SOME forty years ago, the inimitable musician and Afro beat maestro, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, went into the studio and came out with one of the evergreen numbers titled – Authority Stealing – of which I am borrowing as part of the title of this piece.

I guess Fela would be smiling or hissing in his grave if he can see that what he sang about over 40 years ago is now the order of the day and that under this yoke, we are suffering but not smiling at all.

Lying is now becoming an art and a tool of governance. Let us take the recent election of the President of the Governors’ Forum. Is it not a big shame that governors cannot even organize a free and fair election and they are supposed to be less than 40 in number! It is even more annoying when two governors who were present at the election gave contradictory reports. We once had a teacher in Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti many years. The Reverend gentleman told us that two or more spectators at a football match may give two or more accounts of how the goals were scored, who passed to who, who headed the ball into the net or at what point a goalkeeper frustrated the efforts of the opposing strikers; but the different accounts will give the same concluding scores.

Not with our governors! Is it possible for two people to report on an incident such as an election with two varying outcomes? I think that even those who annulled the 1993 elections were even more ingenious than some of these governors. If these governors can brazenly lie about their own elections, any wonder why we are being fed lies by almost all of them in many of the states we look at?

Unfortunately for us, the lying is at levels of government. When we were young and when we were raising our children, there was a maxim – anybody who lies will steal. Can we deny that this is not happening in our society?

I recently had to pick a young man of 19 years at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport. That was a day the heavens also opened up and we had to wade through what he called “dirty horrible water” to get to the vehicle. He was shocked when he realized that we had paid N400 to get a parking space. He turned to me and asked what normally happens to the toll which every vehicle is expected to pay. Guess who came to my rescue – Baba Fela himself – as at that time, thanks to technology, I had Fela on YouTube playing “Authority Stealing”. I asked the young man that this was a song written decades before you were born and the summary is that, according to Fela “pen has the power that the guns don’t have”.

It is only in our country that leaders can talk to international media and tell the whole world that everyone in some ‘named’ major towns can attest to the fact that they are enjoying uninterrupted power supply only for the same leaders to be confronted with power outage in one of those towns! A friend said it was sabotage and my response was “really’? We tend to forget that the Yorubas have a saying that translates into something like: “two people cannot lose in a lie – if the person lying does not realize that he is lying, the one who is being lied to is aware”.

Another level of lying was shown last week with governors taking tonnes of newspapers to congratulate their “Oga at the Top” or themselves on the celebration of “Democracy Day”.

A governor who was supposed to have campaigned and to have made several promises to serve the people comes out to advertise that he has tarred roads or bought buses for transportation. You ask yourself – do you really to go to the pages of the newspapers to tell your own people what you are doing for them? Shouldn’t that be very obvious to them as the primary beneficiaries?

I think we should conduct some research into the achievements of past and present governors and the amount of money spent on advertising these achievements. I cannot remember how many pages of newsprint someone like Alhaji Lateef Jakande took to eulogize himself while in office and yet the incumbent Governor Fashola still referred to the achievements of Jakande as recently as May 29, 2013, thirty years after Jakande left office.

• Oyewole retired from the United Nations and now lives in Lagos.