Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - How Buhari’s Low Bar is Elevating Atiku

When I read the latest opinions from Oga Ochonu and Oga Kperogi, I said, Wow! Trumpism has affected my esteemed scholars. I was not too sure they read their contributions over within the context of Nigeria's recent history. That is, 1999-2018, and see what their latest contributions do to advance the interest of the beleaguered Nigerians. Can you imagine, even Trump, the depraved, is seeking a second term, yet because PMB is slow, does not spread the lucre of office, allow all manner of criminals to continue to pillage the treasury, or appoint us, absentee Andrewed academics to positions in his Cabinet, we now throw history to the dogs and condemn his THREE and HALF years in office, period during which he had to survive poisoning, where the Oil Revenue dipped below US$30/barrel, compared with bonehead GEJ who squandered the fortunes of the country, at US$140/barrel to enrich cronies, the Pigs and the marabouts of the land. I just can't stop shaking my head.

How are we even beginning to compare death to sickness? How does one compare manifest crook to manifest normal person. Both have human defects, while one has moral fiber and the other lacks this critical ingredient, but he combines with his natural human weakness a proclivity toward anti-people, anti-country and anti-black predatory, kleptocratic, disdainful reflexes to egocentric depraved wealth grabbing megalomania that would have landed him in jail for life in other climes or a bullet to the head were he in China.

It is only in Nigeria that academics will shamelessly parade their intellect in the service of those who have consistently or otherwise destroyed their country the way we have wiped clean the 16 years of locusts and pestilence that was PDPigs time in Nigerian History. We now make it seem as if AA has no antecedents, and his arrival from Mambila plains is prophetic and the beginning of Nigerian Exodus from slavery to salvation.

This is getting curioser and curioser as the days go by. But these top Nigeria/American/Canadian academics are entitled to their own views. We all witnessed the Abatification of the cerebrum and the after effects of the journey. We hope that this too shall pass, and our collective sanity will not have gone the way of God's Own Country, US of A, where truth, decency and humanity is in its final death throes, gasping for life support without any oxygen supply in the horizon. We may be witnessing the demise of American domination before our very eyes. Nigeria has never been great, but our own intellectuals are deploying all the tricks in their arsenal to ensure we cannot ever return to the so-called 60s and 70s when the academy held the feet of the then civilian and military governments to fire without trying to grind personal axes.

O ga o.



Dr. John Ayotunde (Tunde) Isola BEWAJI, FJIM, MNAL
Professor of Philosophy
BA, MA, PhD Philosophy, PGDE, MA Distance Education
Postgraduate Certificate in Philosophy for Children
Department of Language, Linguistics and Philosophy
Faculty of Huimanities and Education
University of the West Indies
Mona Campus Kingston 7 Jamaica
Tel:       1-876-927-1661-9 Ext: 3993
             1-876-935-8993 (o)
Fax:      1-876-970-2949
Email:   john.bewaji@uwimona.edu.jm      johnayotundebewaji@gmail.com       tundebewaji@yahoo.com (alternate) 
             tunde.bewaji@gmail.com (alternate)

http://www.cap-press.com/books/isbn/9781611630879/Narratives-of-Struggle (2012)
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Aesthetics (2012)

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739185032/Ontologized-Ethics (2013)

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498518383/The-Rule-of-Law-and-Governance-in-Indigenous-Yoruba-Society-A-Study-in-African-Philosophy-of-Law (2016)

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/the-humanities-and-the-dynamics-of-african-culture-in-the-21st-century (2017)

--------------------------------------------
On Sat, 20/10/18, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - How Buhari's Low Bar is Elevating Atiku
To: "USAAfrica Dialogue" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, 20 October, 2018, 6:14

Saturday,
October 20, 2018How
Buhari's Low Bar is Elevating AtikuBy Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
In a previous
column, I argued that President Muhammadu Buhari has so
lowered the bar of governance that it won't take a lot for
any person who succeeds him to impress Nigerians. So the
best campaign against Buhari is to promise not to be like
him, which is really sad because there is much more at stake
in the task of governing Nigeria than just transcending
Buhari's incompetence and mediocrity.
Atiku Abubakar has
started to excite voters by promising to not be like Buhari.
On October 12, for instance, Atiku's statement on Twitter
that he won't
take six months to name his ministers resonated wildly
with a lot of Nigerians. It reminded people that Buhari took
six months to assemble the least impressive cabinet in
Nigeria's recent history, which is peopled by NYSC
dodgers, certificate forgers, malefactors, liars,
etc.
I extensively
researched to see which other country in the world in recent
memory elected a president who took six months to name his
or her cabinet. There was none. So promising to name a
cabinet shortly after inauguration ordinarily shouldn't be
a campaign promise because that's what every elected
president is expected to do. But you can't fault Atiku
because Buhari has lowered the bar to an unprecedented
degree.
Atiku also
promised that 40 percent of his cabinet would be composed of
women and young people. Again, ordinarily, that would have
been uninspiring, even condemnable, because the promise
implies that 60 percent of his cabinet would be composed of
old men, which is unfair, unbalanced, and regressive.
However, look at Buhari's cabinet, which he has failed to
rejig in more than three years, and you will see why such an
unimpressive pledge would strike a chord with Nigerian
voters.
See below an
excerpt from my February 3, 2018 column titled "How
Buhari Has Lowered the Bar of Governance" to gain an
insight into why Atiku's popularity has been soaring in
the last few days. Buhari's unexampled incompetence is
propelling Atiku to heights he is unworthy of:
"I had hoped
that even if Buhari wasn't a stellar president, he would
at least not lower the bar. But that is precisely what he
has done. He has set the bar of governance so low that all
it would take for any president who comes after him to
impress us is to:
1. Constitute his
cabinet within a few days of being sworn in. It took Buhari
nearly six months to appoint his cabinet, which is the worst
record in Nigeria's entire history. It slowed the country
and hurt the economy. On September 17, 2015 when France
24's François Picard asked him why he hadn't named his
ministers months after being sworn in, he said ministers
were worthless and just "make a lot of noise." That was
a low point. And the cabinet he took months to put together
turned out to be one of the most colorless and lackluster in
Nigeria's history.
2. Appoint members
of governing boards of government agencies in the first few
months of being in power. It took Buhari nearly three years
to do this. Since government agencies can't legally
function without governing boards, governance basically
halted for more than half of Buhari's first term. That's
why I once observed that while previous administrations were
guilty of misgovernance, Buhari is, for the most part,
guilty of "ungovernance," which is worse.
3. Not be so
incompetent as to appoint dead people into government—and
living people without first consulting them.
4. Periodically
speak to Nigerians through the domestic media, not when he
is abroad.
5. Personally
visit sites of national tragedy, show emotion, and make
national broadcasts to reassure a grieving nation. In my
March 18, 2017 column titled, "Why
Buhari Should Learn from Osinbajo," I
wrote:
"In a tragic
irony, it took Buhari's sickness for Nigeria to get a
chance at some health. It also took his absence for the
country to feel some presence of leadership. Why did it take
the ascendancy of Osinbajo to the acting presidency for this
to happen? The answer is simple: symbolic presence. Buhari
lacked symbolic presence in the 20 months he was in
charge."
6. Have an
economic team made up of economists and not, as Buhari has
done, appoint a diplomat as an economic adviser and then
push him to the gaunt fringes of the Vice President's
office.
7. Reflect token
religious, regional, and national diversity in appointments.
Buhari won a national mandate, but his appointments are, as
I've pointed out in previous
columns, undisguisedly Arewacentric. His personal
example shows that he doesn't believe in one Nigeria, yet
he often insists that Nigeria's unity is
"non-negotiable." That's unreasonable.
8. Not lie
shamelessly about self-evident facts.
9.  Not budget
billions for Aso Rock Clinic and yet starve it of basic
medicines (so much so that his own wife and daughter would
complain openly) and then fly to London for medical
treatment at the drop of a hat even for "ear infections"
and "breathing difficulties."
10.  Not have
a compulsive
runawayist impulse that ensures that he travels out of
the country at the slightest opportunity and for the
silliest reasons.
11. Even pretend
that the whole of Nigeria is his constituency—including
those who gave him "97%" of their votes and those who
gave him only "5%" of their votes.
12. Add to the
list
Sadly, these are
really basic things that shouldn't attract any praise.
There is no greater evidence that Nigeria has regressed
really badly in almost every index in Buhari's less than 3
years of being in power than the reality of these grim
facts.
And he wants you
to extend this national tragedy for another 4 years in 2019?
Well, it's up to you. If that's what Nigerians want,
who am I to deny them the "luxury" to inflict
self-violence on themselves?
But what I won't
take is the narrative being promoted by apologists and
beneficiaries of the government that there is no one better
than Buhari at this time. On the contrary, it's actually
practically impossible to be worse than Buhari because he
has brought Nigeria to the ground zero of incompetence, so
almost anybody would be better than him. He descended from
the zenith of "Sai Baba" to the slope of "Baba
Go-slow" and finally to the nadir of "Baba
Standstill." It can't get worse than
that."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




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