Not at all amusing. A sorrowful meditation on the ongoing witch hunt about certificates
cornelius...@gmail.com
“You may be a businessman or some high-degree thief
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief”
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As Baba Kadiri put it, “Bola Ahmed Tinubu might not be the best President Nigerians deserve, but he is ten thousand times better than Atiku Abubakar (PDP) and Peter Gregory Obi (LP)”
That was no exaggeration. Our level-headed, cool, calm and collected Baba Kadiri is not known as one who has a penchant for hyperbole or big grammar and you read that right :
10,000
TEN THOUSAND TIMES
BETTER !
Because my heroes are people like I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson and Pa Michael Imoudu, at first I thought that it was the title of their academic degrees that Baba Kadiri had appended after their names: “Atiku Abubakar PDP ( postgraduate diploma in polygamy/ politricks) and Peter Gregory Obi LP (Licentiate in Proletarianism )
I for one am angry about this much ado about nothing. This storm - like a tsunami in a teacup .It’s like a witch-hunt. It quacks. It is a witch hunt. It’s unconscionable. The miscreants and other self-appointed concerned citizens would like to disqualify Mr President ,the former two -term most successful governor of Lagos, on the flimsiest of cooked up excuses. It ‘s shameful and it's a disgrace, this malicious manufacturing of fake evidence against the democratically elected President of Nigeria. In total, they are only embarrassing themselves and the nation - and they should be ashamed of themselves. What they are doing, their dirty linen that they are exposing, this baring of their arse - mooning -exposing their bare buttocks in public , to the world’s public, is only contributing to the ever hydra-headed racism and that avoidable/ unavoidable racial/ racist perception of Nigeria and Nigerians. “Just look at them” ,the racists say, using the N word, “See what they are squabbling over - some piece of paper from Chicago!”
Well , perhaps from the Nigerian, post-colonial point of view, the constitutional requirements for anyone to be eligible to be president of the United States, are less stringent than what obtains for Nigeria where there is a language requirement
The U.S. Constitution states that the president must:
# Be a natural-born citizen of the United States
# Be at least 35 years old
# Have been a resident of the United States for 14 years
So, we have Presidential wannabe Ronald Reagan class b movie actor, no one harassing him to show his certificate from Eureka College (BA), long after which he became Governor of California ( 1967 -1975 ) during which time he gave the order to wipe out the Black Panthers) - two-term president of the United States ( 1981 -1989)
But, O Nigeria!
Nowhere else in the world, certainly not in the United States and not even in Liberia is there such a fuss about the so-called qualification/s of Mr President .
Don’t we ever get sick and tired of all the hullabaloo about “Sabi buk”? Some poor bloke still poking around in the dark with his 25 PhDs, his 100 languages some of which he doesn’t speak beyond the rudimentary “howdy”, speak less of writing anything meaningful in Hebrew Chinese or hieroglyphics, and then, just like Sheikh Speare who Ben Jonson said knew “small Latin and less Greek” there are the 1,000 buks he is supposed to have written, “original contributions to knowledge”, buks which nobody reads or has read,
and no = no
nobody = No body
nothing = no thing
no one = no one
not even you.
That’s the beauty of poetry , each poem , a divine emotion or revelation, the communication of a feeling or an inspired insight and therefore a personal contribution to the world’s fountain of knowledge.
There’s the joke about the Jewish mother who is told that her son has just been awarded a Nobel Prize and she asks, distraught and disappointed “ Only one?”
But on the other hand that’s only a Jewish joke.
This evening I’ll be attending this lecture ( not a Jewish joke)
Verily, this is what colonialism has done to some of us, placing such an extraordinarily high premium on qualifications that people are prepared to beg, buy, borrow, murder, steal in order to acquire some bogus certificates duly signed and attested by some bogus fellow sinners - and it’s a characteristic of the big degree thief that for him everyone is suspect, because he thinks that everyone else is a thief, like himself.
Dr Ben (Yosef Ben-Jochannan) jokes about the villager ( from someplace in africa) who returns home - from abroad - to his village, beating his chest about his Ph.D, the very first in his universe to have accomplished such a great feat (like David slaughtering Goliath, like the first man on the moon) and the village headman asks him, “Son, the the very first man who was ever awarded a Phd in this world, the one who gave it to him, did he have one too?”
Well the President of Nigeria ,President Tinubu, who is not a thief and who has a genuine certification that’s being disputed by some sour grape losers who are prepared to commit murder ( character assassination) in order to discredit him, this upright president with no skeletons in the cupboard can therefore bray about that ”den of malfeasance”
The buck actually begins, where it ends :
The Nigerian Constitution :
Chapter 6, Section 131 - Qualification for election as President
They are a citizen of Nigeria by birth;
They have attained the age of 35 years (40 before 2018);
They are a member of a political party and are sponsored by that political party;
They have been educated up to at least School Certificate level or its equivalent
Seriously : Stephen Braude - Do People Have Souls?