Haba!

[Toyin Falola]

Many private messages have been sent that Southerners are mocking Northerners over language and accents. And some have been posted with one going viral.

 

Haba!  When Kperogi was talking about verbs and nouns, you all forget that he is not an Igbo man. I don’t know that verbs and nouns now have colors.

 

Haba! When someone says a letter emanating from a state house, a paid media communicator with a degree, is badly written, what as being Kanuri or Hausa go to do with this?

 

Haba! Have you not heard Gowon speak? Or he speaks well because he is not a Hausaman? Do you not know of a man called “the golden voice of Africa?” Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria’s first prime minister!

 

Haba! Let me show you the recorded Keynote Address by Malami Buba, my Fulani friend; or the writings of Aisha Bawa, my Fulani friend; or of Bunza, my Fulani friend; or Ashafa, my Kaduna friend; or Bishop Kukah, the Zangon-Kataf man. Are they not better than many of the so-called southerners?

 

Haba! Everything is not about resource control or federal character.

 

Haba! This nonsense must stop today.

[Anthony Akinola]

Even a so-called good English speaker from our end would be shocked when a native English speaker seeks clarity

in what the former was trying to say. Pardon me, you meant to say...

Maybe one reason Buhari seldom makes public speeches is because of perpetual fault finders who are more interested in

his pronunciations than the context of his message.

Anthony Akinola.

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[Michael Afolayan]

Don't mind them, Prof. It's all because we love to major in minor and minor in major. When OBJ became the president, everyone mocked his accent and limited repertoire of the English lexicon. He must have been a Northerner then, right? And you are right on the money: the generation that heard Balewa speak English  would never join the foolery of mocking the north on the mastery of the English language or a lack thereof. 

Yep, the nonsense, indeed, must stop!

MOA

--

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

The overwhelming majority of Nigerians speak with accents.

President Buhari committed no crime because the Constitution ( until amended) does not prohibit accents.

In native English speaking countries leaders stumble on words and are mocked and this never led to national crises.  President George W.  Bush never once pronounced "nuclear" correctly during the Iraq war.  He always pronounced 'nukila' We all laughed and mocked him (including non native speakers.)  Nothing came of it.  

Some northerners are being over sensitive to criticisms.  No one is perfect.  We all can learn to better our best.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>

Date: 25/03/2020 10:52 (GMT+00:00)

To: dialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Haba!

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[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Niemen  says it all in Strange is This World

 

Oh, strange is this world

Well, still it seems

There's so far so much evil

And strange it is that since long ago

Man despises man.

 

Oh, strange this world

Of human affairs

Sometimes I'm ashamed to be in it

Oh, so often a man can kill

With a bad word or still a knife.

 

But most people are of good will

I - thanks to them - believe

That this world should never, never die

And now, the time has come

The final time for hatred, for hatred

To destroy itself.

 

Verily, this is what colonialism has done to some of us. Sixty years after Nigerians achieved Independence from the linguistic dictatorship of Westminster the “My accent is more British than yours” syndrome persists as a post-colonial phenomenon; some would say a post-colonial hangover which should be funny if it wasn’t so silly (comic) and so tragic. It’s akin to something like this.

To rephrase the question in that most famous dramatic poem, “ Telephone Conversation”,  the caller, obviously speaking RP,  gets past the landlady’s “not sounding British” language suspicion litmus  test, failing which, in addition to enquiries about the hue, shade, colour, shape  and maybe the weight of the caller’s bottom or booty, the landlady would have remarked  either “ Your accent sounds very dark” ( West African Sepia) or maybe  “somewhat lighter” ( Derek Walcott, Trinidad and St Lucia)   

In which case an adequate response to all the questions could have been the Parthian shot, a typically vulgar Americanism, “M-f, you can kiss my entire black ass” (if you please

Back in Sierra Leone, as my  two secondary school  classmates  from Nigeria ( Omodele Wariboko and Michael Bassey) can also testify, we had a  Nigerian geography teacher Mr. Inyang who we used to mock/ make fun of ( his nickname was “ Heng-‘am dae” – because  just  like  Michael Jackson, his trousers were  usually suspended about six inches above his shoes) but we mostly made fun of him because of his weird pronunciation of the most common English words, and in defence of his peculiar pronunciations he would  offer this concise explanation:  “ Pronunciations va-ary”.

We were very conscious of the approved Buckingham Palace pronunciation in our School which after all was opened  by His Royal Highness, the then Prince of Wales, on April 6, 1925.  Unfortunately, some of the products from that school became real neo-colonial snobs, you know…

Sure enough there are varieties of English and varieties of accents within the British Isles, not to mention other diversities  in both vocabulary, pronunciation and standard orthography when you extend the  family language empire and common wealth to include V.S. Naipaul & Salman Rushdie’s India, Tariq Ali’s Pakistan,   T.S. Eliot, Gore Vidal and Amiri Baraka’s North America,  Patrick White’s  Australia ( he had a good ear for colloquial speech and their approximate transcriptions to the written page) and Elsie Locke’s New Zealand. I mention Elsie Locke, because my wife translated her (into her mother-tongue which is Swedish.

I mention other English worlds to consciously remind those who may need reminding that the language world also has its “infinite variety” , and that it is  only ignorant, small-minded parochiality that breeds the intolerance that is typical of what Baba Kadiri would like to attribute as evidence of  all manner of psychological disorders  some kind of post-colonial stress of the kind that the Chinese do not suffer and that’s why it could not occur to  Sheikh Umar to start ridiculing their President for not speaking goody English…

And how I hate the condescending English pre-and post-colonial attitude of “ You speak good English”  and some of the other confusions, straightened out in these charts on  “ What the Englishman says and what he means”

 In utter ignorance, about any precise number I asked Alagba Google, How many British accents are there? Some of us would be surprised to know that we don’t fit into any of those 37 varieties.

I know, because when I was about nine years of age and attending school in Fulham I had a perfect “London accent “and  my aunty Nelly ( Dutch) uncle John Jeffrey-Coker’s wife) has to rub some of it off me, because I said “ pint box” instead of paint box,  and of course Charlotte and I could not say “lie” – the polite word  for children like us, was “fib”

We’ve got to liberate ourselves from “mental slavery”. What I liked about  pre-Satanic Verses Rushdie  was that in his own creative mode,  he did not seem to have any respect for Her Majesty’s English, that he  showed a sufficiently self-certain mastery of the lingo,  that he was obviously  doing  precisely  whatever the hell he liked with it , instead of being attached to  the straight and narrow of it, as if still shackled in  in post-colonial slavery  to it – like some guys still writing poetry etc. as if Shakespeare had never existed.

 As for me, have no fear.  Baba Kadiri has thoroughly indoctrinated me all about Pa Michael Imoudu

 Those of you living in English-speaking countries such as the United States, have no idea what it’s like for people like us. This afternoon I called Kehinde Ogunrinola in Canada, talked to him for approximately twenty minutes, mostly reminiscing about when he lived in Stockholm  and in comparing the two places,  one of the main differences is that in Sweden, the Oyibo’s last line of attack or defence when he doesn’t want to give you the job, is that you speak Swedish with a “foreign” accent.  Anyway, towards the end of our conversation Kehinde started speaking Swedish to me, and to my great surprise I noticed that he is now speaking Swedish with what sounded to my ears, something like an American accent.  “No”, he corrected me, “Canadian”.   A Swedish -Canadian accent. Not the same as a Southern Swedish or a Stockholm accent. Amin.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DB6PR04MB29823FB16089208D6E138F79A6CE0%40DB6PR04MB2982.eurprd04.prod.outlook.com.

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

This is not an issue to be touchy and self-conscious about. When Obasanjo was in power, northerners, especially Hausaphone northerners, also mocked southern Nigerian English accent. I’ve published letters in my now rested grammar column from readers who derided southern Nigerian accents. Here is an example published on January 20, 2007, which is archived on my blog:

“And one thing [about] the people of southern Nigeria is that their spoken English is not very good. However, they keep thinking that they are the best. [They are] very ignorant until they happen to be in the white man’s land when they know [the truth]. A southerner here will pronounce ‘mother’ as ‘murder’ and ‘occur’ (correctly pronounced as something like ‘occa’) as ‘occo,’ ‘doctor’ (pronounced ‘docta’) as ‘docto, and so on.

“On many occasions, you will see President Obasanjo addressing the English-speaking white people who most times resort to using translators fixed to their ears [rather] than listen to him directly. I really don’t understand. What is the factor governing the difference in [pronunciation] between the North and South of Nigeria when it comes to English Language?”

In my response to the writer, I dispelled his assumptions and I pointed out that an accent is the unique, phonologically specific, culturally determined, and sometimes unconscious, way we orally express ourselves.

Pronunciation is only part of the story of an accent. You can have a perfect English pronunciation (in any case, there is no such thing as a “perfect" English pronunciation, which explains why pronunciation is not an ingredient of Standard English) and have the “wrong” accent, depending on where you are and who is listening to you.

As far as most non-Nigerians are concerned, interestingly, all Nigerians—whether they are southerners or northerners—have fairly the same national accent with only insignificant, barely perceptible variations. In fact, it’s customary for Americans and Europeans to talk about not just a “Nigerian accent” but also an “African accent.” Inattentive? Yes! But that’s the reality. 

Most non-Americans, for instance, also think there is a monolithic American accent, which is, in fact, indistinguishable from Canadian accent. But anyone who lives in America and pays attention knows there are wide regional variations in accents, and that the southern drawl tends to invite the most ridicule nationally.

There is no such thing as a person who has “no accent.” As phonologists often remind us, “a person without an accent would be like a place without a climate.”

Accents have been used historically to distinguish between in-group members and outsiders. For instance, the term “shibboleth,” now understood in everyday speech to mean “a manner of speaking that is distinctive of a particular group of people,” was used in ancient Israel to tell one tribe of Jews from the Ephraimites, who reputedly couldn’t pronounce the word “shibboleth” because they didn’t have the “sh” sound in their own Hebrew dialect.

Farooq

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

--

[Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM]

What about late Maitama Sule Yusuf?

CAO.

[Michael Afolayan]

The subliminal message in Farooq's submission is clear: as long as we lean on the language of others to express our minds, we will continue to wallow in fake ego, self-pity, and/or self putdown. The truth is, we just can't get it right. Period! We are not intrinsically wired to use someone else's language to navigate  our communication paths and not miss some steps or even the whole path, especially in the realm of phonetics and even in the overall language use. To paraphrase the rhetorical question of Paulo Freire, how can you name your own world in the words of others and expect it to be hitch-free? My big cousin (our family daddy) is probably one of the best users and writers of the English language on earth, in my subjective estimation. The nonagenarian is a sociolinguist and retired professor of English; but just listen to him speak the English language. His accent is so thick and I bet, an average first language and/or native user of the English language would almost want to use an interpreter to understand when he speaks. Yet, I can't imagine even an Oyinbo person writing better in English than he does. Folks like Professor Abiodun Adetugbo, a foremost dialectologist, would tell you that our dialects or even idiolects affect our articulations and/or dictions. I have seen Obasanjo make his presentations in Yoruba (in his beautiful Egba dialect) and you would have to love it! Like Obasanjo's Yoruba, if Buhari or even our polished friends (Professors Buba, Kperogi or the late Balewa) were to present in Hausa language (BTW, I know Kperogi's MT is Batonou), it would still most likely be better than in the English language. 

All that is just the phonology; the language use is another thing altogether!

Look,  friends, this North-South English usage dichotomy is tantamount to two captives fighting over who cleans the whip of their master the more. We need to snap out of it and put our linguistic house in order. If we are not careful, we, especially. generations after. ours, will fall victim of what the Yoruba call "Àgbóògbótán Ègùn", a concept well captured in what Professor Awoniyi referred to as being "members of two worlds, citizen of none!"

Michael O. Afoláyan

===

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPq-FWtnevmifC53_6ihLdcG%3DYk0Jbh3iujTcEBj1gW1afHF0w%40mail.gmail.com.

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

People think pronunciation is not part of standard English but it is, in spite of regional variations. 

My trainer in English for Second Language Users said when westerners hear Africans speak they refer to their pronunciation as stilted meaning it does not conform to the general rules of pronounciation called intonation ( colloquially called accents.) This is in spite of the fact they know that Midland and Liverpudlian accents are different from the London 'accent' and they know until Tony Blair came to power ( his deputy John Prescott is a northerner)southerners mocked the northern English 'accent' just as it happens between northern and southern Nigerian English ' accents'.

I have stated in this forum before how my undergraduate linguistics teacher Professor  Oke said he could tell when attending conferences in London where Africans came from by the way they spoke English..  That meant regional accents conditioned by their first language.Since Africans don't speak the same first language this conditioning is bound to be different.  I can now tell an East African from a South African  or an Ethiopian apart from a West African ( and a Ghanaian from a Nigerian as well as Yoruba from Igbo or Hausa) merely by the way they articulate English.  To an English listener they all have an undifferentiated African stilt (accent.)

When I speak in the UK and the US people tell me I do not have a thick African accent as such and such.  This means I have been able to drop as much of my African language accent determined intonation as I could.  What I do not generally divulge is that I FORMALLY trained to do so using specialist publications to build on my undergraduate phonetics classes.  This is how I know it can be taught.  Because it was never part of the curriculum of teaching English in Nigeria people are resistant to its introduction.  They refer to it pejoratively as speaking through the nose.

After spending more than 15 years in the UK I had a Checkoslovakian student who was less than 5 years in the country and intonation- wise spoke better English than I do so I asked her how this hapoened? She confirmed to me what I already suspected: from early schooling in her country they were taught English including correct pronunciation by specialists according to how westerners actually pronounced.  When Pa Oyewole  (our undergraduate phonetics and phonological expert) tried to make us do the same thing it was too late.  My classmates rebelled and the man referred to the anti- intellectual climate all over the place when it came to phonetics and phonology.

Now when it comes to politics I have canvassed since the late 90s that federal public office holders should be made to go through the same standardised re-learning of English as a pre- requisite to entering  politics at the federal level.  Once that is done the Buhari debacle would not repeat itself.  Not only that if that is applied to the other 3 lingua francas federal politics will be sanitised because.

1.  It will ensure only those who respect the other broad cultures in the country practice politics at the federal level.  The cultural acrimonies will be lessened.

2.  Learning itself disciplines the mind so we will have more disciplined federal politicians.

Nigerians are currently demonstrating the cultural inferiority complex that no Nigerian language can be made to stand shoulder to shoulder with English as lingua franca.  A country like India passed that stage a long time ago.

As at now the only pre- requisites are general minimum education, age and money with the last being the most decisive.  Any money bags or any one with money bags backer can get inti politics to go in search of more money without any higher disciplined goals.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooq...@gmail.com>

Date: 26/03/2020 04:19 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Haba!

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[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Oga Michael,

As usual, you've made several penetratingly insightful points that bear testimony to your admirable multidisciplinary scholarship. I have an anecdotal experience to support the point you made about how proficiency in written English by a non-native speaker can be notionally "undermined" by the "thickness" of the foreign accent of the speaker.

In the early days of the Internet when I hadn't visited any country where English is spoken as a native language, I used to be active in Yahoo groups. In my cyber interactions at the time, no native speaker believed I was Nigerian. One American grandmother from Illinois (whom I later physically met and with whom I am now friends many years later) was so sure that I was a Londoner lying about being a Nigerian that she asked for my Nigerian number. She thought I either would not be able to provide one or would give her a random Nigerian number. Either way, she thought, her point would be made.

I gave her my number and she called. The fact that I could discuss the content of our group chat convinced her that I was indeed the person I said I was. But I sensed that she was taken aback by the disjunction between the "thickness" of my English accent and the written proficiency she admired during our interaction. When we finally met in 2005, she confessed that she expected to hear a British accent.

Nonetheless, I disagree that "this North-South English usage dichotomy is tantamount to two captives fighting over who cleans the whip of their master the more. We need to snap out of it and put our linguistic house in order."

English is now, for all practical purposes, a non-ethnic language that has emerged as the world's lingua franca. There are now more non-native English speakers in the world than there are native English speakers. So the notion of English as "the whip of [the] master" is, sorry to say, now passé. As you know, I come from a border area. There is no educated Beninese I know who doesn't speak and write very good English--and, we all, of course, know they weren't colonized by Britain. 

It turns out that there are more Benin Republic Baatonu people in the US than there are Nigerian Baatonu people. My wife remarked the other day that the Benin Republic Baatonu people she has met here (and in Benin Republic itself when we traveled there in 2016) tend to speak better English than Nigerian Baatonu people. 

She is right. Many Nigerians are still burdened by this notion that proficiency in English is a capitulation to neocolonialist domination. Other people in the world have a more instrumentalist attitude to the language: it's nothing more than a passport to social mobility in a world that is dominated and defined, at least for now, by the English language.

As I've always said in my interventions, no one is infragibly wired to express thoughts only in the language of their early socialization. Because all the concepts with which I make sense of the world are learned in English, not in my native Baatonu language, I think in English and express my thoughts better and more coherently in it (with my Baatonu-inflected accent, of course!) than in my native language.

Accentual diversity is natural to all languages. Accents, as you know more than I do, are markers of geo-cultural zones, of social status, of educational socialization, etc. There are several accents in even Oyo Yoruba. And, among my Nigerian Baatonu people, there are at least three different accents; there are way more in Benin Republic.

Among native English speakers, as I pointed out earlier, there's a multiplicity of accents. Some accents are privileged and enjoy prestige. Others are not. That we speak English with different accents from native speakers and mock each other over it, in my opinion, is neither an indication of an internalization of inferiority nor a reason to discard the language. 

To give another example, non-native Hausa speakers in West Africa (who now outnumber native speakers) not only speak the Hausa language with different accents but also mock each other's non-native Hausa accents. Heck, Kano Hausa speakers delight in ridiculing the Sokoto dialect of the language called Sakkwatanci. Is that a reason to stop non-native Hausa speakers from speaking Hausa as a lingua franca in their linguistically plural communities? I don't think so.

Farooq

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/562067935.1520839.1585221406010%40mail.yahoo.com.

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Farooq. has just joined my campaign to call on the federal government to institute without further delay the implementation of all the Nigerian lingua francas across the nation no matter with what accents these accents are being spoken.

Accent refinements can then feature in the second stage consolidation of the programme. Imagine language teachers teaching both Yoruba and English in the North or a Farooq on a sabbatical in Ibadan teaching both English and Hausa.

Come on federal government! You have nothing to lose but stand to gain enormous job creation potentials and an integrated  closer Nigerian society.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooq...@gmail.com>

Date: 26/03/2020 17:28 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Haba!

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (farooq...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Oga Michael,

As usual, you've made several penetratingly insightful points that bear testimony to your admirable multidisciplinary scholarship. I have an anecdotal experience to support the point you made about how proficiency in written English by a non-native speaker can be notionally "undermined" by the "thickness" of the foreign accent of the speaker.

In the early days of the Internet when I hadn't visited any country where English is spoken as a native language, I used to be active in Yahoo groups. In my cyber interactions at the time, no native speaker believed I was Nigerian. One American grandmother from Illinois (whom I later physically met and with whom I am now friends many years later) was so sure that I was a Londoner lying about being a Nigerian that she asked for my Nigerian number. She thought I either would not be able to provide one or would give her a random Nigerian number. Either way, she thought, her point would be made.

I gave her my number and she called. The fact that I could discuss the content of our group chat convinced her that I was indeed the person I said I was. But I sensed that she was taken aback by the disjunction between the "thickness" of my English accent and the written proficiency she admired during our interaction. When we finally met in 2005, she confessed that she expected to hear a British accent.

Nonetheless, I disagree that "this North-South English usage dichotomy is tantamount to two captives fighting over who cleans the whip of their master the more. We need to snap out of it and put our linguistic house in order."

English is now, for all practical purposes, a non-ethnic language that has emerged as the world's lingua franca. There are now more non-native English speakers in the world than there are native English speakers. So the notion of English as "the whip of [the] master" is, sorry to say, now passé. As you know, I come from a border area. There is no educated Beninese I know who doesn't speak and write very good English--and, we all, of course, know they weren't colonized by Britain. 

It turns out that there are more Benin Republic Baatonu people in the US than there are Nigerian Baatonu people. My wife remarked the other day that the Benin Republic Baatonu people she has met here (and in Benin Republic itself when we traveled there in 2016) tend to speak better English than Nigerian Baatonu people. 

She is right. Many Nigerians are still burdened by this notion that proficiency in English is a capitulation to neocolonialist domination. Other people in the world have a more instrumentalist attitude to the language: it's nothing more than a passport to social mobility in a world that is dominated and defined, at least for now, by the English language.

As I've always said in my interventions, no one is infragibly wired to express thoughts only in the language of their early socialization. Because all the concepts with which I make sense of the world are learned in English, not in my native Baatonu language, I think in English and express my thoughts better and more coherently in it (with my Baatonu-inflected accent, of course!) than in my native language.

Accentual diversity is natural to all languages. Accents, as you know more than I do, are markers of geo-cultural zones, of social status, of educational socialization, etc. There are several accents in even Oyo Yoruba. And, among my Nigerian Baatonu people, there are at least three different accents; there are way more in Benin Republic.

Among native English speakers, as I pointed out earlier, there's a multiplicity of accents. Some accents are privileged and enjoy prestige. Others are not. That we speak English with different accents from native speakers and mock each other over it, in my opinion, is neither an indication of an internalization of inferiority nor a reason to discard the language. 

To give another example, non-native Hausa speakers in West Africa (who now outnumber native speakers) not only speak the Hausa language with different accents but also mock each other's non-native Hausa accents. Heck, Kano Hausa speakers delight in ridiculing the Sokoto dialect of the language called Sakkwatanci. Is that a reason to stop non-native Hausa speakers from speaking Hausa as a lingua franca in their linguistically plural communities? I don't think so.

Farooq

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 7:24 AM 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/562067935.1520839.1585221406010%40mail.yahoo.com.

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[Cornelius Hamelberg]

Sir, 

I hope that I'm not being merely facetious mischievous when I ask, "Shouldn’t the Nobel Prize in Literature be awarded to Nigeria’s best English speaker?"  After all, you  and Wole Soyinka  both belong to the same club and you were both awarded an Honorary D.Litt

 

With all the national chest-beating about the New Nigerian words  that have just been admitted into the Oxford English Dictionary, the time is ripe for the altercation that has started about which sections of the Nigerian language groups have contributed most to the latest English Dictionary and  in some circles,  even  more importantly, who are the “best” Nigerian English speakers?

Is should do us a world of good to take note of the Devil’s Dictionary definition of Bigot

BIGOT, n. One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

On a much lighter note: For your eyes and for your amusement only:

Victor Borge: Phonetic punctuation

Speaking as an English Language analyst and language detective, I daresay that in my own personal experience in relating to homegrown Africans, including Nigerians, as far as pronunciation is concerned it would seem that the Hausa Speakers – whether from Ghana or Nigeria, are naturally closer to having a British type accent. The little dust that Baba Kadiri is trying to raise about his fellow Yoruba from Ekiti having  language interference problems with sibilants, well, the same is true of Wolof speakers from Senegal and the Gambia when it comes to saying a simple word like “ Church” – not that as Muslims they probably have some trepidation about merely enunciating that word, it’s just that they have a general problem with sibilants and the litmus test for the Ekiti brethren too, is this little tongue twister test: she sells shells on the seashore.

( The Sierra Leone Creoles speak both English and Krio with a very pronounced  French “ R”,   whereas the Mandarin Chinese love the “L” sound   - “L – as in “love” but have some difficulty with the “R” sound, so that “room” becomes “loom” - but with a little practice they overcome that impediment.  As the saying goes, amor vincit omnia (love overcomes all difficulties) When it comes to language interference Swedes for example usually have problems with some of the prepositions - “ I came to Kano for two days ago “ is a typical Swedish construct in which the preposition “ for “ is transferred from Swedish into English, to express the same meaning.

 The Sephardim and the Ashkenazi have their differences when it comes to the pronunciation of the liturgy in the Holy Hebrew language;  the transliterations in the Siddur accentuate their differences. From the Sephardim point of view, the Ashkenazi have imported their peculiar German and Yiddish pronunciation into the Holy tongue. The good news is that the Almighty understands and forgives the various infelicities of speech.

More seriously, while we still have time down here on earth before COVID-19 or some other genocidal calamity sweeps us all away to the Hereafter and whatever awaits us after that, there, I think that  there must be some means by  which we should be able to determine which  individual and which ethnic group in Nigeria, is best at speaking Her Majesty The Queen’s English. After all, when we bear in mind that English has been the Official Language of the Federal Republic Nigeria since Nigeria attained Independence in 1960, the importance of that Language should not be underestimated. It is the language of The Law and of the Holy Nigerian Constitution, it’s the language of governance and good government; it’s the language of good or bad grammar, pronunciation, and understanding.

If Boko Haram have their way, who knows, at a future date it could be replaced by Arabic, the language of the Holy Quran.

 Indeed, at a future date the Queen’s English could be replaced or displaced by Swahili as the Pan-African language, the official language of the United States of Africa. Who knows? It could even be replaced by Yoruba, Hausa or Fulani.  If the upstart “I. go. Before. others” Igbos start agitating that they want their mother tongue to reign supreme and be adopted as the official language of the Federal Republic, they shall probably either all be drowned in that Lagos lagoon or they could voluntarily set off to some other place to start their Republic of Biafra somewhere else, maybe start a little colony in neighbouring Cameroon.

In the meantime, this much should be clear: We can’t go on arguing forever, in the very language that we are disputing about. There must be a way of finally settling this palaver, for once and for all. We could take the matter to court, if you like, all the way up to the Privy Council, on condition that the litigants will accept the final judgment of those appointed as judges by Her Majesty’s Sanitary Language inspectors, a turn of phrase I got from one Kayode Robbin-Coker ( a cousin)  and that’s what he does for a living  - he is one of Her Majesty’s Sanitary Language Inspectors, over there ina Ingland.

As senior counsel representing the plaintiffs from the East, I should recommend Emeka Anyaoku – because of the  characteristic, measured  authoritarian air about him,  and I should recommend that he be assisted by one Obododimma Oha,  distinguished professor of rhetoric , Cultural Semiotics and English stylistics. They can quote from their gods  the great Igbo writers all day long, if they choose to prove to buttress their claims by doing so.

I would suggest that Professor Malami Buba , a man of balance and discretion  represent the Far North , assisted by the one and only  Professor  Farooq Kperogi, certified as “an authority on English and on language” by one no less than Professor Kenneth Harrow, author of “ Trash: African Cinema from Below”

 So, who should represent the Yoruba?  I know that Baba Kadiri would like to quote all day long from Daniel O. Fagunwa and the pantheon of Yoruba Literature – only to be kindly re-minded that it’s the Buckingham Palace English that we’re talking about.  Those who would like to vanquish our Yoruba would much prefer that we only quote  from Amos Tutuola, all day long. They should remember Bishop Krister Stendhal’s rules 2 and 3:

(2) Don't compare your best to their worst.

 (3) Leave room for “holy envy.

As to leaving some room for” holy envy”. there’s plenty of room to speculate about who should represent the West and the South.

 If  Sierra Leone was to enter into the competition and we would have to start quoting from some published works, I should recommend that we start with the very latest and that’s what I’m redoing right now: John Edward Bankole Jones : A Mother's Dilemma

--

[Salimonu Kadiri]

​Once upon a time, the late Enoch Powell of Britain was credited with saying that Black (African) people always meet every problem in life with laughter, drum-assisted song and dance. Whereas the whole world is taking measures to limit the spread of COVID-19 and combat it, all that the Nigerian intellectuals, especially the self-exiled economic migrants, could do is to engage in sarcastic satire over different pronunciations of English words in Southern and Northern Nigeria. In his nationwide broadcast on Coronavirus, Buhari has not only been ridiculed but declared demented, because he pronounced COVID-19, in one of many varieties of Nigerian accents of speaking English language. In fact, Buhari's broadcast is the genesis of the discussion over a purported claim that Southerners always think that they speak better English than Northerners in Nigeria. Nigerian intellectuals have reduced Coronavirus pandemic to the issue of how the coded name, COVID-19, is pronounced by Northerners and Southerners in Nigeria. According to WHO, non-medical means of preventing the spread of COVID-19 are, social-distancing, avoid overcrowding, and frequent washing of hands.

​Considering these socio-structural and non-medical measures, Nigeria is already doomed before the arrival of COVID-19. For how can one maintain social-distance in Nigeria where most residents throughout the country are of the type known as face-me-I-face-you rooms? In a ten-room face-me-I-face-you apartment with one pit toilet, which is the commonest in every big city and town in Nigeria, as much as 15 people can share a room. In a three-bed-room flat, it is not unusual to find twenty people residing there. In addition to this, residents in both face-me-I-face-you and three-bed-room flats depend on MAIRUWA, water vendors, for their daily need of water. Yet the sanitary value in washing hands frequently requires running water and not just washing hands in a bowl. Majority of Nigerians who are crowded in their face-me-I-face-you rooms or three-bed-room apartments and are dependent on water vendors are already conditioned not to maintain the minimum 2 metres social distance to one another and to wash hands frequently. COVID-19 is dangerous, but the most dangerous to Nigerians are the public officials because of their general policy of acquiring money illicitly at the expense of the people they are elected/employed and paid to serve. The Nigerian public servants, political or employed, are responsible for creating the infrastructural environments in which any infection, disease or virus, apart from COVID-19 can thrive because funds set aside for infrastructural developments have been stolen with impunity. While the logorrhoea afflicted misanthropes continue to harangue Buhari for pronouncing COVID-19 to their dislike, it is very comforting to read the post of Toyin Falola posted, on 27 March 2020, on this forum and titled - Coronavirus : Nigerian Update. Among other things, he wrote, "Today marked the inaugural meeting of the Presidential Taskforce National Pandemic Response Centre. All the necessary Working Groups have been inaugurated today. …//… WHO,UNICEF, UNDP, CDC, World Bank, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation … are partnering the Taskforce with technical and financial support." According to the post, millions of dollars had already flown into the account of the Taskforce. Will Coronavirus fund in the care of Nigerian public servants be used for the purpose for which it is donated? Few examples will do to explain my fear for Nigeria's public officials' unquenchable thirst to appropriate to themselves public funds at the expense of the wellbeing of the citizens.

Many Nigerians of today may not have heard about the KOKO TOXIC WASTE DEPOSIT IN THE DELTA, NIGERIA, IN 1987. It was an Italian businessman, named Gianfrance Raffaeli who gave his address in Nigeria then as No. 126 A, Nnebisi Road, Asaba, that imported the toxic wastes into Nigeria. Mr. Raffaelli, in one of his missives to Messrs S. I. Ecomar, a Company in the Italian waste disposal business and member of Saint Antuan, that had asked it to "ship your industrial raw materials to us in Nigeria." Gianfrance Raffaelli followed up his request by seeking and obtaining approval of the PHARMACISTS BOARD OF NIGERIA to import  and clear 20 lists of INDUSTRIAL & LABORATORY CHEMICALS into Nigeria. Thereafter, he approached one Sunday Nana, a farmer in Koko, near Warri, to rent his backyard at a cost of 300 US dollars per month to deposit 8,000 drums containing about 4,000 metric tonnes of Raffaelli's purported industrial raw materials. What later proved to be toxic waste drums were imported into Nigeria from the port city of Italy's central region of Tuscany. The toxic wastes had been deposited at Koko for eight months before the then 23-year-old female freelance journalist, Racaelli Gonalli got wind of the story and published it in L'Unita, a leftist provincial Newspaper that exposed the toxic wastes' deposit in June 1988. Patriotic Nigerians in Italy traveled to Nigeria to alert the media about the toxic deposits. Gianraffaelli fled  Nigeria immediately after the 8,000 drums were discovered and found to contain toxic and radioactive wastes. The Minister of work at that time, Brigadier Mamman Kontagora supervised the evacuation of the drums by Nigerian Ports Authority personnel, some of which had already started leaking. Sunday Nanna in whose backyard the drums were deposited died 3 March 1990. Ninety-four personnel of the Nigerian Ports Authority that took part in the evacuation suffered serious health hazard immediately and filed suits against the NPA. It was not until April 2008, 20 years after, that a settlement out of court to pay a total sum of N39.7 million to the victims of the evacuation was agreed to by the NPA.  Seven of the victims were officers while the rest were ordinary staffs. This Day online of 4 April 2008 wrote, "One of the victims, Mr. Peter Eromuakpor, thanked NPA for the compensation, but requested for free medical treatment for life. According to him, some of them (the victims) had died and so many were still sick, noting that the cost of treatment (resulting from the evacuation injuries) was very high." What happened to the compensations due to those who had died must be a good guess for you and me. Worth to note in the Koko Toxic Wastes deposit is that the Italian man in Nigeria Gianfrance Raffaelli, applied and obtained approval from Pharmacists Board of Nigeria to import and clear 20 lists of Industrial and Laboratory Chemicals into Nigeria; the Deputy Director of Nigerian Custom at that time owned together with another Italian man a registered Clearing Agent Company which facilitated Mr. Raffaelli's smooth clearance of his goods at the port without proper inspection to certify that the imported goods were as approved in the import license. Up till today nobody at the Nigerian Port Authority has been held responsible for importation and clearance of the Toxic and radioactive wastes from Italy  into Nigeria, in 1987.

 Washington Post newspaper reported in 2001 that a US pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, tested antibiotic known as Trovafloxacin or Trovan during the outbreak, in Kano, of a three pronged epidemic of cholera, measles, and cerebrospinal meningitis in 1996. According to Washington Post, over 500 children who contracted meningitis during the 1996 meningitis Trovan trials died. About 200 others who survived the administration of Trovafloxacin were either deaf or dumb. William Steer, Chief Executive of Pfizer defended the drug trials at an interview with Washington Post, claiming that Pfizer had the support of the Health Ministry during the trials and met all necessary criteria. Kano Commissioner of Health during the period, Nafisatu Kabir, told Washington Post that she was not aware of the trials. She blamed Idris Mohammed, a professor of medicine and Chairman of the Federal Task Force on epidemic control at that time, who supervised the trials. Idris Mohammed who by 2001 had become provost of the University of Maiduguri claimed, according to Washington post to have written to Abacha's Minister of Health, Ihechukwu Madubuike, saying, "No multinational Company should be allowed to use innocent Nigerians suffering from such deadly epidemic as guinea pigs." Madubuike did not deny receiving such letter from Idris Mohammed but he claimed to have replied him thus, "Only when your relationship with Pfizer soured, when the Company could not reportedly meet your personal demands did you cry foul. Madubuike added, "You were chairman of the Taskforce on epidemic control, you were reported to have expressed satisfaction with the protocol before the trial began and you participated in the trial in a supervisory role." 

Washington Post's report caused Olusegun Obasanjo's federal government to set up an investigative Committee headed by Ahmed Nasidi, then a Director, Special Projects at the Federal Ministry of Health. His subsequent report revealed that when the meningitis broke out in Kano in 1996, Sam Ohuabunwa, the then Chairman of Pfizer Nigeria Plc, later Naimeth International Pharmaceutical Company, approached the Minister of Health then, Mr. Ihechuchwu Madubuike, and expressed the intention of Pfizer to assist in the effort at curbing the spread of the epidemic. Mr. Madubuike facilitated the issuance of a duty exemption to Pfizer for importation of Trovafloxacin (Trovan) and other drugs/medical supplies without expert's advice. Mr. A. E. Ike, then a special assistant to the Minister of Health, Mr. Madubuike, was directed by the Minister to write a letter dated 28 March 1996, inviting Robert Buhl of Pfizer to bring the drug to Nigeria. Mr. Ike confessed to the Committee that he did not know what Trovan is used for but he had specifically been requested by Pfizer to include Trovan in the letter. Pfizer's applied to National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) for approval to use Trovafloxacin in Kano was dated 15 March 1996 and NAFDAC consented to it in its reply of 20 March 1996. However, NAFDAC maintained during investigation that its approval to Pfizer's request was for investigational purposes and not to conduct clinical trials. After the clinical trials had begun, the Chairman of the Federal Taskforce for Control of Epidemic at that time, Dr. Idris Mohammed wanted the trial stopped until a proper approval was obtained from NAFDAC but the Director General of Kano State Ministry of Health, Dr. Sanda Mohammed directed Pfizer to continue, claiming that the hospital belonged to Kano Ministry of Health and not the taskforce. The then Kano State Commissioner for Health, Nafisat Kabir and the then DG in Kano's health ministry jointly visited the trial ward later. A week and a half after the trial had commenced Pfizer made donations of N6.3 million to Kano State officials. On 23 April 1996, Dr. Sanda Mohammed, wrote on behalf of Kano State Government Ministry of Health and Social Services expressing gratitude to Pfizer. 

Dr. Isa Dutse, then Chief Medical Director at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital was made the principal investigator for the clinical trial. He had previously worked for Pfizer. Dr. Isa Dutse recruited patients for the Trovafloxacin trial without written records of patients (actually children) and the consent of the children's parents. Six months after the trial and the consequences were known, Pfizer contacted Dr. Isa Dutse to obtain ethical clearance certificate for the trial. Dr. Isa Dutse, who was paid twenty thousand US dollars ($20,000) single-handedly issued a backdated ethical clearance certificate even though no ethical committee existed at that time at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital. At the time of investigations on Trovafloxacin in 2001, Dr. Isa Dutse had progressed to be a professor and Chief Medical Director at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital. By the time the Federal Government completed its enquiry on Pfizer's Trovafloxacin clinic trials in Kano in 1996, it became public that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)  cleared Trovafloxacin for Adult use in 1997 and swiftly became established as one of the most prescribed antibiotics in the US. However, it was later associated with reports of liver damage and deaths which prompted FDA in 1999 to restrict its use to serious adult cases. In the same 1999, European drug regulators recommended Trovafloxacin's suspension from the European Market, a decision that has since been made permanent, according to Pfizer's website as at 2007. As a result of its investigation, the Federal Government of Nigeria sued Pfizer International Incorporated (PII) for $7 billion as a compensation for the Trovafloxacin tests conducted on two-hundred children in Kano State in 1996. The Federal Government alleged that Pfizer under the guise of a humanitarian gesture illegally administered Trovafloxacin Mesylate on about 200 children in Kano. The children reportedly used as guinea pigs by the company ended up with adverse effects like deafness, muteness, paralysis, brain damage, lost sight, slurred speech and death. In the suit which was filed at an Abuja Federal High Court on 4 June 2007, the Federal Government accused Pfizer of fraudulent misrepresentation, illegal/unethical conduct and practice, negligence and contravention of customary international law. Named defendants in the suit were Pfizer International Incorporated (PII), Pfizer Nigeria Ltd (PNL), William Steere, Samuel Ohuanbunwa, A. Dogunro, Isa Dutse, Scott Hopkins, Mike Dunne, Debra Williams and Robert Buhl. At the time of the TROVAN trials, William Steere was the Chief Executive Officer of PII, Samuel Ohuanbunwa was the Chief Executive Officer of PNL, Dogunro was a medical doctor employed by PNL, Dutse was a medical doctor and Principal Investigator of the PII test. Hopkins, Dunne, and Williams were medical doctors employed by PII to carry out the test. 

Towards the middle of 2009, Pfizer and Kano State Government opted to settle out of court as Pfizer agreed to pay $75 million (seventy-five million US dollars) compensation. Of the 75 million dollars, the victims of the trial were to share 35 million dollars, while the government of Kano State would receive 30 million dollars and 10 million dollars for the legal expenses incurred during the trial. Why was Pfizer reaching out of court settlement with Kano State government when it was the Federal government that set up a Committee to inquire into Trovafloxacin experiment on Kano children in 1996? The answer is that Kano State followed the enquiry and knew that the Federal government was likely to sue Pfizer for damages and before the Federal government could do that Kano State government filed a suit against PII on May 18, 2007, to claim 2.7 billion dollars for using Kano children as guinea pigs in 1996. For Pfizer, it was much easier to deal with Kano State government that was claiming $2.7 billion than with Federal government, claiming $7 billion. Moreover, Pfizer's agreement with Kano State government served to void Federal Government's suit against Pfizer. Kano State government of 2009 was to benefit from the collaboration of the government of Kano State in 1996 with Pfizer in using about 200 Kano children for Trovafloxacin experiment.

​On October 4, 2009, the Attorney General and Commissioner of Justice in Kano State, Barrister Aliyu Umar, confirmed that Kano State government had received $10 million from Pfizer, being part of the $75 million out of court settlement. At the same time, he said that medical records of the children of the 1996 Pfizer Trovafloxacin clinical trials could not be found either at the Kano State Ministry of Health or at the Infectious Diseases Hospital where the ill-fated clinical trials of the drug were conducted. Barrister Umar said that the initial plan was that the whole compensation was to be finally settled by October 15, 2009, but the process had been extended by three months because of some unforeseen hitches. According to Barrister Umar, Kano State government would use its 30 million dollars compensation for the construction of a disease control center as well as diagnostic centre in order to discourage patients from travelling abroad for medical treatment. For that purpose Pfizer-Kano State Healthcare Programme Trust Fund was set up to oversee the construction of a disease control and diagnostic centre in Kano. The Healthcare Trust Fund was headed by Professor Shehu Galadanchi with following members : Architect Ibrahim Haruna, Dr. Habibu Sadanki, Alhaji Adamu Jafiya, Adamu Aliyu Kiyawa and Professor Auwalu Hamisu Yadudu. 

As for the disbursement of the 35 million dollars compensation to the victims of Trovafloxacin, Pfizer and Kano State set up a Meningitis Healthcare Trust Fund chaired by Justice Abubakar Bashir Wali with other members named as Dr. Musa Borodo, Professor Mu'uta Ibrahim, Justice S.M.A. Belgore, Dr. Prosper Igboeli, and Professor Isa Hassim. Of the 10 million dollars released by Pfizer, Barrister Aliyu Umar stated on 4 October 2009, that $4.5 million had been set aside as logistics and operational costs of the two trust funds jointly set up by Pfizer and Kano State government for compensation and construction of the proposed healthcare projects in Kano. Eleven years after Pfizer reached 75 million dollars out of court settlement with Kano State government over illegal administration of Trovafloxacin Mesylate on 200 children in Kano causing deaths and other hazards, not a single cent has been paid to any victim of the trial as their records could not be found. And the construction of a control and diagnostic centre in Kano is yet to start in 2020. The purpose of this long narration is to point out that some Nigerian public officers (northerners and southerners) allowed Pfizer in 1996 to experiment a hazardous medicine on Nigerian children after receiving gratifications from Pfizer. Another set of Nigerian public officers received compensation on behalf of the victims of medical experiment but failed to deliver the money to the rightful owners. In their mad quest for plenty money without work educated Nigerians, regardless of profession, always act thoughtlessly and irresponsibly. ​

https://punchng.com/abuja-quack-doctor-arrested-after-10-years-practice/ 

https://www.premiumtimesng.com/health/health-interviews/344053-nigerian-hospital-treats-man-for-large-brain-tumour-that-was-never-there-patient.html 

Nigerian hospital treats man for 'large brain tumour' that was never there - Patient - Premium Times Nigeria About two weeks after a Nigerian police officer, Dauda Fika, accused Cedar Crest, an Abuja- based private hospital of wrong diagnosis, the hospital’s management has refused to respond to the ... www.premiumtimesng.com

​Following the publication of Dr. Michael Gottlieb report in the US CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report No. 30 of 5 June 1981, about five homosexual patients with suppressed immune defence, Jim Curran of the CDC wrote an editorial on it saying, "The occurrence of Pneumocystis in these five previously healthy individuals without a clinically underlying immunodeficiency is unsettling. The fact that these patients were all homosexuals suggests an association between some aspect of a homosexual lifestyle or disease acquired through sexual contact and Pneumocystis pneumonia in this population. All of the above observations suggest the possibility of a cellular-immune dysfunction related to a common exposure that predisposes individuals to opportunistic infections such as Pneumocystis and Candidiasis." Not surprisingly, the disease was named, Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID). Since a disease associated only with the homosexuals would not generate research funds from the government or attract public sympathy, virologists in the US quickly changed the name of the disease to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in August 1982. Certain virologists from the US, Centre for Disease Control, quickly asserted that AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease that could affect not just the homosexuals, but all mankind and the search for its cause began. The chief protagonist of putting the cause and origin of AIDS in Africa was Robert Charles Gallo who was appointed in August 1982 as a Director of AIDS research at National Cancer Institute (NCI). In his book published in 1991, Gallo narrated, "Intellectually, I began to play out one scenario. What if AIDS were due to mutation of an HTLV, probably occurring in Africa, which had spread to Haiti, then to the United States (p.136, Virus Hunting, AIDS, CANCER & The Human Retrovirus By Robert Gallo, M.D.)?" Besides Time Magazine, 30 April 1984, and Newsweek Magazine, 7 May 1984, Robert Gallo was quoted to have said in the January 1987 issue of  Scientific American thus, "AIDS is probably the result of a new infection of human beings that began in central Africa, perhaps as recently as the 50s. From there it probably spread to the Caribbean and then to the US and Europe (Gallo R.C., The AIDS Virus, Scientific American, 1987; Vol.256 :38-48)" Writing on what is the origin of AIDS and the AIDS virus in his VIRUS HUNTING, Robert Gallo noted on p. 227 thus, "Amazingly, in the early part of my research on AIDS (early 1983) I was visited by Ann Guidicci Fettner, a freelance writer who told me emphatically that the origins and epicenter of the epidemic were in a river basin near Lake Victoria. She also stated that she believed the virus came from African green monkeys, apparently due to her experiences and observations in central Africa." Unfortunately for Robert Gallo, Ann Guidici Fettner co-authored a book, published in 1984, with Dr. William A. Check, titled : The Truth About AIDS - Evolution of an Epidemic. Fettner and Check wrote on  page 2 thus, "Another crystallization has occurred, its (AIDS) cause unknown, its (AIDS) origins obscure." Further on page four the authors stated, "Even in equatorial Africa where some suspicion of the genesis of AIDS is focused, no previous reports of such an illness are known to physicians long treating this population. This is a book co-authored by Ann Guidici Fettner with William A. Check a year after Gallo claimed she had informed him that AIDS and the virus that caused it originated in Africa. The whole of Africa was colonized by Western Europe and all the hospitals there were founded and manned by Europeans medical personnel. So, if AIDS had been in Africa, European personnel would have recognized it and Europeans would have contracted it direct from Africa and not from the US. But because Robert Gallo is an American medical doctor and a virologist, he thought he could place the origin and cause of AIDS in Africa with the help of hypothetical words,  perhaps and probably which a proven fact, especially, in science would not need. Contrary to Gallo's assertion that AIDS started in Africa from where Haitians took it back home to infect American tourists who took it back home to the US and who in turn infected their brethren in Europe, Fettner and Check wrote, "AIDS started as an *American* disease. But it is spreading in Europe and perhaps in black Africa (p. 244)." It is remarkable that Fettner and Check were only certain that AIDS was spreading in America and Europe but not in Africa which was why they wrote perhaps in Black Africa.

When AIDS reached Sweden in the early 1980s, and Sweden being a welfare state, its government quickly set up what was called AIDS Delegation to tackle what was then assumed to be a great scourge. By 1991, the picture of the AIDS scourge had become clear and the former vice-chancellor of Karolinska Institute, Professor Hans Wigzell, noted, "At moment the epidemic is approximately spreading at double rate every year, but it is likely that the rate of spread with time is going to reduce depending on the fact that the virus so far is found in people with a special lifestyle (p. 114, Vårt Fantastiska Immun Försvar by Hans Wigzell. My translation from Swedish to English)." Who were the people with special lifestyle that Professor Hans Wigzell referred to? The people became known in the PR and Media newspaper named 'Resumé' in its 21 May 1992 issue. The front-page was captioned, Erroneous image of threat : AIDS-delegation confirms that advertisements distort reality. A medical doctor and Secretary to the AIDS-delegation, Johan Wallin, spoke frankly in the newspaper's interview. He said, "It was impossible to go out and describe this as a gay-plague for the reason that then the homosexual organisations would have offered resistance. It was important that we carried them along with us; The campaigns have been directed to all sexually active - latest in the Garberg's produced stories - despite that it thereby stood clear that one avoided to point out the bigger problem that is called analsex and which is practised mainly by the homosexual men; When certain doctors, some years ago warned that hundred-thousands of Swedes would contract AIDS, one should not forget that those who spread the doom-day mood were themselves interested parties, including the homosexual organisations." On Friday, 24 July 1992, the Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, published an article on page four, titled : Widespread Desinformation about AIDS, authored by a Professor of Immunology, Göran Möller. He wrote, ''There is something strange with AIDS. Alarming figures are spread about the number of AIDS sick and the prognoses over the development of AIDS are frightening. Contradictory messages are given about who the risk groups are.'' Naming some doctors in Sweden, he wrote, "Their main message is that AIDS can affect all and after all kinds of sex. A certain scepticism is justified. At the beginning of AIDS disease in Sweden, night-black prognoses were also spread in a very high sound range by Swedish experts. Now we know that their prognoses were wrong." After examining figures that were being touted around, professor Möller concluded that ''persons who are engaged in AIDS research have certain interest of amplifying the spread of the disease. All can be affected by AIDS, we have heard. But is that true?"   By 1996, USA and Europe (at least Western part of it) had agreed that HIV, the virus they claimed was the cause of AIDS is transmitted among homosexuals, drug addicts and prostitutes in Europe and the US but in Africa it is absolutely transmitted heterosexually. How true was that?

Figures were manufactured that the entire Black Africa was about to be extinguished by HIV infections and AIDS deaths. US and Europe claimed that South Africa was shielded from HIV/AIDS during the Apartheid era but when Apartheid ended in 1994 and its borders were opened, it led to the influx of people giving rise to sudden explosion of AIDS deaths in South Africa. In an interview in the Newsweek of December 8, 1997, the head of US controlled United Nations AIDS (UNAIDS) program, Dr. Peter Piot said, "We are now realizing that the rates of HIV transmission have been grossly underestimated, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the bulk of infections have been concentrated. UNAIDS now estimates that 7.4 percent of Africans 15 to 49 (years old) are infected. Because voluntary testing are so rare, at least 90 percent don't even know that the virus is lurking in their body fluids (p. 41-42)." On what did Peter Piot's UNAIDS base his estimates of HIV infected Africans without tests when by nature of the Virus it could not be seen on the face of the infected until it had developed to AIDS after about five years of infection? Three years later, the American Daily, International Herald Tribune of 12 May 2000 wrote that "by some estimates more than 95% of the millions of infected people in AFRICA have never had an Aids test." Of course the International Herald Tribune meant HIV test, the virus, HIV, said to be the cause of the incurable disease, AIDS, that leads to ultimate death and not AIDS test. In Nigeria, it was not until December 1, 2006 that President Olusegun Obasanjo flagged off National Counselling and Testing Programme by publicly submitting himself to an HIV screening test during the World's Aids Day ceremony in Abuja. Thereafter, he urged Nigerians through the media to test themselves to know their HIV status. That happened 25 years after the immune system of some American homosexual men were reported to have been compromised by what was later agreed to be called HIV by the government of US and France. Were there obvious massive AIDS deaths in Nigeria, in 2006, warranting the suspicion of ongoing large scale infections of HIV in the country? This question was indirectly answered on Friday, 29 December 2006, when the National Population Commission (NPC), chaired by Chief Sumaila Makama submitted a provisional population census figure to the Chairman-in-Council of the Federal Executive Council, President Olusegun Obasanjo. The new population figure of Nigeria was put at 140,003,542 (over 140 million). The new figure showed an increase of 51,011,322 (over 51 million) when compared with the census figure of 1991 that put the population of Nigeria at 88,992,220 (almost 89 million). The population growth was put at 3.2 per cent per annum. The National Council of State met at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on 9 January 2007, and accepted the census figures presented by the NPC. Immediately after the meeting President Olusegun Obasanjo in a nationwide broadcast complained that the population growth of 3.2% per annum was too high and should be brought down. In other words if there was proliferation of HIV in Nigeria leading to massive deaths in AIDS, the population of the country should have been decimated instead of growing. Due to pressure from the United States, Obasanjo, like all Black Africa's leaders, was forced to invest state funds to prevent the spread of the fictitious virus called HIV in Nigeria. National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) with a Director was established at the Federal level followed by SACA and LACA in the 36 States and 774 local governments of Nigeria respectively. Since Obasanjo's era to the present, bogus statistics have been churned out periodically to tell how many Nigerians are infected with HIV. Between July and December 2018, the Government of Nigeria, with the support of the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Global Fund) and other development partners, with technical assistance from the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC), conducted what was termed Nigeria HIV/AIDS INDICATOR and Impact  Survey (NAIIS) on about 250,000 Nigerians containing nearly 100,000 households. Presenting the result of the survey in Abuja, on Thursday, 14 March 2019, the Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole, said that NAIIS findings provide Nigeria with an accurate national prevalence measure of 1.4 percent. The result of the survey, he said, shows that about 1.9 million Nigerians are currently living with HIV as against 3 million previously estimated. NAIIS HIV-prevalence, defined as the percentage of People Living with HIV in Nigeria was said to be among adults between age 15-49 years 1.4%; children between age 0-14 years, females between age 35-39 years was 3.3%; males between age 50-54 years was 2.3%; and the new prevalence of 1.9 million living with HIV in Nigeria was said to have been derived from people between age 0-64. What sense can one make of these statistics?

The survey was not based on a specific number of people per household, rather it stated that about 250, 000 in nearly 100,000 households took part in the survey, making it 2.5 persons per household, i.e. HIV in half a person. How many adults between the age of 15 and 49 participated in the survey that resulted in 1.4% HIV prevalence in the group? How many children, aged 0-14 in the survey gave 0.2% HIV prevalence? How many people, aged 0-64 years took part in the survey that led to the estimate (guess) of 1.9 million people living with HIV in Nigeria? Nigeria's HIV/AIDS business up till date can best be illustrated by what the former Harvard and John Hopkins Professor, Dr. Charles Thomas, a Molecular Biologist, said in 1994, ''AIDS is a cruel deception  that is maintained because so many people are making money from it. Take away this money and the entire system of mythology will collapse. The HIV-causes-AIDS dogma represents the grandest and perhaps the most morally destructive fraud that has ever been perpetrated on young men and women of the Western World (London Sunday Times, 3 April 1994)." There are no reported deaths from cases of AIDS in Nigeria but it is still a trend in year 2020 to engage in large scale screenings of Nigerians for the virus, HIV, said to be the cause of AIDS by some partisan scientists. Some Nigerians earn their livings by chasing shadow in their self-proclaimed combat against HIV. ​https://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2019/07/04/efcc-arraigns-director-for-stealing-n30m-hiv-aids-funds/      
https://www.tori.ng/news/123903/some-labs-are-giving-false-hiv-results-in-lagos-to-extort-money.html 

Some Labs Are Giving False HIV Results In Lagos To Extort Victims - Doctor Raises Alarm Nigerians have been warned to be wary about labs in Lagos issuing false HIV results to extort patients. www.tori.ng

​On the appearance of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) now codenamed COVID-19, its threat to Nigeria is not as great as that of public officials that are authorized to implement measures to curb/prevent the spread of the virus. The mental trait of Nigerian public officials, Muslims and Christians alike, is always geared towards earning money from afflictions and pains of their fellow citizens. Will Nigerians charged with the responsibility of testing people for COVID-19 be honest and not exploit their position to extort money by declaring uninfected person as infected while an infected person is left un- tested when money has changed hands? ​http://www.saharareporters.com/2020/03/30/uk-returnee-declared-positive-coronavirus-benue-cries-out-says-i'm-negative 

​S. Kadiri

​      

---

Från: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> för Cornelius Hamelberg <hamelberg...@gmail.com>
Skickat: den 26 mars 2020 18:40
Till: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Ämne: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Haba!

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAC50OP8%2B4Gp2QV1Vsoso%3DJXqEMRXFayqH7-NBU57ThtJRvk3uQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Julius Eto]

Dear SK,

God bless you for this piece.

This is the reason that our politicians deploy divisive ethno-religious politics to effective use for looting as moral lepers.

Some Labs Are Giving False HIV Results In Lagos
To Extort Victims - Doctor Raises Alarm

Nigerians have been warned to be wary about labs in Lagos issuing false HIV results to extort patients.

www.tori.ng



​On the appearance of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) now codenamed COVID-19, its threat to Nigeria is not as great as that of public officials that are authorized to implement measures to curb/prevent
the spread of the virus. The mental trait of Nigerian public officials, Muslims and Christians alike, is always geared towards earning money from afflictions and pains of their fellow citizens. Will Nigerians charged with the responsibility of testing people
for COVID-19 be honest and not exploit their position to extort money by declaring uninfected person as infected while an infected person is left un- tested when money has changed hands? ​http://www.saharareporters.com/2020/03/30/uk-returnee-declared-positive-coronavirus-benue-cries-out-says-i'm-negative
​S. Kadiri





​

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DM6PR07MB502052D38180B49A4CC410C3AECC0%40DM6PR07MB5020.namprd07.prod.outlook.com.

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Is the EFCC still operational in Nigeria or is their brief selective?

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: 'Julius Eto' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Date: 06/04/2020 18:03 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: Sv: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Haba!

Dear SK,

God bless you for this piece.

This is the reason that our politicians deploy divisive ethno-religious politics to effective use for looting as moral lepers.







 On Sunday, April 5, 2020, 11:10:10 PM GMT+1, Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Some Labs Are Giving False HIV Results In Lagos
 To Extort Victims - Doctor Raises Alarm

Nigerians have been warned to be wary about labs in Lagos issuing false HIV results to extort patients.

www.tori.ng



​On the appearance of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) now codenamed COVID-19, its threat to Nigeria is not as great as that of public officials that are authorized to implement measures to curb/prevent
 the spread of the virus. The mental trait of Nigerian public officials, Muslims and Christians alike, is always geared towards earning money from afflictions and pains of their fellow citizens. Will Nigerians charged with the responsibility of testing people
 for COVID-19 be honest and not exploit their position to extort money by declaring uninfected person as infected while an infected person is left un- tested when money has changed hands? ​http://www.saharareporters.com/2020/03/30/uk-returnee-declared-positive-coronavirus-benue-cries-out-says-i'm-negative
​S. Kadiri





​

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/DM6PR07MB502052D38180B49A4CC410C3AECC0%40DM6PR07MB5020.namprd07.prod.outlook.com.

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