“Nigerians Are Not That Hungry”: APC’s Alwan Hassan

There is a technique, perfected by Joseph Goebbels, of repeating a lie so loudly and so often that the masses will eventually accept it as truth.

It is a technique that requires a certain audacity, a willingness to look reality in the eye and deny it, to tell a hungry man that he is not hungry, to tell a nation in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis that its suffering is merely “opposition rhetoric.”

On Tuesday, Alwan Hassan, a member of the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Council, demonstrated that he has mastered this technique.

The declaration, delivered on Channels Television’s Politics Today, is not a gaffe. It is a calculated, chilling attempt to gaslight an entire nation, ValidViewNetwork reports .

THE CLAIM

Hassan was responding to the opposition’s description of the 2027 election as a contest between President Bola Tinubu and hungry Nigerians.

“That is an opposition rhetoric. People are not that hungry,” he said .When challenged on whether dismissing the suffering of millions could offend them, he doubled down. “And I will say it anyway. People are not that hungry as the opposition politicians are portraying it. That is an opposition rhetoric. I will say it anywhere” .He insisted that he was speaking from personal experience. “I’m telling you, I live in Nigeria”.

THE CONTRADICTION

Hassan’s argument, such as it is, rests on a single, flawed premise: that because food prices have fallen in some markets, Nigerians are no longer hungry. “In fact, farmers are complaining because foodstuffs are down in the market. Why? Because this government is importing and reducing the prices,” he said .

But when pressed on whether relying on food imports was a sign of the government’s success in agriculture, he made a stunning admission.

“We cannot feed ourselves. No, but while we do things to now cover up on the gaps, well, in the meantime, we must import,” he said .

The contradiction is staggering.

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The government is importing food because it cannot feed its own people. Farmers are complaining because imported food is undercutting their produce. And yet, the party’s spokesman insists that Nigerians are not hungry.

THE YARI PRECEDENT

Hassan’s comments came just days after the Director-General of the APC Presidential Campaign Council, Senator Abdulaziz Yari, was accused of calling Nigerian youths lazy.

Yari had said, according to reports, “You are hungry because you are lazy. If you work hard, you will not be hungry.”

The party subsequently denied that Yari had said this, claiming his remarks were “misrepresented” and that he had only acknowledged that “we have hunger” before speaking about the importance of hard work .

But the pattern is clear.

First, Yari dismisses hunger as a function of laziness. Then, Hassan dismisses it as opposition rhetoric. The APC is not merely denying that Nigerians are hungry. It is denying that the hunger is real.

THE GOEBBELSIAN PARALLEL

The comparison to Goebbels is not hyperbole. It is analytical.

Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment understood that the most effective propaganda does not persuade people of a new truth.

It erases the old one. It makes them doubt their own senses. It tells them that what they see with their eyes, what they feel in their stomachs, is an illusion, a lie spread by enemies of the state.

Hassan’s claim is a textbook example. He is not saying that the government is addressing hunger. He is saying that hunger does not exist. He is telling Nigerians that their lived experience—the empty pots, the unaffordable food, the children who go to bed hungry, is not real.

In a functioning democracy, a party that told such a lie would be punished at the polls. But in Nigeria, the APC controls the machinery of power, the narrative, and the means of coercion. It can afford to lie.

THE ANALYTICAL LENS

The APC’s strategy is not to win the argument. It is to exhaust the electorate.If the party can convince enough Nigerians that their suffering is exaggerated, that they are better off than they think, that the opposition is merely whipping up sentiment, then it can cling to power for another four years.

The strategy is not without precedent. In the United States, the Republican Party lost the midterm elections because voters were angry about the cost of living.

The party in power was punished because it had lost touch with reality. The APC should be paying attention.

But the APC is not the Republican Party. It does not face the same level of accountability. It controls the institutions that could hold it to account.

And it has a spokesman who is willing to stand on national television and tell a nation of hungry people that they are not hungry.

The claim has been made. The lie has been told. And the question is whether Nigerians will remember it when they cast their votes in 2027, or whether they will allow themselves to be gaslit into believing that their hunger is all in their heads. ValidViewNetwork reports.