Better rich than sorry. Lots of money coming his way! Mighty Congratulations to Don Kperogi!
In fact, I thought of him a few hours ago, before getting wind of his latest accomplishment – and it was in relation to this news item (some irreverential Trump bashing):
UK Independent: Psychiatrists worried about Trump impeachment
Reading which reminded me of some recent altercations that took place in this forum between Baba Kadiri and what the habitually hyperbolic Don Kperogi had had the impudence to suggest, that "Buhari's Physical and Mental Health is Now a National Emergency", followed by another impish and impious opinion piece in the same series, this time alleging that " Buhari is too weighed down by dementia…"
Rich in fantasy, nothing more than Kperogi's wishing thinking.
All of which only goes to show the extent of press freedom in Nigeria and in the diaspora social media. It's doubtful though that Kperogi has the temerity to write about Trump in like manner, perhaps because he still views himself as a humble guest in Georgia, Trump Country - and of course if he can maintain that safe distance ( by not irreparably annoying Trump ) then he can continue to take pot shots at Nigeria's Beloved Brother Buhari…
Nigeria is a big, wide country, many peoples, many opinions, degrees of appreciation, understanding, patience, disappointment, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, disillusionment, discontent, being variously expressed in all media outlets….
"a coordinated project of silencing him?"
To silence Farooq? At least not to bribe him (highest bidder – the greater the price the nicer the nice) / make him an offer he can't refuse?
Thin-skinned or thick-skinned he should be able to take some flak (from here and there) for the constancy and the contumacy of his unsavoury opinions, without it being construed as "a coordinated project of silencing him"?
Contextualizing Indeed. For now, this one fact: the best medical treatment for the human being is not readily available in Nigeria. So, if President Farooq Kperogi or President Moses Ochonu were to need critical medical attention soon after they arrived in Lagos tomorrow, apart from praying for deliverance what would they do? I know what they would do: Start building hospitals, financing medical research, training better doctors and providing better facilities, in short improving the Health Sector, as Farooq would put it, "as a National Emergency"
Contextualizing Indeed:
May 2017: President Buhari seeks medical treatment London and the fallout from that event is natural. If he had travelled to Switzerland, Germany, France or Poland, there would have been the same kind of critical fallout. if Mr. President had travelled to China, then the fallout would have been slightly different, since there are those who would have criticized Mr President for being unfaithful , their point being that Nigeria is not a former Chinese colony, and of course had he travelled by Nigeria Airways all the way to Jerusalem to obtain the best medical treatment available there at the Hadassah University Hospital - Ein Kerem, that would have generated a two-fold ire: (1) unfaithfulness ( "Nigeria is not a former Israeli colony" etc followed by the sort of flak received by Goodluck Jonathan for his pilgrimage with a large entourage to the Holy Land , to pray for election victory on the Banks of the Rivers Jordan, causing one of the philosophy professors in this forum to thus remonstrate with some nationalistic fervour: " I cannot imagine our President will go to a dirty river in Israel when we have better rivers in Nigeria." Unfortunately, the professor cannot make the same argument about hospitals or ask this polite or rhetorical question: "Don't we have better hospitals in Nigeria?" Well, he could ask that question but it would only be sarcastic or ironic or even satirical. And that's the crux of the matter. It's not President Buhari's fault that since Independence in 1960, Nigeria still does not have a world-class hospital that can give the best possible medical attention to any ailing Nigerian president. As to the argument about holy rivers, well, when I was in India in 1977 and was down to my very last dollar on my last day in Bombay, ( I had given the rest to professional beggars carrying babies whose ribs you could count) some Arabs from some Gulf State or other had given me a 500% better rate of exchange and some tzedakah so that I could buy a train ticket to Delhi and a sitar when I got there. What were they doing there in Hindu Country, in the first place? They travel to India for medical purposes, not to take a dip in the Holy River Ganges - and perhaps, a big perhaps, perhaps because medical attention is a little cheaper, in India….
I mentioned Hindu country just now and indeed Prime Minister Modi's Modi's speech at Assocham Annual Conference gives much food for thought about Hindu Country
On Monday, 13 January 2020 16:44:00 UTC+1, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju wrote:
Farooq A. Kperog
15:42 (57 minutes ago)
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2020 at 16:37
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - New Book Announcement
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com >Great congrats.To assist with contextualizing this book, one could read read Moses Ochonu, one of Nigeria's migratory digital elite that is core to Kperogi's book, describing the complementarity, in relation to Nigerian politics, of the author's online journalism and his academic career.He does this in three essays known to me on Facebook, a central site of the digital discourses Kperogi is writing about.The essays are better enjoyed in relation to the comments on the essays, which you can reach by clicking on the statement of the date of publication of the essay.1.Is today a "crucify Farooq Kperogi" day or did I miss something? Why are attacks against him emanating from and proliferating in several corners of the Northern Nigerian cyberspace in such a manner as to suggest a coordinated project of silencing him?
So let me get this straight. The president who self-righteously railed against Nigerian leaders seeking treatment in foreign hospitals and against Nigerians who were abandoning the country but has himself become the poster politician for foreign medical tourism and absenteeism is not the target of outrage from my Northern Nigerian brethren. Rather, it is Farooq Kperogi, a private citizen who is courageous enough to call the president out on his hypocrisy and xenophilia that is being attacked and stupidly accused of hating the president.
What kind of logic of civic citizenship informs this retrogressive attitude? Farooq Kperogi is actually the most prominent if not currently the only Northern Nigerian newspaper columnist who regularly gives voice to those in the Buhari-centric Northwest and Northeast who cannot vent their frustrations with the current misrule without suffering social ostracism.
Yet we seem to want to silence him or force him to abandon his commentary on the MANY infractions, betrayals, broken promises, and hypocrisies of President Buhari. Are we so enamored with fascism and ethno-religious solidarity that we fail to see the transience of the current or any power configuration and the persistence and permanence of the national interest?
Are we comfortable with the offensive cult of personality evolving around the president in certain geopolitical cycles or are we simply incapable of understanding the ethos and demands of vigilant, active citizenship?
This penchant for substituting emotion and group solidarity for rational objectivity is why I took a break from commenting on national affairs.
2.
NIGERIANS OF THE YEAR 2019
1. Farooq Kperogi: He is the Buharists' favorite bete noir, the man they consider their number one enemy, but whom they cannot ignore and are in fact obsessed with. They monitor his posts, interventions, and hard-hitting commentaries on all platforms around the clock. They have sleepless nights about his previous and next post, his next revelation of malfeasance, his next provocative inquest into the daily scandals of this administration. Unfortunately for them, by being their number one enemy, he has emerged as the number patriot in the current dispensation, willing to say what other journalists fear to say, and giving professional cover to other commentators to call an incompetent and fraudulent dictator by his proper name. As of today, Kperogi is by far Nigeria's most consequential journalist, columnist, and social media commentator. He is Nigeria's preeminent agenda setter, the man who defines and moves the national political debate, the conscience of a beleaguered nation. The more the Buharists try to smear and discredit him, the more they inscribe him in our psyche as a custodian of and mouthpiece for our collective anguish, trauma, and aspirations in the unfolding tyranny. The enablers of corruption and dictatorship taunt him, daring him to come back to the country, knowing for a fact that their tyrannical master has him backlisted and that he is effectively now on exile from his own country on account of his insistence on holding Buhari and his cabal to account. But let me make a bold predication for them: when this tragic epoch ends, which it will, Kperogi will be in a small cohort of Nigerians that will be feted and lionized as heroes.
2. Adunni Adelakun: If you have not been reading this award-winning PUNCH columnist, you're missing out on the punchiest, most cerebral commentaries in the Nigerian media ecosystem. She is a professor at the University of Texas in Austin and she brings both professorial depth and journalistic candor to her commentaries. And then she sprinkles ideological and moral clarity on her writings. The result is a weekly offering of compelling analyses of the most important issues in the news. In a few years, she has emerged as Nigeria's most consistently strident and insightful analyst of the national condition and of the current national meltdown under Buhari. She takes no prisoners in her commentaries. She goes straight for the metaphorical jugular, eschewing the atmospherics and the distractions. That's what makes her work so searing, so piercing, and so effective in its ability to cause you to reflect and to cause the powers that be to fret. Her commentary on the rot in Nigeria's religious and cultural industries are as gripping as those on politics. They tried to stop her PUNCH column, pulling out all the stops to get her off the pages of the newspaper. It did not work. This fearless and fierce voice speaking for Nigerians and making current rulers uncomfortable cannot be silenced. When the history of this tragic moment in our country is written, she is guaranteed a chunky chapter.
3. Omoyele Sowore: There is nothing more to be said about him. He has awakened the nation to the danger that Buhari and his cabal of nepotistic, corrupt, tyrannical, and incompetent handlers pose to the what is left of Nigeria.
3.
I woke up to the bizarre news that Buhari's BMC [Buhari Media Centre; understood as a media outfit working for Nigeria's President Buhari ] trolls are trying to justify their N30,000 monthly stipend by launching an online petition to get Professor Farooq Kperogi's employer to fire him.
Sometimes one does not even know whether to pity or simply laugh at these dimwitted BMC operatives. They have no clue that, far from getting him fired, their online petition may actually attract a commendation for Professor Kperogi from his employers, as previous efforts by paid government hacks did during Jonathan's presidency.
In the US, unlike Nigeria, academic institutions appreciate and protect academic freedom and freedom of thought and intellectual expression. It is sacrosanct. In fact institutions spend their money to defend these freedoms in respect of their faculty members.
More importantly, academic institutions value visibility as this plays a big role in rankings and institutional prestige. Visibility can come from multiple avenues, but one important indicator is the public profile of faculty members (lecturers) as well as the public relevance of their scholarly work and reflections.
Professor Farooq Kperogi embodies these two principles of a visible public persona and public intellectual relevance.
Professor Farooq Kperogi's status as arguably Nigeria's most credible and courageous journalistic voice and the preeminent critic of the incumbent autocratic regime makes him an asset to his institution.
Every time Professor Farooq Kperogi's work is mentioned, whether by his admirers or by the BMC trolls, his institutional affiliation follows. That is free visibility and unpaid PR for his employer.
Furthermore, as a teacher of journalism and media, Kperogi is in fact practicing what he teaches his students, and his public intellectual interventions on social media and in his newspaper columns are invaluable pedagogical resources and references for his students. How many other journalism teachers can give that to their students?
All of this is to say that Professor Farooq Kperogi's uncompromising journalistic inquests into the abuses and corruption of the Buhari regime have made him a bigger asset to his employer and his students than he was before now.
Instead of firing him, they will lionize him. In fact, not only has he received strong support for his public intellectual work, his institution has advanced him as an exemplar of the ideals of scholarly activism. I know this for a fact.
Will this free education on American academic culture deter the BMC clowns from future efforts to "get Kperogi fired" to protect Buhari? Probably not, because for them it's not about logic and common sense. Rather, it's about justifying their N30k even if this entails becoming imbecilic copies of their paymasters.
On Mon, 13 Jan 2020 at 15:42, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@gmail.com> wrote:My new book titled Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation has just been published by the University of Rochester Press. If you order it online from boydellandbrewer.com with promo code BB35 you will get a 35% discount.--Please consider recommending it to your library.
Here's the book's blurb:
Over a decade ago, when Nigeria's migratory digital elite in the United States pioneered a newfangled form of citizen online journalism that disrupted the professional certainties of domestic legacy journalism, the country's professional journalists held out hope that the disruptive effect of this insurgent, non-professionalized, non-routinized but nonetheless transformative form of journalism would be transitory. But diasporic citizen online journalism is not only now an integral part of Nigeria's media ecosystem, it has also inspired successful homeland digital-native emulators and is challenging, even supplanting in some cases, traditional domestic media formations as sites of consequential democratic discourse. With Nigeria's frenetic and deeply engaged social media scene, diasporan citizen journalism, homeland news, and social media activism are merging to create the most energetic moment in Nigeria's media history. This book chronicles the emergence and transformation of Nigeria's diasporic citizen journalism from the margins to the mainstream of the country's journalistic landscape and draws parallels with the mainstreaming of alternative media formations in other parts of the world.Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorJournalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science BuildingRoom 5092 MD 2207402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State UniversityKennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @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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