Dear Godwin Okeke,
I'm with you 100 % about this too.
The absence of any precise information about what was ailing the president gave ample room for speculation. This lack of information was aggravated by Mr. President not talking to us directly that he was indeed feeling "hale and hearty." When from her own privileged position President Buhari's sister exhorted the nation to pray for her brother, it sounded as if he was about to give up the ghost and I thought that we would be hearing a call to national prayer from people like, on the one hand the Sultan of Sokoto, the Emir of Kano and on the other hand, Pastor Adeboye and Bishop Bishop Kukah. I feared that maybe some sons of bitches had secretly poisoned him, in which case, long may they rot in the hell-fire.
At some later point there were unconfirmed rumours circulating that Our Muhammadu had already crossed over the sirat bridge to the hereafter.
When Chidi asked in his fragments of poetic thought, whether anyone had seen the president and furthered this ominous enquiry to Adeshina Afolayan
"Dear Adeshina,
How do you know
That that voice
Have presidential body?"
At that point, many of us feared the worst.
President Buhari has now confirmed that he had not been feeling "hale and hearty" - on the contrary just a few days ago he told us, "I have never been so sick in my life"
I'm in no position to personally vouchsafe the integrity of all of the president's aids.
If the information management had told us " The president has never been so sick in his life" that could have plunged the nation into a panic mode - with some of the aids that you have in mind trying to "make hay while the suns shines", others jockeying for position as they gather round his successor.
Sadly, the Buhari-Idiagbon duo was overthrown on the 27th of August 1985 whilst Tunde Idiagbon was on pilgrimage to Mecca, with his son. The only mistake that Tunde Idiagbon made was to have told the scoundrels that he was leaving behind, that he had started rooting out corruption and that they should just wait and Insha Allah he would finish the job when he returned from his pilgrimage. That must have put the fear of God in the incorrigible lootocracy and so "they couped" him before he returned.
By the way, quite another matter, you do know that Ironsi's father was Sierra Leonean, not Nigerian, Senegalese , Gambian or Liberian?
"Pray for the forest, pray for the tree, pray for the fish in the deep blue sea.
Pray for yourself and for God's sake, say one for me, poor wretched unbeliever." (Gaia)
From the Chocolate Factory
Cornelius
On Monday, 13 March 2017 13:26:21 UTC+1, Godwin Okeke wrote:
Well taken Cornelius,
But the issue is not much as in Nigerians wanting to know the type of ailment the President is suffering from, than the President talking directly to the people from wherever he was receiving treatment. This would have defused tension and all the unwarrantable speculations that it triggered. Rather is was senate President and Speaker House of Reps. toady, and Mr. ABC tomorrow, who saw the President, coming to tell us that he is hale and hearty. The question is if he is hale and hearty, why does he need prayers? Unless for a different purpose. Information management is key here! Don't be surprised that some of his Aids may use this opportunity to loot the treasury. Remember during Yar Ardua's health crisis, it was reported that even the security vote was traced to someone's private account.
GSM
--------------------------------------------
On Sun, 3/12/17, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Orwellian Doublespeak About Buhari's Health
To: "USA Africa Dialogue Series" <usaafric...@googlegroups.com >
Date: Sunday, March 12, 2017, 12:14 AM
Dear Godwin Okeke,
That was cute of you signing off as "Mr. Know it
all".
How to explain? In this life I have been assigned to play
the role
Cornelius - nobody else - and I'm writing my own lines,
just as you
are writing yours.
Like Ray Charles, I'm fresh
out of tears.
My friend Menachem told me yesterday when I complained to
him, he
said " Well, you know that the Germans like
titles"
The Germans like titles and some people don't like the
Germans, all
because of the führer
- and so you see, for some people, sometimes, one bad apple
represents the whole bunch. You could even extend that one
bad apple
to someone like this
little
ex-Hitler Youth
I like your name - just as I liked the name of our
chemistry
teacher Vidal
Godwin in the third form of secondary school.
It's a good
name, as good as other names such as Good-luck,
Good-looking,
Patience, Blessing; the Almighty has multiplied us into
millions of
souls to serve him and so Besserwisser
(good German word), I love you too, I love our people
and this
means that your problems are also mine, really. It's not
as if should
I be the weakest link in the chain then the problem is mine
and not
yours also
According to another besserwisser, "We
get the governments we deserve" - this is
unarguably the
case with one-man-one-vote Nigeria, so, in my opinion, if
some people
don't agree with this and want to become self-governing
as an
independent nation to be known as e.g. Biafra, that 's
absolutely OK
with me as long as they go for it peacefully, starting with
a
referendum, because I don't want to countenance any
wanton killing; I
don't want anybody to die just because they ask for a
divorce from
being married to Nigeria.
Question : Shouldn't
we all be having a good time?
I understand that you asked a rhetorical question.
In Sweden, we have a parliamentary system of government
and a
prime minister, not a president. Here, transparency is a
reality and
not just a slogan - so if our prime minister were to fall
ill for an
extended period of time - to the extent of not being able to
perform
his duties as prime minister, I do believe that it would be
in place
for us to know about it (unless of course - God forbid it
was
something like HIV - which has such a stigma) - but there
are
privacy laws and so normally my medical journal cannot be
accessed
and made public just like that, not to talk about that of
our King or
our prime minister. No one's extended illness has to
cause a crisis
in government or a constitutional crisis; I'm sure that
there are
provisions in our constitution and in the Nigerian
constitution as to
how to how to deal with such an eventuality.
Check this out : US
presidents who concealed ill health
Concerning the mystery enveloping President Buhari's
state of
health and the question, of transparency about the matter,
our own
Oga, Professor Falola has explained that it's cultural -
mark his
words: "Africans
don't like to report their health, whether it's a poor
farmer or
the president"
. Africans. All
Africans?
Africans, generally? Is Godwin Okeke an Oyinbo or an
African?
Mainland or
Diaspora?
Fact
is that as far as I know, no one has yet asked President
Buhari,
exactly what the matter is. When he took time off and was
off to
London to fix his ear
everybody knew that it was an ear problem . Now it's
certainly
something more serious than just his ear. Bottom line, I
think that
in Sweden too a person whether a poor farmer or the prime
minister
has a right to privacy and even if he is a public servant,
he/ she
does not have to make his ailment public.
Passing
by
Cornelius
On Saturday, 11 March 2017
13:57:23 UTC+1, Godwin Okeke wrote:Cornelius,
May be that is the way the President of the
country you reside is hidden away from the people who put
him in power when he's facing any health challenge. Some
of you can never see anything wrong with the manner the
country is administered because of reasons best known to
you. Mr know it all.
GSM
------------------------------
--------------
On Fri, 3/10/17, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re:
Orwellian Doublespeak About Buhari's Health
To: "USA Africa Dialogue
Series" <usaafric...@
googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, March 10, 2017, 8:45 PM
Baruch
Hashem!
Sami allahu liman hamidah - rabbana lakal
hamd
!
President
Buhari returns to Nigeria !
This has laid to rest the many ugly
rumours and the
endless,
unhealthy speculations by the
ne'er-do-well, about the
whereabouts of
the President.
Since President Buhari is the president
of all
Nigerians, I wish
that I knew exactly how to express the
same sentiment of
thanks and
gratefulness to the Almighty for bringing
him back safe and
sound to
our Nigeria in all the indigenous Naija
dialects and all of
the
varieties of Nigerian English - of which
there are many
regional
varieties - and in terms of indigenous
language interference
- as I
pointed out to a dear friend this
afternoon, there must even
be a
variety of jargon known as "Biafran
English" - if
they
should ever want to
"nationalise" that speech
community,
within and even without imaginary
borders. As to exactly how
it
sounds - as with all languages, with
special lexical
features,
prosody, thought patterns and usual modes
of expression, we
should
ask those who speak it fluently and fully
understand the
range
It was frail looking Muhammadu Buhari
that we saw getting
off that
plane on TV - but - another Baruch
Hashem - his eyes
were
bright. May the Almighty fortify him
and shine His light
upon him is
our prayer, according to His will. We
heard his spokesmen
Shehu
Garba say on BBC Focus of Africa that
the President will be
needing
some more time to rest and heard the
voice of President Buhari himself confirm
his intention to
do so
It should be strictly, doctors orders -
in this case
peace and
quiet!
The advice that one usually gives to the
Brethren - the
Brethren
includes yours truly and all those who
believe that when the
doctor
orders complete rest for two or three
months he only has the
weak
toubabs / oyinbo in mind and that
real Africans are
usually back in
the field playing football again after
a mere two or three
weeks...
I guess that rest in this case should
include rest from
the little
jabs from certain sections of the
always oppositional and
hostile
Naija press that would like to torment
him even now. May
they never
be satisfied!
Good thing that the vice president is
already performing
at peak
efficiency...
On Monday, 13
February 2017 08:43:08 UTC+1, Farooq A.
Kperogi
wrote:My "Politics of
Grammar" column in today's
Daily Trust on Sunday
By Farooq
A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
Doublespeak is intentional manipulation
of
language to conceal uncomfortable truths
or to cleverly tell
outright lies. The term came to us from
George Orwell,
although he didn't use it himself. The
term he used in his
famous book titled 1984 is
"newspeak," which he
said consists in limiting the range of
words people use and
in stripping language of semantic
precision in order to
facilitate government propaganda and mind
management.
The mainstreaming of Orwellian
doublespeak
in Trump's America is already causing
an enormous spike in
the sales of Orwell's 1984, which was
first
published in 1949, especially after a
Trump administration
official by the name of Kellyanne Conway
defended habitually
intentional falsehoods by the Trump
administration as merely
"alternative facts."
All governments lie, but the brazenness
and
consistency of the lies of the Buhari
government are simply
remarkable. It competes favorably with
the Trump
administration in prevarications and
loud, bold defiance of
basic ethical proprieties. Nowhere has
this become more
apparent in recent time than in the
information that
government officials share with the
Nigerian public about
President Muhammadu Buhari's
health.
I have no evidence for this, but my
hunch
tells me that Buhari isn't nearly as
sick as his
detractors make it seem, but the illogic,
intentionally
deceitful and mutually contradictory
language of government
spokespeople in explaining away the
president's prolonged
absence from Nigeria have conspired to
fuel unhealthy
speculations about the state of his
health.
As I told the BBC World Service in a
February
7, 2017 interview, the labyrinth of
tortuous lies, fibs,
half-truths, and conscious deceit that
emanate from the
government make it impossible to even
guess the
truth.
The president's media advisers admit
that
the president is in London on a
"medical vacation"
(which is doublespeak for "he is sick
and needs medical
attention"), and his latest letter to
the National
Assembly said he was awaiting the results
of medical tests,
but the Acting President and the Minister
of Information say
he is "hale and hearty" (which means
he is vigorous and
doing well). No one can be simultaneously
on a "medical
vacation," be awaiting the results of
medical tests, and
be "hale and hearty." That's a
logical
impossibility.
It gets even stranger. Senator Abu
Ibrahim, a
senator from Katsina State who said he
was in touch with the
president, told newsmen that the
president was neither on
medical vacation nor hale and hearty, but
only "exhausted
by the weight of the problems the country
is going
through." So London is the
president's destination of
choice to rest, while millions of people
who voted him into
office squirm in the severe existential
torment his
administration either deepened or caused?
Interesting!
On February 7, Presidential Media Adviser
Femi Adesina also told Channels TV that
he was
"daily" in touch with the
President, but
doesn't "speak with him
direct." How does one
"keep in touch" with someone
thousands of miles
away without "directly
speaking" with
him?
Well, Adesina said he does that by being
"in touch with London daily." I
am not making this
up. You can watch the interview on
ChannelTV's YouTube
channel. But it gets worse still. He
added: "People
around him will speak daily. Daily."
You would think
the word "daily" was in danger
of going out of
circulation and needed to be verbally
curated on national
TV.This doublespeak recalls my grammar
column of
December 10, 2009 on the late President
Yar'adua's
health. It was titled "Yar'adua's
Health: Amb.
Aminchi's Impossible Grammatical
Logic." Read it below
and note the similarities with what is
going on now.
Enjoy:Nigeria's ambassador to Saudi
Arabia,
Alhaji Garba Aminchi, was quoted by an
Abuja newspaper to have fulminated
against
the unnervingly prevailing buzz that
President Yar'adua is
in a persistent vegetative state and in
grave danger of
imminent death. "And all these
insinuations are lies,"
he was quoted to have said. "To the
best of my knowledge,
I see him every day, and he is
recovering…."
To the best of his knowledge, he sees the
ailing president every day? So our
ambassador is not even
sure if, indeed, he sees the president
every day, but he is
certain nonetheless that the president is
recovering. Huh?
This is a supreme instantiation of a case
where thought,
language, and materiality have parted
company.
At issue here is the idiom "to the best
of
my knowledge," which is also commonly
rendered as "to my
knowledge." This expression, according
to
the Macmillan
Dictionary, is used for saying that you
think something
is true, but you are not completely
certain, as in, "To
the best of my knowledge, the President
has not decided if
he will resign because of his failing
health."
The Free
Dictionary defines the idiom thus: "as
I
understand it." The Oxford Dictionary
also defines it as,
"from the information you have,
although you may not know
everything."
So, the idiom is deployed principally to
express thought-processes that reside in
the province of
incertitude, of inexactitude. If, for
instance, someone were
to ask me (and somebody did indeed ask me
a couple of days
ago) if Yar'adua was dead, I would say
"well, to the
best of my knowledge he is alive."
Here, the phrase "to
the best of my knowledge" admits of
both the possibility
that he could be alive or dead. In other
words, it betrays
the uncertainty and tentativeness of the
information I have
about the query.
Now, for Ambassador Aminchi to use the
idiom
"to the best of my knowledge" (which
admits of
uncertainty) in the same sentence as "I
see him every day
and he is recovering" (which connotes
cocksure certitude)
evokes an eerily bizarre disjunction
between thought,
speech, and reality, one that is
impossible to conceive of
even with the wildest stretch of fantasy.
This is as much a
grammatical slip as it is a logical
labyrinth.
One perfectly legitimate interpretive
possibility from the ambassador's
statement is that he
actually sees a figure in Saudi Arabia in
the likeness of
President Yar'adua that is convalescing
from a sickness,
but is uncertain if this is merely the
apparition of a
spooky specter masquerading as Yar'adua
or if it's
Yar'adua himself. In spite of this
dubiety, however, he is
positive that the real Yar'adua is
recuperating.
This is obviously not what the ambassador
wants to be understood as saying. So, one
or two of three
things are happening here. The first is
that the ambassador
is being barefacedly mendacious in order
to conceal the
graveness of the condition of
Yar'adua's health. And
this won't be out of character. After
all, English
diplomat and writer Henry Wotton once
famously defined an
ambassador as an "honest man sent to
lie abroad for the
good of his country." Only that, in
this case, our
ambassador is lying abroad for the bad of
his
country.
The second possibility is that the
ambassador
is simply clueless about the meaning of
the idiom. And a
third possibility is that he has been
misquoted or
mistranslated by the reporter who wrote
the
story.
Now, this isn't an idle, nitpicking
censure
of an ambassador's innocent slip by a
snooty,
self-appointed grammar police. This issue
is not only about
the health of Yar'adua; it is also
about the health of our
country. Since Yar'adua took critically
ill, the nation
has been in even much graver illness. In
somber moments such
as this, we cannot afford the luxury of
tolerating
intentionally deceitful and irresponsible
political language
from public officials.
Link
between Bad Language and
Misgovernance
In his famous 1946 essay
titled "Politics
and the English Language," George
Orwell
railed against this very tendency among
the public officials
of his day. He wrote: "Political speech
and writing are
largely the defence of the indefensible.
Things like the
continuance of British rule in India, the
Russian purges and
deportations, the dropping of the atom
bombs on Japan, can
indeed be defended, but only by arguments
which are too
brutal for most people to face, and which
do not square with
the professed aims of the political
parties. Thus political
language has to consist largely of
euphemism,
question-begging and sheer cloudy
vagueness."
Do you see any parallels here between
Ambassador Aminchi's illogical
grammar—and indeed that
of most Nigerian public officials—and
the public officials
of Orwell's days?
Interestingly, the problem endures to
this
day even in Britain. On Nov.
3, 2009 the Guardian of
London reported that a British
parliamentary committee excoriated
"politicians and civil
servants for their poor command of the
English language"
epitomized in the "misleading and vague
official
language" of prominent
politicians.
Tony Wright, chairman of the committee,
said:
"Good government requires good
language, while bad
language is a sign of poor government. We
propose that cases
of bad official language should be
treated as
'maladministration'."
Maybe the committee chairman's
sentiments
are a bit of a rhetorical stretch, but
someone should tell
Ambassador Aminchi that he cannot
simultaneously be unsure
that he sees the ailing president and yet
be certain that
the president is recovering. That's
impossible grammatical
logic. And that can only sprout from a
mind that is wracked
by psychic
disarray.
Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.Associate
ProfessorJournalism & Emerging
Media
School of Communication &
MediaSocial Science
Building Room 5092 MD
2207402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw
State University
Kennesaw, 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
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola,
University of Texas at
Austin
To post to this group, send an email to
USAAfric...@ googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email
to
USAAfricaDial...@ googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/
group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/
conferences/africa/ads/index. html
---
You received this message because you are
subscribed to the
Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue
Series"
group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop
receiving emails
from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@
googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/
optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at
Austin
To post to this group, send an email to
USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to
USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index. html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the
Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series"
group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails
from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com .
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout .
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment