Dear Professor Farooq Kperogi,
Salaam alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu and for all the good things that you say and do, of course, jazzak Allah khairan!
This matter of respect for the president ought not be treated lightly. This response is being partly dictated by great respect for the religion of al-Islam and its mores, its adherents/ Muslims and in the same spirit, my unadulterated respect and admiration for president Muhammadu Buhari for his dedication, sense of purpose and perseverance. I have followed his star since his first coming, suffered three rigged election defeats with him…
Charity begins at home. You want the racists and islamophobes etc. to be given the green light to start naming their dogs after prophet Muhammad – salallahu alaihi wa salaam? Should that not be a heinous crime? Or that some miscreant non-Nigerians should be given the green light to name their dog "Muhammadu Buhari"? "Farooq Kperogi"? Your namesake " Umar ibn Khattab" also known as "Farooq?
Please tell us clearly: Is that what you are saying ?
Like you, I am disappointed in his handling of the massacre of Shia Muslims in the early days of his presidency. I personally believe that it is Satan/ Iblis that stupefies and leads the killers of the Shia - going back all the way to Karbala and the massacre of the Prince of Martyrs, Imam Hussein, alaihi salaam, mourned annually on Ashura ...
Unlike you, I am disappointed in your woeful assessment of Brother Buhari "Buhari's administration is shaping up to be perhaps the most intolerant and petulant civilian administration in Nigeria" - especially when the evidence for your assessment is so very thin.
When it comes to freedom of speech versus intolerance, please correct me if I'm wrong , but wasn't it Goodluck Jonathan's Doyin Okupe who wanted to pass a law that would criminalise anyone who said that his master was "clueless"?
"A stick in time, saves nine " - this applies to the handling of Nnamdi Kanu (after his call to arms) as a deterrent to various insurgents who want to advocate taking up arms against Nigeria's military. My impression is that it's this call to arms that jolted the authorities to action, and not – as you say, "when he started attacking President Buhari, Nigerian authorities moved in swiftly to contain him"
(I hope that it will be a Steve Biko type of public trial – in which Nnamdi Kanu will be given the opportunity to present his ideology - and to defend it – and in the interest of saving, not only Igbo lives, will use the opportunity to renounce violence, not even endorsing it as a last resort...)
"A stick in time, saves nine " also recommends the handling of this recent case of Chinakwe's dog : That's not the way to show respect for your president, your father, your mother or your brother; in my book it's an insult and it should be good to put a stop to, so that we don't encourage okuru dogs being named after - in sensitive alphabetical order, Abacha, Adichie, Azikiwe, Bishop Ajayi Crowther, Jesus, Herbert Macaulay, running around and wagging their tails, forever at their master's beck and call. (Some disgruntled wives lack the courage to name their dogs after their husbands - although the said husbands intuit that it is they that their wives are cursing, every time they start cursing their dogs)
About naming the dog - or indeed his pig after Nigeria's Muslim president would be an intentional insult, given what you know about the status of dogs in the eyes of Muslims. If he called his pet Budgerigar or hawk " Buhari" that would not be an offence.
Don't forget Barney or "Tony Blair"
American presidents and their dogs
Dogs named after famous people
Your parthian shot was an exaggeration : "You can't be paying over-sized attention to minor, inconsequential irritants while the country burns under your watch."
It's not as if the matters you have mentioned are being given the government's 24 hrs. day attention, to the neglect of other matters, such as the war against endemic corruption , "while the country burns"
I leave you with the words of the most famous Bukhari : Sahih Bukhari
On Saturday, 27 August 2016 16:40:23 UTC+2, Farooq A. Kperogi wrote:
My column in today's Daily Trust:By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
Buhari's administration is shaping up to be perhaps the most intolerant and petulant civilian administration in Nigeria. But it isn't the intolerance and petulance in and of themselves that are disquieting; it is the crying incompetence of this government's handling of dissent, which often ends up popularizing and lionizing nonentities.
It started with Indigenous People of Biafra's Nnamdi Kanu. He was spewing his rib-tickling inanities on the fringes of the Internet and on a barely known radio station. Then, suddenly, when he started attacking President Buhari, Nigerian authorities moved in swiftly to contain him. They announced that they had successfully jammed his radio station, but came back a few days later to refute an alleged libelous falsehood the station made against Buhari!
Of course, news of the "jamming" of the radio and the press release refuting what the station reportedly said against Buhari (after it was supposed to have been jammed!) caused the station—and the ideology it espouses—to make national and international headlines. And there was an enormous spike in the number of searches for "Radio Biafra" and "Nnamdi Kanu" on Google and other search engines.
This, combined with Buhari's unambiguous antipathy toward the southeast, has sparked a resurgence of Biafran and neo-Biafran movements and periodic sanguinary communal upheavals. This was completely avoidable. If the government had ignored (or quietly diluted) Kanu and his Radio Biafra and demonstrated even token large-heartedness toward the southeast (and the deep south) in the immediate aftermath of Buhari's epochal electoral triumph in spite of opposition from the region, we wouldn't know of Kanu and IPOB. But Nigerian authorities couldn't stomach an insult at Buhari.
Now another man by the name of Joe Fortemose Chinakwe has become an international celebrity. He has been arrested, detained, imprisoned, and charged to court just because he named his dog Buhari. This is the height of petty intolerance.
Worse bile was directed at previous civilian presidents in the country. Tafawa Balewa, Shagari, Obasanjo, Yar'adua, and Jonathan were often at the receiving end of so much thoroughgoing hate, but the world didn't know about this because no one was arrested and imprisoned. (Comedian Ali Baba said he named one of his dogs "Obasanjo" during Obasanjo's administration and publicized it. In northern Nigeria, Jonathan and Attahiru Jega were called some of the vilest names I have ever heard—and in songs, too.) Public office is not for huffy crybabies.
I have read many Muslim commenters point out that giving a dog a Muslim name was offensive in and of itself. I agree. The problem is that the name wasn't given to the dog to spite Muslims; it was given to make a political statement. If Buhari's name was Smith Punapuna, the dog would be named precisely that.
But Buhari isn't even a Muslim name in the strict sense of the term. As I pointed in previous articles, the name Bukhari (which we render as Buhari in Nigeria because many Nigerian languages don't have the guttural consonant that the phoneme "kh" represents), is derived from Bukhara, which is the name of a town in what is now Uzbekistan in the former USSR.
The person who popularized the name is a 9th-century author of hadith collections known as Abū 'Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Ismā'īl ibn Ibrāhīm ibn al-Mughīrah ibn Bardizbah al-Ju'fī al-Bukhārī.
In Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi, "i" is added to the name of a town to indicate descent from the town. So "Bukhari" simply means someone from (the town of) Bukhara, what Hausa speakers would call "Dan Buhara." It's like someone taking offense because someone named his dog Dan Kano, Dan Daura, Dan Hadejia, etc., which, though names of towns, are borne by some northerners as last names (without the "dan").
But that's not even the most important point. How many people will the Buhari administration arrest for getting under the president's skin? In other words, how many people will this administration make undeservedly popular because of its intolerance and incompetence? Many frustrated people who feel they have nothing to live for in light of the present economic crunch in the country are going to name their dogs after Buhari. Watch out. It's now the surest way to cheap popularity, and the intolerance and incompetence of this government will ensure that they get all the attention, and possibly financial benefits, they crave.
But it isn't only after Buhari that dogs will be named; dogs will also be named after key ministers of the government.
As I am writing this column, I read that a woman by the name of Ada Ogbonna has named her dog after the comically loudmouthed Lai Mohammed. "Meet my dog, Lai Mohammed," she wrote on Facebook. "I named it after someone I admired."
There will be several such publicity baits. A competent government with some clue won't swallow such easy baits. This is all part of democracy. I live in America where the president of the country is called all sorts of dreadful names without consequences. For instance, many racists named their dogs Obama, but Obama disarmed them by naming his dog Bo, which is short for Barack Obama.
We can't pretend to be practicing democracy and clamp down on people for merely saying hurtful things that get on our frail nerves.
This is particularly telling coming from a government that is caught flatfooted in almost everything, a government that daily inflicts misery on its poor citizens while its power structure feeds fat on the misery of the poor. It's troubling when a government that took six months to appoint a predictable cast of characters as ministers wastes no time to arrest a person for naming his dog Buhari. It is concerning when a government that is mute in the face of the horrendous mass murder of hundreds of Shiites in Zaria arrests inconsequential people because they got under the skin of the president.
Maybe Buhari is not even aware that someone has been imprisoned because he named his dog after him. Maybe. But people who are close to and love the president should tell him that the emerging pettiness and intolerance of his administration are becoming intolerably embarrassing.
You can't be paying over-sized attention to minor, inconsequential irritants while the country burns under your watch.
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Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorJournalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science BuildingRoom 5092 MD 2207402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State UniversityKennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogAuthor 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
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