“All of these experiences have taught me that there is smoke without fire” – Chude Jideonwo

One of my bosses when I started my career was a big TV celebrity and one day, we woke up in the morning and a magazine had put on the cover that she was dating the Vice President at the time. Now I knew for a fact that she didn’t know him, but this magazine reported it as fact. That was my first lesson that when people say ‘There is no smoke without fire’, they don’t know what they’re talking about. There are plenty smokes without any fire.

One of the fascinating things when I was working in politics was people would say things about the people I was working with, with such confidence, things that I knew for a fact were untrue. I had a member of my team one time that was connected to someone high up in office and then someone leaked that the way she got the job was that, ‘this one is a pastor, and this is a pastor, so this one called Chude and said hire…’ it was the most ridiculous story.

I can not also forget spending a weekend with President Jonathan at the Villa and I was with him when he received news from INEC that that election was going to be postponed and then we were doing an interview, and I saw it unless he’s a great actor of which he can be, and the next day I heard people saying, ‘Oh, Jonathan is the one that is trying to rig the election because he is trying to get INEC to postpone the election’ and I was like… Wa-Wu!
Because I was there.

Therefore, when I hear blogs confidently say somethings; the confidence doesn’t relate to the possibility of truth.

It can be a mistake to treat public gist as fact. To pollute your own system by assuming the worst of people because of what other people say about them. And to assume because something is in the public is true and even worse, to plan your own life, career, financial choices, friend choices, reputational choices, intimate choices based on what people in the public say about other people or other things.

We can’t always confirm all the information we get in the world but we can at least suspend judgement until we know, at least, to a certain degree.

How to watch the FULL episode: 

1. Subscribe on watch.withchude.com to watch the full video. 
2. Subscribe on listen.withchude.com or Apple Premium to listen to the full podcast.