Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT CERTIFICATE

In the USA, the constitution was meant to capture the essence and guiding principles of the people it governs. In Britain it is the Monarch to some extent. Then (along the life on the entity) there have been laws which are derived from or are interpretations of situations based on how the original writers (founding members) of the constitution would have wanted it, if they they were faced with similar situations at current times.

The constitution of the United States took more than one year to craft and each word, phrase and sentence was deliberated on and some intentionally left open ended. In the next 200 years and more hopefully, interpretation of new ideas/problems will still be based on the original intent and also how other similar ideas had been interpreted (along their way) since the original constitution. 

Regarding the certificate, I believe that INEC is right ( if the courts are independent), sue and have the courts interpret what that is in the constitution. 

Mr Buhari has been president for about four years now and has been running for president for the past about 13 years, which is enough time for our law maker (among the best paid in the world) to straighten out the issues.

1) The issue of WAEC/GCE as a prerequisite is either in the constitution or not. If they find out that it is, but no longer necessary then remove it., if it is then apply the law. If it is equivocal then make it clear. 

Every other argument is mainly superfluous and based on emotions.

We should not have to have this same debate every four years about whether or not to obey a law of it is explicit.

2) The issue of affidavit: if I swear an affidavit that I am 36 (when in reality I am 30), and running for president, is the 'system' just allowed to ignore it, just because somehow I have the talent/training to do the job? 

When it is explicit in the law that one should be 35?

Does an affidavit replace a certificate or give you some time to locate your certificate from the appropriate quarters or prove by whatever means that you have it? 

Constitutions have nothing to do with trust but rather human nature (more like distrust and at the very least circumspection especially with political power).

Should we really encourage disobedience of written down laws?

Ogedi

On Oct 30, 2018, at 8:25 AM, Anthony Akinola <anthony.a.akinola@gmail.com> wrote:

  TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT CERTIFICATE

Voluminous constitutions are symptomatic of the distrust a people have about themselves. It is assumed that a people cannot be reasonable and patriotic,every rule governing their behaviour must be spelt out in black and white.This would seem to be the case in Nigeria,with its cumbersome constitution, where every rule of democratic governance  is assembled, albeit in confusing and contradictory wordings.

One knows of a nation that is governed without a written constitution. There is not a document that is called the British Constitution, democratic governance derives its legitimacy from customs and tradition. Yet, Britain is one of the most orderly geographical entities in the world-a nation that once superintended governance in many overseas colonies.

Even in the United States of America, the nation with the first written constitution , not everything is packed into the constitution. The American constitution is a very slim document, readable and easy to comprehend even by those with minimal education. There is no reference to political party in their constitution, and neither is their a requirement that the President must acquire a certain level of education. It is enough that a candidate for that position has attained the age of 35,and he or she is a natural born citizen of America, or a resident within the USA for a minimum of 14 years.

Much as the letters of any constitution must be respected, one honestly thinks that the requirement of education for President should no longer be generating controversy in a modern society. It should by now be taken for granted that whoever shall be President of Nigeria would be educated, otherwise the collective intelligence of the citizenry is insulted.Such a requirement should not be in the constitution.

.

Even then, it is the democratic right of the people to decide who their leader is. Paper qualification may not necessarily mean that one is politically-intelligent. Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents of the USA, is said to have had only about a year of formal schooling of any kind. His successor, Andrew Johnson, is said to have had no formal schooling of any kind.

Lest one gets me wrong, one is not saying that education is not important and neither is one holding brief for any politician. What one is trying to assert is that there are things we must now take for granted in the 21st century. Even in our local communities, contemporary traditional rulers are well-educated and sophisticated individuals. Gone is the era when the traditional ruler was that kola-chewing individual, very eloquent at reciting incantations.

Anthony Akinola,

Oxford, UK.

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT CERTIFICATE

Toyin Adepoju

What a dismal picture you paint! You are convinced and determined that national unity won't work, hence your sordid conclusion that summarises all the spurious accusations that you throw around, so carelessly! It seems that if you were to have your own way, the result your disastrous proposal should culminate in nothing less than the dissolution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the utter and complete destruction/ fragmentation of the sleeping giant into an untold number of independent splinter nations, self-contained ethnic enclaves (some of therm no bigger than the Gambia) and the amalgamation of some of the adjacent ethnic nations in your own Edo neck of the woods// the oil-rich Delta swamp, hopefully welding together friendly ethnicities, the Atlantic Ocean as your southern border, some of your neighbours to the East and to the West (and to the North?) to create new independent states on contiguous strips of what is currently sovereign Federal Nigerian territory, no doubt your battle cry " Divided we fall!" Such eloquent pessimism:

" The IPOB vision is the only certain way I can see out of this calamity - a referendum run by international honest and impartial brokers for reconstituting the leaving or remaining together of each ethnicity currently in Nigeria and the terms for that..."

All because your region 's got some oil

I understand that apart from the rabid Islamophobia that rules your heart and what you call a brain ( attributing it to Boko Haram,"The Fulani Herdsmen" and your so called " Northern Hegemony" ) you also cynically espouse The Latest Decalogue

and of course,

" strive

Officiously to keep alive"

I've said it before : This shalt not exaggerate : Here are a few of the atrocious  and in my view irresponsible accusations that you've made in this posting, your monomaniacal bearing false witness against the President Buhari of Nigeria which Chief Anthony A. Akinola has already dealt with , adequately. But you have to be careful with too dabbling in spirit world , there are some demons out there - maybe out to get you , which means that you could be in need of some exorcism deprogramming from Islamophobia and anti-Islamism, suspicion and lack of love and goodwill to our brothers and sisters from Northern Nigeria

I could take up each of your malicious accusations it's just that I don't have the time and you must know that I don't have to be an ultra Nigerian nationalist at heart to point them out to you in good faith and in the hope that you will repent and begin to amend your hatred: Your words (in italics): 

"Can you point to any definite evidence that your candidate has any significant education, FORMAL or INFORMAL?" - "a crude provincial who does not belong anywhere beyond his native Daura local govt as President." - "a Buhari who has no qualifications, whether academic or otherwise to lead anything outside Daura," - "We are happy if the Daura man presents toilet paper as a certificate, some once declared." 

 If you are referring to President Muhammadu Buhari who attained to the rank of Major- General , then you must be surely out of your mind and you Toyin Adepoju ought to ashamed of yourself. Check this out : Muhammadu Buhari's qualifications

Raziel HaMalach

Fresh

On Wednesday, 31 October 2018 21:21:06 UTC+1, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju wrote:

People  are arguing for the no certificate option bcs they have a candidate who has little FORMAL education and little INFORMAL education.

Can you point to any definite evidence that your candidate has any significant education, FORMAL or INFORMAL?

Buhari's fellow ethocentrist, Trump, is not only a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania he is not representative in his crudity and fascist ethnocentrism, of modern US Presidency. He represents the resurgence of ethnocentric forces similar to those that have empowered Buhari, but the mentalities he represents may be seen as ultimately on the losing side, seeing in Trump a last gasp for air. The ethnocentricities of much the Buhari base, however,  are deeply entrenched.  The huge injustices possible in Nigeria, topped by state sponsorship of internal terrorism, are, also, most likely, impossible or unsustainable in the US.

The differences in legal systems, political history and economy between Nigeria and the US are too great for these two nations to be adequately compared  without making careful qualifications.

The person who should be Nigerian President in the current equation is Osinbajo. His conduct of affairs whenever his   lean master is not around shows that.

But we have a cultured SAN as VP and a crude provincial  who does not belong anywhere beyond his native Daura local govt as President.

Why?

Bcs most of the ethno-religious kin of the provincial will support him no matter what-after all, those outside their fold belong to a different universe, fellow humans but not equatable  with their brethren.

Those kin gave support for the initial two years of their uprising to the murderous Boko Haram Islamic terrorism which sold itself as an uprising agst the govt of a Southern President, thereby enabling  the eventual  removal of that govt by the govt of the provincial. That same provincial made sure he milked this narrative for all it was worth, arguing agst the war on the terrorists as war agst his people and telling his people that the terrorists in their later stages, when the govt's war agst them was succeeding,  were the work of the govt.

The Muslim North is dominated by right wing mentalities, conservatives at best, ethno-religious supremacists at worst, while the South often deludes itself in political arrangements into thinking it is dealing with a partner who sees it as equal.

This imbalance enables the Muslim North to field a Buhari who has no qualifications, whether academic or otherwise to lead anything outside Daura, a man whose history is stained with the blood of those massacred in his name, people whose actions he allowed to continue unabated without a word from him, people building on a culture of recurrent anti-Southern pogroms reaching back to the 50s, a culture that does not exist anywhere else in Nigeria, while the South can never field a person with only a secondary school certificate, even which Buhari does not have, and yet the uninformed character can win bcs Southern politicians might have little interest at the national level beyond how to eat.

We are happy if the Daura man presents toilet paper as a certificate, some once declared. Yet, there exist many who do not need to be assessed by such abysmal criteria. Now efforts are being made to paper over the determined  lack of self improvement in the Daura character by making convoluted arguments involving Presidents from centuries ago in other lands.

In a world in which his elders have chosen to improve themselves after leaving office-Gowon and OBJ- he has based his political identity squarely in such ethnic consolidations as publicly identifying with the massive looter from his region, ex head of state Abacha and in identification with Boko Haram Islamic terrorism and lately, enabling right wing Fulani  terrorism.

Buhari's major opponent, Atiku Abubukar, is an even deadlier cocktail than Buhari. Both demagogue and sly creature, he created the ideological foundation that eventually brought Buhari to power in the name of the power-must-return-to-the North mantra aided by the momentum he helped generate by fueling Boko Haram with his threats of violent change agst Nigeria, enabling Buhari's eventual victory as the candidate most visible in the Muslim North and now enables him stand a chance of taking over from Buhari since the PDP zoned the Presidency to the North in the name of riding the wave of pro-Northern agitation. Atiku has now  joined the restructuring brigade, all in the chance to pretend to believe in a Nigeria that is a level playing ground for all citizens.

I belong to Nigerian centred social media groups dominated by Benin people, by Igbo people, by Yoruba people, by Hausas and Fulanis, along with social media groups dominated by no particular ethnicity, and have frequented the Facebook walls of a good no of figures influential on social media from these ethnicities and more. I also correlate my understanding of Nigerian history with observations I make on these fora.

I have concluded that except most from the SE, educated as they are  by the 60s crises and the civil war, Southern Nigerians, of various social and educational classes, are largely politically shortsighted  in relation to the national context  while Northern Nigeria, across various social and educational classes, is dominated by an ethno-religious supremacist mentality.

That is what I reference in terms of " the negativities of Nigeria's Muslim North" describing people demonstrating those mentalities as  "a slice of that population that has no business in Nigerian govt".

Some people prefer to see me as vituperating agst everyone from the Muslim North. The argument is about  dominant  influences and a dominant mentality, not about every person from the  region .

This culture, pervasive but not all encompassing, is  rooted, I expect, in the deeply ethnocentric and religiously insular Fulani Jihad, most likely the most fundamental shaping influence of the region, a puristic form of Islam established through colonizing a dominant population in the name of social and religious reforms, while placing the scions of the conquering ethnicity as the perpetual ruling class.

I wish re-education on this  if those are not the facts, however they are interpreted.

Its from only the Muslim North you will find articulate and at times, highly Western educated elite defending or justifying or excusing terrorism bcs it serves their clannish interests, threatening death on social media to those of their people who support a candidate not from their region, where a mob will beat up a person who states their candidate might not win the Presidency in 2019, the only region where a candidate will threaten antagonists bathing in blood if he does not win the Presidential election, another threaten the nation with violent change bcs he was not made candidate of a party likely to win the Presidency etc

In a country where people from one section can carry out a sustained terrorist  campaign of occupation, murdering thousands and occupying their lands, with the most prominent elite of  the same ethnicity publicly supporting them, and go free as the govt run by a person from the same ethnicity struggles to bend or create laws to assist their geographical spread as owners over the lands of others, what you have is not equality but a relationship btw two classes, a subordinate and a dominant class.

Can this inhumane power differential ever be eliminated?

The IPOB vision is the only certain way I can see out of this calamity - a referendum run by international honest and impartial brokers for reconstituting the leaving or remaining together of each ethnicity currently in Nigeria and the terms for that, but with Niger Delta oil to feed a bloatedly run   govt, who among the political class wants to miss a chance to ride the gravy train?

Meanwhile a good no of  Southerners, in dealing in political contexts with  the Muslim North,  pride themselves on the political blindness  which they call freedom from ethnic identification, while,  without recognizing the evident ethnocentricity dominant in the other, they  are uninformed, or recognizing and refusing to act on it, are  being self destructive or colluding in their subjugation.

toyin

On Wed, 31 Oct 2018 at 14:49, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagb...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Toyin:

People also burned and killed people in the SW in the days of the Wild Wild West and in the second republic in Nigeria.  So that attitude is not the exclusive preserve of the Muslim North as you imply.

What is the the educational status of Donald Trump and how has that aided his quest for power and his administrative style?  He is also a contemporary American President and does not belong to the age of Lincoln. Donald Trump said worse things than Buhari yet he was elected President.  Can you remove him? Do you still not desire to go and live among such people as elected Trump?  So what's different about Nigeria?

Beware of the bigotry that you accuse the whole of the Muslim North of.  You contradict yourself by saying Buhari educated his daughter to a Law degree.  That means he recognizes his daughter belongs to a different generation from his.  He is not to be judged as belonging to his daughters generation.

Good education is desirable as the writer admits (so this is just making a mountain of a mole hill.)  After all he admits even traditional rulers are nowadays well educated

(Prof) Jibrin (Ibrahim) is from the Muslim North.  He understands the value of education and is more highly educated formally than you are. Does that mean you can not intelligibly  interract with him? No!  Does that disqualify him from being seen as a member of the Muslim North? No!

Dies the Nigerian Constitution say the President must have university a degree?  If not Buhari did no wrong by offering himself for election without a degree until the Constitutiin is changed

Bigotry is in every locale North or South.  Beware you are not an unsuspecting perennial victim.

OAA

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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

From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>

Date: 31/10/2018 11:30 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT CERTIFICATE

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

another pro-buhari massage?

perhaps all to support a man who has never bothered to gain a self or institutionally administered education? whose crass provinciality is evident in his administration and what he has to say to the public?

Buhari represents the negativities of Nigeria's Muslim North, a slice of that population that has no business in Nigerian govt.

have you ever reasoned that it is only from the Muslim North that anyone will dare present himself for the Presidency with little  certifiable education?

Nobody from the South would do that. It will not be accepted by either Southerners or Northerners.

Why is it so?

Partly bcs the Northern Muslim candidates can trust on the unwavering support offered by religio-ethnic bigotry of their kind of ethno-religious compact,  the kind that leads to the massacre of innocents bcs their candidate has  lost an election ( pro-Buhari massacres 2011) ,  as different from the more cosmopolitan Islam of the SW.  That ethno-religious clannishness is the primary strength of Northern Muslim politics in opposition to the South.

Those in the South, however, will not demonstrate such intense clannishness  but some are ready to blind themselves in support of such a clannish culture, such as through trying to sell to the public a story that you cant sell to your own child of why you do need not bother with significant education.

After all, without the piece of paper called a degree, one might not be politically  intelligent enough to get elected as Nigerian President as those without that sheet of paper have succeeded in doing.

You are not going to ask your son or daughter to emulate US Presidents of centuries ago in a time when  their country  was just beginning to develop a definite identity, where many values and the significance of many institution were still fluid.

You are not going to advice your child to ignore the fact that for perhaps a century now the standard education for US Presidents is an Ivy League education, an unwritten rule that, almost without exception, any serious aspirant to the highest levels of US govt is well aware of and does their best to abide by.

You have chosen to ignore the fact that the largely uneducated Buhari made sure he educated his daughter in a law degree in the UK. He did not give to his daughter the advice you are now giving to Nigerians, most likely in his support.

Why must some insist on low standards for Nigeria?

Standards they will not wish for themselves or their loved ones.

Invoking nations that have developed a superb systems of government in comparison with a country that is significantly akin to a jungle, where the govt itself is a terrorist enabler, where even the law does not do very much to restrain the powerful or the desperate.

well done sir.

toyin

On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 at 13:38, Anthony Akinola <anthony....@gmail.com> wrote:

  TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT CERTIFICATE

Voluminous constitutions are symptomatic of the distrust a people have about themselves. It is assumed that a people cannot be reasonable and patriotic,every rule governing their behaviour must be spelt out in black and white.This would seem to be the case in Nigeria,with its cumbersome constitution, where every rule of democratic governance  is assembled, albeit in confusing and contradictory wordings.

One knows of a nation that is governed without a written constitution. There is not a document that is called the British Constitution, democratic governance derives its legitimacy from customs and tradition. Yet, Britain is one of the most orderly geographical entities in the world-a nation that once superintended governance in many overseas colonies.

Even in the United States of America, the nation with the first written constitution , not everything is packed into the constitution. The American constitution is a very slim document, readable and easy to comprehend even by those with minimal education. There is no reference to political party in their constitution, and neither is their a requirement that the President must acquire a certain level of education. It is enough that a candidate for that position has attained the age of 35,and he or she is a natural born citizen of America, or a resident within the USA for a minimum of 14 years.

Much as the letters of any constitution must be respected, one honestly thinks that the requirement of education for President should no longer be generating controversy in a modern society. It should by now be taken for granted that whoever shall be President of Nigeria would be educated, otherwise the collective intelligence of the citizenry is insulted.Such a requirement should not be in the constitution.

.

Even then, it is the democratic right of the people to decide who their leader is. Paper qualification may not necessarily mean that one is politically-intelligent. Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents of the USA, is said to have had only about a year of formal schooling of any kind. His successor, Andrew Johnson, is said to have had no formal schooling of any kind.

Lest one gets me wrong, one is not saying that education is not important and neither is one holding brief for any politician. What one is trying to assert is that there are things we must now take for granted in the 21st century. Even in our local communities, contemporary traditional rulers are well-educated and sophisticated individuals. Gone is the era when the traditional ruler was that kola-chewing individual, very eloquent at reciting incantations.

Anthony Akinola,

Oxford, UK.

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT CERTIFICATE

Some people seem addicted to throwing political labels at random. What, for instance, do you mean by "fascist ethnocentrism"?

On Oct 31, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

People  are arguing for the no certificate option bcs they have a candidate who has little FORMAL education and little INFORMAL education.

Can you point to any definite evidence that your candidate has any significant education, FORMAL or INFORMAL?

Buhari's fellow ethocentrist, Trump, is not only a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania he is not representative in his crudity and fascist ethnocentrism, of modern US Presidency. He represents the resurgence of ethnocentric forces similar to those that have empowered Buhari, but the mentalities he represents may be seen as ultimately on the losing side, seeing in Trump a last gasp for air. The ethnocentricities of much the Buhari base, however,  are deeply entrenched.  The huge injustices possible in Nigeria, topped by state sponsorship of internal terrorism, are, also, most likely, impossible or unsustainable in the US.

The differences in legal systems, political history and economy between Nigeria and the US are too great for these two nations to be adequately compared  without making careful qualifications.

The person who should be Nigerian President in the current equation is Osinbajo. His conduct of affairs whenever his   lean master is not around shows that.

But we have a cultured SAN as VP and a crude provincial  who does not belong anywhere beyond his native Daura local govt as President.

Why?

Bcs most of the ethno-religious kin of the provincial will support him no matter what-after all, those outside their fold belong to a different universe, fellow humans but not equatable  with their brethren.

Those kin gave support for the initial two years of their uprising to the murderous Boko Haram Islamic terrorism which sold itself as an uprising agst the govt of a Southern President, thereby enabling  the eventual  removal of that govt by the govt of the provincial. That same provincial made sure he milked this narrative for all it was worth, arguing agst the war on the terrorists as war agst his people and telling his people that the terrorists in their later stages, when the govt's war agst them was succeeding,  were the work of the govt.

The Muslim North is dominated by right wing mentalities, conservatives at best, ethno-religious supremacists at worst, while the South often deludes itself in political arrangements into thinking it is dealing with a partner who sees it as equal.

This imbalance enables the Muslim North to field a Buhari who has no qualifications, whether academic or otherwise to lead anything outside Daura, a man whose history is stained with the blood of those massacred in his name, people whose actions he allowed to continue unabated without a word from him, people building on a culture of recurrent anti-Southern pogroms reaching back to the 50s, a culture that does not exist anywhere else in Nigeria, while the South can never field a person with only a secondary school certificate, even which Buhari does not have, and yet the uninformed character can win bcs Southern politicians might have little interest at the national level beyond how to eat.

We are happy if the Daura man presents toilet paper as a certificate, some once declared. Yet, there exist many who do not need to be assessed by such abysmal criteria. Now efforts are being made to paper over the determined  lack of self improvement in the Daura character by making convoluted arguments involving Presidents from centuries ago in other lands.

In a world in which his elders have chosen to improve themselves after leaving office-Gowon and OBJ- he has based his political identity squarely in such ethnic consolidations as publicly identifying with the massive looter from his region, ex head of state Abacha and in identification with Boko Haram Islamic terrorism and lately, enabling right wing Fulani  terrorism.

Buhari's major opponent, Atiku Abubukar, is an even deadlier cocktail than Buhari. Both demagogue and sly creature, he created the ideological foundation that eventually brought Buhari to power in the name of the power-must-return-to-the North mantra aided by the momentum he helped generate by fueling Boko Haram with his threats of violent change agst Nigeria, enabling Buhari's eventual victory as the candidate most visible in the Muslim North and now enables him stand a chance of taking over from Buhari since the PDP zoned the Presidency to the North in the name of riding the wave of pro-Northern agitation. Atiku has now  joined the restructuring brigade, all in the chance to pretend to believe in a Nigeria that is a level playing ground for all citizens.

I belong to Nigerian centred social media groups dominated by Benin people, by Igbo people, by Yoruba people, by Hausas and Fulanis, along with social media groups dominated by no particular ethnicity, and have frequented the Facebook walls of a good no of figures influential on social media from these ethnicities and more. I also correlate my understanding of Nigerian history with observations I make on these fora.

I have concluded that except most from the SE, educated as they are  by the 60s crises and the civil war, Southern Nigerians, of various social and educational classes, are largely politically shortsighted  in relation to the national context  while Northern Nigeria, across various social and educational classes, is dominated by an ethno-religious supremacist mentality.

That is what I reference in terms of " the negativities of Nigeria's Muslim North" describing people demonstrating those mentalities as  "a slice of that population that has no business in Nigerian govt".

Some people prefer to see me as vituperating agst everyone from the Muslim North. The argument is about  dominant  influences and a dominant mentality, not about every person from the  region .

This culture, pervasive but not all encompassing, is  rooted, I expect, in the deeply ethnocentric and religiously insular Fulani Jihad, most likely the most fundamental shaping influence of the region, a puristic form of Islam established through colonizing a dominant population in the name of social and religious reforms, while placing the scions of the conquering ethnicity as the perpetual ruling class.

I wish re-education on this  if those are not the facts, however they are interpreted.

Its from only the Muslim North you will find articulate and at times, highly Western educated elite defending or justifying or excusing terrorism bcs it serves their clannish interests, threatening death on social media to those of their people who support a candidate not from their region, where a mob will beat up a person who states their candidate might not win the Presidency in 2019, the only region where a candidate will threaten antagonists bathing in blood if he does not win the Presidential election, another threaten the nation with violent change bcs he was not made candidate of a party likely to win the Presidency etc

In a country where people from one section can carry out a sustained terrorist  campaign of occupation, murdering thousands and occupying their lands, with the most prominent elite of  the same ethnicity publicly supporting them, and go free as the govt run by a person from the same ethnicity struggles to bend or create laws to assist their geographical spread as owners over the lands of others, what you have is not equality but a relationship btw two classes, a subordinate and a dominant class.

Can this inhumane power differential ever be eliminated?

The IPOB vision is the only certain way I can see out of this calamity - a referendum run by international honest and impartial brokers for reconstituting the leaving or remaining together of each ethnicity currently in Nigeria and the terms for that, but with Niger Delta oil to feed a bloatedly run   govt, who among the political class wants to miss a chance to ride the gravy train?

Meanwhile a good no of  Southerners, in dealing in political contexts with  the Muslim North,  pride themselves on the political blindness  which they call freedom from ethnic identification, while,  without recognizing the evident ethnocentricity dominant in the other, they  are uninformed, or recognizing and refusing to act on it, are  being self destructive or colluding in their subjugation.

toyin

On Wed, 31 Oct 2018 at 14:49, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:

Toyin:

People also burned and killed people in the SW in the days of the Wild Wild West and in the second republic in Nigeria.  So that attitude is not the exclusive preserve of the Muslim North as you imply.

What is the the educational status of Donald Trump and how has that aided his quest for power and his administrative style?  He is also a contemporary American President and does not belong to the age of Lincoln. Donald Trump said worse things than Buhari yet he was elected President.  Can you remove him? Do you still not desire to go and live among such people as elected Trump?  So what's different about Nigeria?

Beware of the bigotry that you accuse the whole of the Muslim North of.  You contradict yourself by saying Buhari educated his daughter to a Law degree.  That means he recognizes his daughter belongs to a different generation from his.  He is not to be judged as belonging to his daughters generation.

Good education is desirable as the writer admits (so this is just making a mountain of a mole hill.)  After all he admits even traditional rulers are nowadays well educated

(Prof) Jibrin (Ibrahim) is from the Muslim North.  He understands the value of education and is more highly educated formally than you are. Does that mean you can not intelligibly  interract with him? No!  Does that disqualify him from being seen as a member of the Muslim North? No!

Dies the Nigerian Constitution say the President must have university a degree?  If not Buhari did no wrong by offering himself for election without a degree until the Constitutiin is changed

Bigotry is in every locale North or South.  Beware you are not an unsuspecting perennial victim.

OAA

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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

From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>

Date: 31/10/2018 11:30 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT CERTIFICATE

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another pro-buhari massage?

perhaps all to support a man who has never bothered to gain a self or institutionally administered education? whose crass provinciality is evident in his administration and what he has to say to the public?

Buhari represents the negativities of Nigeria's Muslim North, a slice of that population that has no business in Nigerian govt.

have you ever reasoned that it is only from the Muslim North that anyone will dare present himself for the Presidency with little  certifiable education?

Nobody from the South would do that. It will not be accepted by either Southerners or Northerners.

Why is it so?

Partly bcs the Northern Muslim candidates can trust on the unwavering support offered by religio-ethnic bigotry of their kind of ethno-religious compact,  the kind that leads to the massacre of innocents bcs their candidate has  lost an election ( pro-Buhari massacres 2011) ,  as different from the more cosmopolitan Islam of the SW.  That ethno-religious clannishness is the primary strength of Northern Muslim politics in opposition to the South.

Those in the South, however, will not demonstrate such intense clannishness  but some are ready to blind themselves in support of such a clannish culture, such as through trying to sell to the public a story that you cant sell to your own child of why you do need not bother with significant education.

After all, without the piece of paper called a degree, one might not be politically  intelligent enough to get elected as Nigerian President as those without that sheet of paper have succeeded in doing.

You are not going to ask your son or daughter to emulate US Presidents of centuries ago in a time when  their country  was just beginning to develop a definite identity, where many values and the significance of many institution were still fluid.

You are not going to advice your child to ignore the fact that for perhaps a century now the standard education for US Presidents is an Ivy League education, an unwritten rule that, almost without exception, any serious aspirant to the highest levels of US govt is well aware of and does their best to abide by.

You have chosen to ignore the fact that the largely uneducated Buhari made sure he educated his daughter in a law degree in the UK. He did not give to his daughter the advice you are now giving to Nigerians, most likely in his support.

Why must some insist on low standards for Nigeria?

Standards they will not wish for themselves or their loved ones.

Invoking nations that have developed a superb systems of government in comparison with a country that is significantly akin to a jungle, where the govt itself is a terrorist enabler, where even the law does not do very much to restrain the powerful or the desperate.

well done sir.

toyin

On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 at 13:38, Anthony Akinola <anthony.a.akinola@gmail.com> wrote:

  TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT CERTIFICATE

Voluminous constitutions are symptomatic of the distrust a people have about themselves. It is assumed that a people cannot be reasonable and patriotic,every rule governing their behaviour must be spelt out in black and white.This would seem to be the case in Nigeria,with its cumbersome constitution, where every rule of democratic governance  is assembled, albeit in confusing and contradictory wordings.

One knows of a nation that is governed without a written constitution. There is not a document that is called the British Constitution, democratic governance derives its legitimacy from customs and tradition. Yet, Britain is one of the most orderly geographical entities in the world-a nation that once superintended governance in many overseas colonies.

Even in the United States of America, the nation with the first written constitution , not everything is packed into the constitution. The American constitution is a very slim document, readable and easy to comprehend even by those with minimal education. There is no reference to political party in their constitution, and neither is their a requirement that the President must acquire a certain level of education. It is enough that a candidate for that position has attained the age of 35,and he or she is a natural born citizen of America, or a resident within the USA for a minimum of 14 years.

Much as the letters of any constitution must be respected, one honestly thinks that the requirement of education for President should no longer be generating controversy in a modern society. It should by now be taken for granted that whoever shall be President of Nigeria would be educated, otherwise the collective intelligence of the citizenry is insulted.Such a requirement should not be in the constitution.

.

Even then, it is the democratic right of the people to decide who their leader is. Paper qualification may not necessarily mean that one is politically-intelligent. Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents of the USA, is said to have had only about a year of formal schooling of any kind. His successor, Andrew Johnson, is said to have had no formal schooling of any kind.

Lest one gets me wrong, one is not saying that education is not important and neither is one holding brief for any politician. What one is trying to assert is that there are things we must now take for granted in the 21st century. Even in our local communities, contemporary traditional rulers are well-educated and sophisticated individuals. Gone is the era when the traditional ruler was that kola-chewing individual, very eloquent at reciting incantations.

Anthony Akinola,

Oxford, UK.

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Killer politicians

i like jeffrey sachs, but would complain that murdering one's political enemies is different from engaging in swarfare. the complaints about syria or libya are of a different order from the killing of some foreign ruler or operative. anyway, even as i agree with his points, broadly, i don't think the situation in was or is s simple as he puts it, when there were competing forces on the ground, including syrian rebels, whom we could have really supported, but then isis which joined the anti assad forces, and esp the incursion of the russians.

an egregious example of u.s. govt committing murder against those the fbi wanted eliminate was cointelpro, the assassination of the black panther leadership.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

---

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2018 7:46:42 PM
To: usa
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Killer politicians

 

Of some relevance to your false interpretation of American history, Adepoju.

Note paragraphs 3 - 6,  in particular..

GE

africahistory.net

……………………………………………………………………………..

Killer Politicians    Jeffrey D. Sachs   ||   October 24, 2018   ||   Project Syndicate https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/killer-politicians-include-american-presidents-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2018-10 Americans are rightly horrified at Jamal Khashoggi's brutal murder, yet most fail to recognize that their own leaders' murderous ways may be little different than those who ordered Khashoggi's death. The pervasiveness of state-sponsored killings is no excuse for treating murder as acceptable, ever. NEW YORK – "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" asked Henry II as he instigated the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in 1170. Down through the ages, presidents and princes around the world have been murderers and accessories to murder, as the great Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin and Walter Lunden documented in statistical detail in their masterwork Power and Morality. One of their main findings was that the behavior of ruling groups tends to be more criminal and amoral than that of the people over whom they rule. What rulers crave most is deniability. But with the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by his own government, the poisoning of former Russian spies living in the United Kingdom, and whispers that the head of Interpol, Meng Hongwei, may have been executed in China, the curtain has been slipping more than usual of late. In Riyadh, Moscow, and even Beijing, the political class is scrambling to cover up its lethal ways. But no one should feel self-righteous here. American presidents have a long history of murder, something unlikely to trouble the current incumbent, Donald Trump, whose favorite predecessor, Andrew Jackson, was a cold-blooded murderer, slaveowner, and ethnic cleanser of native Americans. For Harry Truman, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima spared him the likely high cost of invading Japan. But the second atomic bombing, of Nagasaki, was utterly indefensible and took place through sheer bureaucratic momentum: the bombing apparently occurred without Truman's explicit order. Since 1947, the deniability of presidential murder has been facilitated by the CIA, which has served as a secret army (and sometime death squad) for American presidents. The CIA has been a party to murders and mayhem in all parts of the world, with almost no oversight or accountability for its countless assassinations. It is possible, though not definitively proved, that the CIA even assassinated UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. The CIA has only been held to public account on one occasion: the 1975 US Senate hearings led by Frank Church. Since then, the CIA has continued its violent and, yes, murderous ways, without any accountability for it or for the presidents who authorized its actions. Many mass killings by presidents have involved the conventional military. Lyndon Johnson escalated US military intervention in Vietnam on the pretext of a North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that never happened. Richard Nixon went further: by carpet-bombing Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, he sought to instill in the Soviet Union the fear that he was an irrational leader capable of anything. (Nixon's willingness to implement his "madman theory" is perhaps the self-fulfilling proof of his madness.) In the end, the Johnson-Nixon American war in Indochina cost millions of innocent lives. There was never a true accounting, and perhaps the opposite: plenty of precedents for later mass killings by US forces. The mass killings in Iraq under George W. Bush are of course better known, because the US-led war there was made for TV. A supposedly civilized country engaged in "shock and awe" to overthrow another country's government on utterly false pretenses. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died as a result. Barack Obama was widely attacked by the right for being too soft, yet he, too, notched up quite a death toll. His administration repeatedly approved drone attacks that killed not only terrorists, but also innocents and US citizens who opposed America's bloody wars in Muslim countries. He signed the presidential finding authorizing the CIA to cooperate with Saudi Arabia in overthrowing the Syrian government. That "covert" operation (hardly discussed in the polite pages of the New York Times) led to an ongoing civil war that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and millions displaced from their homes. He used NATO airstrikes to overthrow Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi, resulting in a failed state and ongoing violence.  Under Trump, the US has abetted Saudi Arabia's mass murder (including of children) in Yemen by selling it bombs and advanced weapons with almost no awareness, oversight, or accountability by the Congress or the public. Murder committed out of view of the media is almost no longer murder at all. When the curtain slips, as with the Khashoggi killing, we briefly see the world as it is. A Washington Post columnist is lured to a brutal death and dismembered by America's close "ally." The American-Israeli-Saudi big lie that Iran is at the center of global terrorism, a claim refuted by the data, is briefly threatened by the embarrassing disclosure of Khashoggi's grisly end. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who ostensibly ordered the operation, is put in charge of the "investigation" of the case; the Saudis duly cashier a few senior officials; and Trump, a master of non-stop lies, parrots official Saudi tall tales about a rogue operation. A few government and business leaders have postponed visits to Saudi Arabia. The list of announced withdrawals from a glitzy investment conference is a who's who of America's military-industrial complex: top Wall Street bankers, CEOs of major media companies, and senior officials of military contractors, such as Airbus's defense chief. The US prides itself on being a constitutional democracy, yet when it comes to foreign policy, the president is little different from a despot. Trump has just announced the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty without so much as a mention to Congress. Political scientists should test the following hypothesis: countries led by presidents (as in the US) and non-constitutional monarchs (as in Saudi Arabia), rather than by parliaments and prime ministers, are especially vulnerable to murderous politics. Parliaments provide no guarantees of restraint, but one-man rule in foreign policy, as in the US and Saudi Arabia, almost guarantees massive bloodletting. Americans are rightly horrified by Khashoggi's murder. But their own government's murderous ways may be little different. The pervasiveness of state-sponsored killings is no excuse for treating murder as acceptable, ever. It is instead a rationale for subjecting power to strict constitutional constraints and especially to international law, including the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is our only true hope for survival and safety in a world where the casual resort to violence can easily be the end of all of us.

 

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT CERTIFICATE

Some people seem to be throwing around labels at random. What, for instance, do you mean by "fascist ethnocentrism"?

On Oct 31, 2018, at 2:39 PM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

People  are arguing for the no certificate option bcs they have a candidate who has little FORMAL education and little INFORMAL education.

Can you point to any definite evidence that your candidate has any significant education, FORMAL or INFORMAL?

Buhari's fellow ethocentrist, Trump, is not only a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania he is not representative in his crudity and fascist ethnocentrism, of modern US Presidency. He represents the resurgence of ethnocentric forces similar to those that have empowered Buhari, but the mentalities he represents may be seen as ultimately on the losing side, seeing in Trump a last gasp for air. The ethnocentricities of much the Buhari base, however,  are deeply entrenched.  The huge injustices possible in Nigeria, topped by state sponsorship of internal terrorism, are, also, most likely, impossible or unsustainable in the US.

The differences in legal systems, political history and economy between Nigeria and the US are too great for these two nations to be adequately compared  without making careful qualifications.

The person who should be Nigerian President in the current equation is Osinbajo. His conduct of affairs whenever his   lean master is not around shows that.

But we have a cultured SAN as VP and a crude provincial  who does not belong anywhere beyond his native Daura local govt as President.

Why?

Bcs most of the ethno-religious kin of the provincial will support him no matter what-after all, those outside their fold belong to a different universe, fellow humans but not equatable  with their brethren.

Those kin gave support for the initial two years of their uprising to the murderous Boko Haram Islamic terrorism which sold itself as an uprising agst the govt of a Southern President, thereby enabling  the eventual  removal of that govt by the govt of the provincial. That same provincial made sure he milked this narrative for all it was worth, arguing agst the war on the terrorists as war agst his people and telling his people that the terrorists in their later stages, when the govt's war agst them was succeeding,  were the work of the govt.

The Muslim North is dominated by right wing mentalities, conservatives at best, ethno-religious supremacists at worst, while the South often deludes itself in political arrangements into thinking it is dealing with a partner who sees it as equal.

This imbalance enables the Muslim North to field a Buhari who has no qualifications, whether academic or otherwise to lead anything outside Daura, a man whose history is stained with the blood of those massacred in his name, people whose actions he allowed to continue unabated without a word from him, people building on a culture of recurrent anti-Southern pogroms reaching back to the 50s, a culture that does not exist anywhere else in Nigeria, while the South can never field a person with only a secondary school certificate, even which Buhari does not have, and yet the uninformed character can win bcs Southern politicians might have little interest at the national level beyond how to eat.

We are happy if the Daura man presents toilet paper as a certificate, some once declared. Yet, there exist many who do not need to be assessed by such abysmal criteria. Now efforts are being made to paper over the determined  lack of self improvement in the Daura character by making convoluted arguments involving Presidents from centuries ago in other lands.

In a world in which his elders have chosen to improve themselves after leaving office-Gowon and OBJ- he has based his political identity squarely in such ethnic consolidations as publicly identifying with the massive looter from his region, ex head of state Abacha and in identification with Boko Haram Islamic terrorism and lately, enabling right wing Fulani  terrorism.

Buhari's major opponent, Atiku Abubukar, is an even deadlier cocktail than Buhari. Both demagogue and sly creature, he created the ideological foundation that eventually brought Buhari to power in the name of the power-must-return-to-the North mantra aided by the momentum he helped generate by fueling Boko Haram with his threats of violent change agst Nigeria, enabling Buhari's eventual victory as the candidate most visible in the Muslim North and now enables him stand a chance of taking over from Buhari since the PDP zoned the Presidency to the North in the name of riding the wave of pro-Northern agitation. Atiku has now  joined the restructuring brigade, all in the chance to pretend to believe in a Nigeria that is a level playing ground for all citizens.

I belong to Nigerian centred social media groups dominated by Benin people, by Igbo people, by Yoruba people, by Hausas and Fulanis, along with social media groups dominated by no particular ethnicity, and have frequented the Facebook walls of a good no of figures influential on social media from these ethnicities and more. I also correlate my understanding of Nigerian history with observations I make on these fora.

I have concluded that except most from the SE, educated as they are  by the 60s crises and the civil war, Southern Nigerians, of various social and educational classes, are largely politically shortsighted  in relation to the national context  while Northern Nigeria, across various social and educational classes, is dominated by an ethno-religious supremacist mentality.

That is what I reference in terms of " the negativities of Nigeria's Muslim North" describing people demonstrating those mentalities as  "a slice of that population that has no business in Nigerian govt".

Some people prefer to see me as vituperating agst everyone from the Muslim North. The argument is about  dominant  influences and a dominant mentality, not about every person from the  region .

This culture, pervasive but not all encompassing, is  rooted, I expect, in the deeply ethnocentric and religiously insular Fulani Jihad, most likely the most fundamental shaping influence of the region, a puristic form of Islam established through colonizing a dominant population in the name of social and religious reforms, while placing the scions of the conquering ethnicity as the perpetual ruling class.

I wish re-education on this  if those are not the facts, however they are interpreted.

Its from only the Muslim North you will find articulate and at times, highly Western educated elite defending or justifying or excusing terrorism bcs it serves their clannish interests, threatening death on social media to those of their people who support a candidate not from their region, where a mob will beat up a person who states their candidate might not win the Presidency in 2019, the only region where a candidate will threaten antagonists bathing in blood if he does not win the Presidential election, another threaten the nation with violent change bcs he was not made candidate of a party likely to win the Presidency etc

In a country where people from one section can carry out a sustained terrorist  campaign of occupation, murdering thousands and occupying their lands, with the most prominent elite of  the same ethnicity publicly supporting them, and go free as the govt run by a person from the same ethnicity struggles to bend or create laws to assist their geographical spread as owners over the lands of others, what you have is not equality but a relationship btw two classes, a subordinate and a dominant class.

Can this inhumane power differential ever be eliminated?

The IPOB vision is the only certain way I can see out of this calamity - a referendum run by international honest and impartial brokers for reconstituting the leaving or remaining together of each ethnicity currently in Nigeria and the terms for that, but with Niger Delta oil to feed a bloatedly run   govt, who among the political class wants to miss a chance to ride the gravy train?

Meanwhile a good no of  Southerners, in dealing in political contexts with  the Muslim North,  pride themselves on the political blindness  which they call freedom from ethnic identification, while,  without recognizing the evident ethnocentricity dominant in the other, they  are uninformed, or recognizing and refusing to act on it, are  being self destructive or colluding in their subjugation.

toyin

On Wed, 31 Oct 2018 at 14:49, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:

Toyin:

People also burned and killed people in the SW in the days of the Wild Wild West and in the second republic in Nigeria.  So that attitude is not the exclusive preserve of the Muslim North as you imply.

What is the the educational status of Donald Trump and how has that aided his quest for power and his administrative style?  He is also a contemporary American President and does not belong to the age of Lincoln. Donald Trump said worse things than Buhari yet he was elected President.  Can you remove him? Do you still not desire to go and live among such people as elected Trump?  So what's different about Nigeria?

Beware of the bigotry that you accuse the whole of the Muslim North of.  You contradict yourself by saying Buhari educated his daughter to a Law degree.  That means he recognizes his daughter belongs to a different generation from his.  He is not to be judged as belonging to his daughters generation.

Good education is desirable as the writer admits (so this is just making a mountain of a mole hill.)  After all he admits even traditional rulers are nowadays well educated

(Prof) Jibrin (Ibrahim) is from the Muslim North.  He understands the value of education and is more highly educated formally than you are. Does that mean you can not intelligibly  interract with him? No!  Does that disqualify him from being seen as a member of the Muslim North? No!

Dies the Nigerian Constitution say the President must have university a degree?  If not Buhari did no wrong by offering himself for election without a degree until the Constitutiin is changed

Bigotry is in every locale North or South.  Beware you are not an unsuspecting perennial victim.

OAA

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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

From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>

Date: 31/10/2018 11:30 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT CERTIFICATE

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another pro-buhari massage?

perhaps all to support a man who has never bothered to gain a self or institutionally administered education? whose crass provinciality is evident in his administration and what he has to say to the public?

Buhari represents the negativities of Nigeria's Muslim North, a slice of that population that has no business in Nigerian govt.

have you ever reasoned that it is only from the Muslim North that anyone will dare present himself for the Presidency with little  certifiable education?

Nobody from the South would do that. It will not be accepted by either Southerners or Northerners.

Why is it so?

Partly bcs the Northern Muslim candidates can trust on the unwavering support offered by religio-ethnic bigotry of their kind of ethno-religious compact,  the kind that leads to the massacre of innocents bcs their candidate has  lost an election ( pro-Buhari massacres 2011) ,  as different from the more cosmopolitan Islam of the SW.  That ethno-religious clannishness is the primary strength of Northern Muslim politics in opposition to the South.

Those in the South, however, will not demonstrate such intense clannishness  but some are ready to blind themselves in support of such a clannish culture, such as through trying to sell to the public a story that you cant sell to your own child of why you do need not bother with significant education.

After all, without the piece of paper called a degree, one might not be politically  intelligent enough to get elected as Nigerian President as those without that sheet of paper have succeeded in doing.

You are not going to ask your son or daughter to emulate US Presidents of centuries ago in a time when  their country  was just beginning to develop a definite identity, where many values and the significance of many institution were still fluid.

You are not going to advice your child to ignore the fact that for perhaps a century now the standard education for US Presidents is an Ivy League education, an unwritten rule that, almost without exception, any serious aspirant to the highest levels of US govt is well aware of and does their best to abide by.

You have chosen to ignore the fact that the largely uneducated Buhari made sure he educated his daughter in a law degree in the UK. He did not give to his daughter the advice you are now giving to Nigerians, most likely in his support.

Why must some insist on low standards for Nigeria?

Standards they will not wish for themselves or their loved ones.

Invoking nations that have developed a superb systems of government in comparison with a country that is significantly akin to a jungle, where the govt itself is a terrorist enabler, where even the law does not do very much to restrain the powerful or the desperate.

well done sir.

toyin

On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 at 13:38, Anthony Akinola <anthony.a.akinola@gmail.com> wrote:

  TOO MUCH ADO ABOUT CERTIFICATE

Voluminous constitutions are symptomatic of the distrust a people have about themselves. It is assumed that a people cannot be reasonable and patriotic,every rule governing their behaviour must be spelt out in black and white.This would seem to be the case in Nigeria,with its cumbersome constitution, where every rule of democratic governance  is assembled, albeit in confusing and contradictory wordings.

One knows of a nation that is governed without a written constitution. There is not a document that is called the British Constitution, democratic governance derives its legitimacy from customs and tradition. Yet, Britain is one of the most orderly geographical entities in the world-a nation that once superintended governance in many overseas colonies.

Even in the United States of America, the nation with the first written constitution , not everything is packed into the constitution. The American constitution is a very slim document, readable and easy to comprehend even by those with minimal education. There is no reference to political party in their constitution, and neither is their a requirement that the President must acquire a certain level of education. It is enough that a candidate for that position has attained the age of 35,and he or she is a natural born citizen of America, or a resident within the USA for a minimum of 14 years.

Much as the letters of any constitution must be respected, one honestly thinks that the requirement of education for President should no longer be generating controversy in a modern society. It should by now be taken for granted that whoever shall be President of Nigeria would be educated, otherwise the collective intelligence of the citizenry is insulted.Such a requirement should not be in the constitution.

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Even then, it is the democratic right of the people to decide who their leader is. Paper qualification may not necessarily mean that one is politically-intelligent. Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest presidents of the USA, is said to have had only about a year of formal schooling of any kind. His successor, Andrew Johnson, is said to have had no formal schooling of any kind.

Lest one gets me wrong, one is not saying that education is not important and neither is one holding brief for any politician. What one is trying to assert is that there are things we must now take for granted in the 21st century. Even in our local communities, contemporary traditional rulers are well-educated and sophisticated individuals. Gone is the era when the traditional ruler was that kola-chewing individual, very eloquent at reciting incantations.

Anthony Akinola,

Oxford, UK.

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