Josiah
‘ALTERNATIVE TRUTH’ has been defined plainly as the ‘new truth’ or plain, outright lies.
Otherwise also known as ‘alternative fact’, it is a theory posited as an alternative to another, often more widely accepted, theory; or a statement intended to contradict another more verifiable, but less palatable, statement.
According to the ‘Sunday Times’ (2017), for the populist, there can always be alternative facts, because there are no facts.
Alternative facts have been called many things: falsehoods, untruths, and delusions. A fact is something that actually exists – what we would call “reality” or “truth.” An alternative is one of the choices in a set of given options; typically, the options are opposites of each other. So to talk about alternative facts is to talk about the opposite of reality (which is delusion), or the opposite of truth (which is untruth). (Slang Dictionary)
Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to President Donald Trump, used the euphemism alternative facts when she was a guest on NBC’s Meet the Press on January 22, 2017 in a conversation with the show’s moderator Chuck Todd. Conway used this term to describe false statements made by the press statements made by the press secretary Sean Spicer on January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump took office. Todd challenged her use of alternative facts immediately, saying “Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods.” The term caught on widely with critics of the Trump administration.
In conversations about alternative facts, the words post-fact and post-truth often come up. Post-fact and post-truth refer to an environment in which objective facts are a thing of the past. In a post-fact society, facts are viewed as irrelevant and emotional appeals are used to influence public opinion. This is not unlike Stephen Colbert’s concept of truthiness, which is trusting your gut feelings over facts. As his comical Colbert Report persona says, “Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.” DICTIONARY.COM
The expression alternative facts evoke Newspeak, the language of the fictional ruling party’s propaganda in George Orwell’s 1984. In the book, Newspeak leads to doublethink, which is when a person holds two contradictory beliefs in their mind at the same time, and accepts them both. An example of doublethink from 1984 is the idea that ‘war is peace.’
WHO USES ALTERNATIVE FACTS?
In addition to Trump and his staff seriously using the word when speaking to the media or about the media, alternative facts cam be used by anyone to poke fun at the Trump administration. Many memes have also been created using an image of Conway on television with the phrase alternative facts written on top of the image. And, many people tag “#alternativefacts” on social media to poke fun at someone who has said something controversial or ridiculous.
Alternative facts and its variants have been used on protest signs since Conway said it. At a protest challenging Trump’s controversial executive orders, one dog was spotted wearing a sign labelling it as an #ALTERNATIVECAT. Other variants of alternative facts have sprung up on social media. Hashtags like #SeanSpicerFacts and #SeanSpicerSays parody the way in which Spicer made several easily disprovable statements in his first-ever press conference as the press secretary to President Trump. DICTIONARY.COM
In real terms, alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods.
Ghana’s politics over the last sixteen years, has witnessed a new state of alternative reality, where a state of things that does not really exist, but that some people believe it to be real or true. People on different sides of any debate seem to be living in alternate realities, unable to agree on even basic facts; such as “If the fundamentals are weak, the exchange rate will expose you. That was true then, and it is true now, it is one hundred per cent correct. So if the fundamentals are weak, the exchange rate will expose you. But it is warped logic to jump from that to a conclusion that if there is a depreciation in your currency, then the fundamentals must be weak. Do you understand the logic: it is a very warped logic. If the fundamentals are weak, the exchange rate will expose you. If the exchange rate moves, you cannot jump to the conclusion that the fundamentals are weak. That defies logic.”
This is the alternative facts of Ghana’s ‘Walewale Adam Smith’.
Again, during his Media Engagement after the Manifesto Launch to herald his official presidential campaign, he was once again asked the same question and he answered accordingly: “This is a truism, it was true then, and also true today. It is an economic truism that once the fundamentals weaken, you will see the impact on the exchange rate fundamentally. This is where we talk about the GDP growth, the Fiscal Balance, the Exchange Rate, the Level of the Reserves that you have, the Inflation, and so on. When we came into office, during the first term, before we hit Covid between 2017 – 2019, you saw the fundamentals pretty much strengthening on all accounts, and the exchange rate depreciated in those three years by less than 5 per cent. That was the lowest depreciation in the currency for 28 years (i.e., 1989 – 2017).
“Even after Covid, we didn’t get that high depreciation, but the biggest shock for the economy, came in 2022. I mean, this was when all hell was breaking loose in 2022; inflation was 54% as at November 2022; exchange rate had depreciated 54%, I mean, of course you could look at the fundamentals, we were in trouble at that time; you saw the fiscal deficit going up; inflation going up; growth declining; so for me, it wasn’t surprising, even though it was shocking the extent to which the exchange rate went. So the point that we are making is that, once the fundamentals weaken, you will get it shown in the exchange rate. This is why we are seeing that recently, even though we are depreciating by 54% in November, this year the depreciation has been 18.6% so far. We are looking at 18.6% and so, we are looking at a situation this year, why is the depreciation lower; because the fundamentals have strengthened, the fiscal deficit is under 5%; we are running a primary surplus; growth has gone up the first quarter to 4.7%, higher than projected; the reserves are increasing; and the Gold For Oil programme is helping; so as the fundamentals… and inflation today is around 20%; so there has been a strengthening of the fundamentals; and you have also seen more relative exchange rate stability.”
This is definitely taking a page from the Kellyanne Conway’s “Alternative Facts”, where all the English are but plain falsehoods.
Ghana’s ‘Adam Smith’ seems to have perfected this art of Alternative Truth to the point of claiming ownership of these principles.
As we, as a nation and as a people, head towards the 2024 General Elections, particularly with reference to the Presidential, we all ought to be mindful and very alert, so we are hoodwinked with all the English, going back and forth, up and down, crafted in the best of the Queen’s language and semantics.
We have come too far with a near bankrupt economy, a more than crippling debt portfolio: the largest by a single government over all the four (4) Republics and governments of Ghana since Independence put together; massive corruption of unparalleled proportions in all facets of our national and international lives as a nation and as a people; wanton dissipation of public resources for private use; extreme abuses of public office, including capricious sale of public properties to ‘family and friends’ syndicate; and intimidation of public officers into various levels of compromises and acts against the state as well as public interest.
Need I say more…
By Magnus Naabe RexDanquah, the Ghanaian
