are synonymous with telling lies, according to some scholars, but that is not the area of interest in this discourse. Hence, by way of conclusion, perfection belongs to the Almighty but as humans we must eschew regular telling of lies, because whatever we are doing our Creator is All-Seeing; besides, our children are also watching us.
