Peter Okoye’s story should not be believed unless…

We Nigerians love a good story. From our great enjoyment of anecdotes to office gossip, down to our deliberate eavesdropping of the conversations between strangers.

Another aspect of these is that via this good story, we create opinions and contributions. That’s why the comment section of Pulse Nigeria’s Facebook page.

Peter Okoye’s recent story is an amazing one. It has all the qualities of one. The most important quality of a good story is the ability to take readers somewhere else and make them glad they went. Peter Okoye’s story had a quest (how Psquare degenerated), it had an amazing hook (Peter Fired Jude), it has conflicts throughout (Jude & Paul vs Peter), it has style, evokes empathy, and most importantly, makes you glad that you are more knowledgeable now that the curtain has been lifted, and the twins have been demystified, brought down to earth and made to look common.

Peter, Paul, and Jude are three people involved in a business, with different ideas on how to run it. This happens all the time in different levels of human society and institutions. These different ideas, when harvested properly, and put to use, become the ideas that drive the establishment to success and failure. Unhealthy conflict becomes a resort when there are no set rules of engagement and decision making processes. When these rules are non-existent, people’s most basic instincts of competition kick in, and we have what is happening at the Okoye household.

From the story, Peter feels marginalized after he has decided to modernize the business and put a more efficient structure on it. He also feels unappreciated when people brand him the ‘dancer’, with no brain behind the cameras or console. So he has shared his side of the story over and over again until we have held on to it as truth. This truth isn’t necessarily the truth. But in the absence of other truths from Jude and Paul, we have taken what Peter offered, and run with it.

But Peter Okoye shouldn’t be fully believed and his story swallowed whole. Because if we do that, then we fall to the dangers of a single side story. Creating a single story is simple. Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. Peter Okoye has repeatedly shown Jude and Paul as the demons, and to us, they have become demons.

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, the captures the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Let’s look at history and the naming of River Niger. Start the story with the local tribes of Igbo people who fetch water and plant irrigate their farms, and not with the arrival of Mungo Park, and you have an entirely different story. Start Psquare’s story with the entrance of Brother Jude, and not with the marginalization of Peter, and you have an entirely different story.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. Peter’s story has become the only story, even though it cannot be independently verified.

It is impossible to engage properly with a people without engaging with all of the stories of those people. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. Peter is different from Paul because he shared his story, but what if he also has marginalized Paul and Jude with his actions and revolution? Doesn’t that make them all similar?

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a group, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any person or people, we regain a kind of paradise, a paradise that evokes soul-searching, which leads to truth finding.

Paul and Jude Okoye need to share their stories. Only then can the truth emerge.

*Excerpts from Chimamanda Adichie's 2009 TEDX spech: 'The Dangers Of A Single Story' was used in this story*