Femi Segun,
I am neither a fan of Buhari nor of Atiku but a fan of Nigeria!! While it is Kperogi's fact that the parents of Atiku were aborigins of Sokoto, it is other peoples' fact that his parents were Malian. Not only that, Olusegun Obasanjo, under whom Atiku served as the Vice President of Nigeria for eight years, has told the whole world in his 2014 book, MY WATCH (p.32), that Atiku Abubakar's ''parental background was somewhat shadowy.'' If we leave the parents of Atiku Abubakar out of his presidential aspiration, he as former Nigeria's Deputy Director General of Customs and Vice President of the Federal Republic should be qualified to be President of Nigeria. Had Obasanjo been incapacitated to continue in office, Atiku would have been elevated to the post of President, according to a Section of the Constitution. Now, another Section of the same Constitution that should have elevated him to the substantive president says unambiguously that for a person to be qualified for election to the office of President of Nigeria, he must be a citizen of Nigeria by birth. Please, observe that it is not enough alone to be citizen of Nigeria, which can be acquired through other means, but citizen of Nigeria by birth. Please, note that a woman who is a Nigerian citizen by birth is not allowed to contest for the office of the President of Nigeria since Section 131 (a) mentions only *he* and not 'she.' If you have read me well, you would have discovered that I did point out that the Constitution may not be perfect, but we must continue to obey it until it is fully amended. Thus, I am defending the Constitution of Nigeria and not Buhari. In upholding the Constitution, Atiku Abubakar is a Nigerian citizen as a consequence of the 1961 plebiscite that merged Northern Cameroon, where he was born in Jada, Adamawa, on 25 November 1946, to Nigeria, but not a Nigerian citizen by birth because he was not born in Nigeria unless the plebiscite of 1961 is backdated to 1946.
On the educational qualification of Buhari to contest presidential elections, I did not defend what you refer to as his inability to produce WAEC results. Rather, I referred to the 1999 Constitution as amended where it is stated in black and white that the minimum educational qualification required of any Nigerian citizen by birth wishing to contest election for the office of the President is primary school leaving certificate or ability to communicate in English language to the satisfaction of INEC. From the provisions of the Constitution, it did not matter if Buhari had a WAEC or not as long as INEC was satisfied that he could communicate unhindered in English language, he was qualified to contest the Presidential election.
Nigeria will be a better country for all to live if the laws are obeyed and the Constitution is followed according to its letters. At moment, the national assembly is occupied by 54 carpet-crossing members since September 2018, contrary to Section 68 (1g) of the Constitution prohibiting carpet crossing. The God of SANs in Nigeria drinks from the stream of impunity and holds feast for corruption, which are recipes for backward ever and forward never economic and industrial development of Nigeria.
S. Kadiri
Från: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> för Femi Segun <soloruntoba@gmail.com>
Skickat: den 21 april 2019 14:58
Till: 'Chika Onyeani' via USA Africa Dialogue Series
Ämne: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Atiku's Citizenship and Buhari's Illiterate Lawyers
Skickat: den 21 april 2019 14:58
Till: 'Chika Onyeani' via USA Africa Dialogue Series
Ämne: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Atiku's Citizenship and Buhari's Illiterate Lawyers
I am not a fan of Atiku but facts must be treated as facts on this issue of his citizenship by plebscite or birth. Ogbeni Salimonu Kadiri appears to missed the part of the article where Prof Kperogi said the parents of Atiku came from Sokoto State. Can we conveniently overlook this fact and side with desperate politicians who want to cling to power at all cost? Why are we so fanatical about supporting a politician to the extent of defending the indefensible? When PMB, the man who prides himself as Mr. Integrity hired SANs to defend the simple case of producing WAEC result, Ogbeni Kadiri defended him. Why the need to waste money on going to court over WAEC certificate, which can be easily produced, if indeed it is available? Inquiring mind wants to know about these contradictions or should I cal it expediential sanctimoniousness?
Femi
On Sun, Apr 21, 2019 at 7:19 AM Salimonu Kadiri <ogunlakaiye@hotmail.com> wrote:
--As my dear sister, Gloria Emeagwali, humorously expressed it recently in response to one of our experts on this forum, I am a layman in law. However, I am literate enough in spoken and written English language so that I am able to differentiate a real lawyer from a pettifoger whenever I encounter one. On that premise I am changing the title of the topic under discussion here to : Atiku's Birth Certificate and Kperogi, the Pettifoger.
The pettifoger asserted here under that scientific polls predicted that Buhari would lose the (2019) election. Without specifying who conducted the scientific polls and on whose behalf, the pettifoger went on to lecture readers about random sampling and statistics. Random sampling and statistics as we all know can proclaim hungry and starving people as overfed deserving to fast and reduce weight. One can produce statistic to confirm what one has decided to prove. That was the basis on which Darrel Huff once wrote his book titled : How to Lie with Statistic. For opinion polls to be considered scientific in Nigeria, it must be conducted in the language understood and commanded by both the questioner and the questioned. The scientific nature of the answer obtained at the time of polling may be altered if responders to the questions of poll's samplers change their minds on who to vote for between the poll sampling time and election day. Nigeria, unlike the US, is not only a multi-ethnic country but majority of voters are illiterates. Therefore, if opinion polls are conducted in Nigeria on what the citizens think has made few Nigerians millionaires, their answer will be that the rich have used human beings or female under-wears for money rituals. Ninety per cent of the people in the thirty-six states of democratic Nigeria do not know what is federal revenue allocations.
Whenever Nigerians want to be mischievous, they pretend not only to possess one eye but the single eye they possess is situated at the back of their head, thereby causing their vision to be diametrically opposed to the direction of their movements. The Constitution of Nigeria (1999 as amended) is not perfect, but it must be followed as it is until it is amended. Atiku Abubakar was a Nigerian Custom Officer and he has served as Vice President of Federal Republic of Nigeria for good eight years because he is a Nigerian citizen. Is Atiku eligible to contest for the office of the President of Nigeria as a Nigerian citizen? Sentimentally and wishfully, the answer according to Farooq Kperogi is yes. Of course, many liberal extremists will agree with him but what does the constitution say about who is eligible to contest in an election for the office of President of Nigeria? Section 131 (a) of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended) states unequivocally that for a person to be qualified for election to the office of President, he must be a citizen of Nigeria by birth. According to the afore-cited section of the 1999 Constitution only a male citizen of Nigeria by birth is qualified to contest in an election for the President of Nigeria. The information at public disposal now is that Atiku Abubakar was born on 25 November 1946 in Jada, Adamawa in the then Northern Cameroon, which through a plebiscite in 1961 was integrated into Nigeria. Therefore, to make Atiku Abubakar a Nigerian by birth, Northern Cameroon plebiscite of 1961 must be backdated to his date of birth in 1946, which is legally impossible. Atiku was not born in Nigeria in 1946 but in Northern Cameroon. To be eligible to contest for the President of Nigeria in an election, according to the 1999 constitution, one must at birth be born in Nigeria. Atiku Abubakar acquired Nigerian citizenship through a plebiscite and as such he is not a Nigerian citizen by birth according to the constitution. Nonetheless, anyone born in Adamawa from the date of integration of Northern Cameroon with Nigeria in 1961 is a Nigerian by birth and is qualified to contest and be President of Nigeria. One can acquire Nigerian citizenship through other means but that will not qualify one to contest for the President of Nigeria if one is not a citizen by birth. That is what the constitution says regardless of the wish of Kperogi and others.
Concerning INEC's server, the question any sane person will ask is, how was it possible for Atiku Abubakar to gain access into INEC's server? The intelligent answer to that question should be that he could only gain access into INEC's server by criminal means, that is to say by hacking into it. Since there was no INEC server to hack into, INEC has never bothered to report Atiku Abubakar's claim of criminal intrusion into its server to the police. From Atlanta, Kperogi is cocksure that INEC stores presidential election results in its server where Atiku Abubakar had obtained his election result illegally. Kperogi wrote, "Now that Atiku has enlisted the expert intervention of Microsoft and IBM to authenticate his claim that the electronic record of the presidential election stored on INEC's server is inconsistent with the results the compromised and morally putrid chairman of INEC announced, there is panic in the Presidential Villa and Buhari's ignorant lawyers are engaging in comical illiterate rhetorical antics for the sole purpose of diversion." Atiku Abubakar claims that card readers were used to send election results electronically to the INEC server which INEC has denied and, instead, asserted that card readers were only used to accredit intended voters. Atiku's election server figures showed that the total votes of President Buhari and Atiku tallied exactly with the total number of accredited voters, even though 73 presidential candidates contested the election. With Atiku's election server results, it would mean that 71 presidential candidates got zero votes and there were no cancelled or invalid votes in all the booths all over Nigeria!! The pettifogger branded Buhari's lawyers ignorant but with available facts, Kperogi and Atiku must be hallucinating. https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/322565-several-flaws-identified-in-atikus-presidential-election-server-result.html
S. Kadiri
Från: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> för Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Skickat: den 20 april 2019 06:44
Till: USAAfrica Dialogue
Ämne: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Atiku's Citizenship and Buhari's Illiterate LawyersSaturday, April 20, 2019
Atiku's Citizenship and Buhari's Illiterate Lawyers
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter:@faroooqkperogi
The law of attraction says like attracts like, which explains why Muhammadu Buhari is a magnet for mediocrities. Almost all his appointees are, like him, underwhelming, intellectually incurious rubes. It's no wonder that even the lawyers he assembled to defend his unprecedentedly audacious electoral robbery are also risible dolts.
Take, for example, Festus Keyamo, Buhari's reelection campaign spokesman and one of the lawyers defending his stolen mandate. In the run-up to the presidential election, Keyamo took self-righteous umbrage at scientific polls that predicted that Buhari would lose the election, and his point of attack against the polls was that pollsters merely sampled a little over a thousand Nigerians even though Nigeria's population is close to 200 million! He wondered why neither he nor anyone he knew had been polled!
Apparently, Keyamo has no earthly clue that scientific opinion polls base their snapshots and predictions on something called sampling and that 1,000 is a fair sample to make predictive statements about potential voting behaviors. Gallup, which has accurately predicted American presidential elections since 1944—except in 1948, 1976, 2004 and 2016—polls no more than 1,000 people. You don't poll every member of a population to make generalizable predictions about the population in research.
Every first-year Nigerian university student learns about random sampling in introductory research methods classes. But a self-important lawyer who is defending presidential electoral fraud is clueless about this.
It isn't only research illiteracy that plagues members of Buhari's legal team. They are also constitutional and historical illiterates. Their constitutional and historical illiteracy is instantiated by their claim that PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar should never have been allowed to run for president because he "is not a citizen of Nigeria by birth" since he was born in what was called British Cameroons, which later became the Sardauna Province of Northern Nigeria in 1961.
Many lawyers have already pointed out the scorn-worthy constitutional illiteracy that that sort of reasoning evinces. The Nigerian constitution unambiguously accords the same rights and privileges to people born in British Northern Cameroon as it does to those born in the defunct Southern Nigeria Protectorate and the defunct Northern Nigeria Protectorate.
In any case, Atiku's paternal and maternal forebears migrated from what is now Sokoto and Jigawa states respectively to what later became British Northern Cameroon. The Nigerian constitution recognizes anyone who is descended from any of the ethnic groups that are indigenous to what is now Nigeria as a Nigerian. Atiku's paternal forebear came to the Jada area of what was later British Northern Cameroon from Wurno in present-day Sokoto State, which has historically been inhabited by Fulani and Hausa people. By our patrilineal traditions of descent, Atiku isn't even truly native to Jada; he is from Wurno.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that Atiku's ancestors had always lived in British Northern Cameroon. Well, Buhari's lawyers betrayed historical illiteracy in thinking that British Cameroons is and has always been synonymous with modern Cameroon. In the 19th century, the German Empire, like other avaricious European powers, expropriated a huge swathe of land in west and central Africa, which it called "Kamerun." However, in the aftermath of the First World War (which is actually more properly a First European War), Germany was dispossessed of Kamerun along with other lands it had exploited.
In 1922, the League of Nations divvied up Kamerun between Britain and France. France renamed its own portion of the territory "Cameroun" and Britain renamed its own "Northern Cameroon" and "Southern Cameroon." The two territories are non-contiguous. Britain retained control of Northern Cameroon and Southern Cameroon in 1946, the year Atiku was born, after the United Nations, which replaced the League of Nations in 1945, reclassified the Cameroons as "UN Trust territories."
On February 11, 1961, "subjects" of British Northern Cameroon, which had been governed by the same British colonizers that governed Nigeria, voted to join newly independent Nigeria. In other words, an independent British Northern Cameroon never existed at any point in history, and no one was ever its "citizen." So which country do Buhari's nescient lawyers expect people born in British Northern Cameroon to go and be president of? Or do they expect them to be stateless—or be second-class citizens in Nigeria— because of the historical accident of once being governed as British Northern Cameroon?
People born in British Northern Cameroon were never part of French Cameroun, which became independent in January 1960. They were even different from British Southern Cameroon, which voted to become part of French Cameroun the same day that British Northern Cameroon voted to be integrated to independent Nigeria. In fact, both northern and southern Cameroons were administered from Nigeria, a reason a prominent pre-independence Nigerian political party was called the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons.
It's transparent that Buhari's lawyers are merely clutching at straws to salvage their client's indefensibly reprehensible electoral heist. When a theft is as blatant and as easily detectable as Buhari's, you can't invoke the resources of knowledge and logic to defend it. When Atiku's legal team first pointed out that INEC's own data, stored on its server, showed that Buhari lost the election to Atiku by nearly two million votes, Buhari's lawyers—and supporters— made fun of the claim.
However, they stopped laughing when they were confronted with overwhelming evidence. They went from laughing to claiming that Atiku's agents had "hacked" into INEC's server to gain access to— and "manipulate"— it, and even called for the arrest of members of the Atiku team. Meanwhile, INEC, which got hundreds of millions of naira to maintain a server and train staff to operate it, was told to say that it did not have any election results on its server.
Well, how can Atiku's agents "hack" into and even "manipulate" data on a server that has no record of election results? Let us, for now, not even ask what INEC did with the hundreds of millions of naira it budgeted for a server to house election results. Where does it keep the record of the last election? Why is it reluctant to give its record of the results, if it has any, to the Atiku team even when the election tribunal says it should? This is downright conscienceless villainy.
Now that Atiku has enlisted the expert intervention of Microsoft and IBM to authenticate his claim that the electronic record of the presidential election stored on INEC's server is inconsistent with the results the compromised and morally putrid chairman of INEC announced, there is panic in the Presidential Villa, and Buhari's ignorant lawyers are engaging in comical, illiterate rhetorical antics for the sole purpose of diversion.
There are also unconfirmed reports that the DSS has arrested a whole host of INEC's IT staff members on suspicion that they were the conduits through which the Atiku team got access to the authentic results of the presidential election, which shows that Buhari lost to Atiku.
So the Buhari team went from vain boasts of triumphalism, to vacuous laughter when their electoral robbery was exposed, to panic when firm, irreproachable evidence of this robbery was presented, then to comical diversions, and now to illegal arrests of INEC's IT staff.
What's next? Strangulation and intimidation of the judiciary, which started before the election with the illegal firing of the Chief Justice of Nigeria. The judiciary is now practically impotent. This is undisguisedly full-blown fascism.
Related Articles:Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorJournalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science BuildingRoom 5092 MD 2207402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogiAuthor 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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