Buhari's Contempt for Nigerians"
By Godwin Nzeaka
After several days of moving back and forth over the much advertised Presidential Debate, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), finally scorned the organisers of the event. He refused to participate for no good reason. The event was put together by Channels TV, Arise TV and Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN). Even though the debates have been postponed because of the shift in elections date by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), there is no assurance that Buhari would ever attend the session in future.
Before the latest rejection of the debate by Buhari, he had earlier spurned the same debate put together by the Nigeria Election Debate Group (NEDG), alleging bias and hidden agenda on the part of the organisers.
Although it is said that such debates scarcely benefit Nigerian politics as they have no constitutional force, the 2015 exercise being the first of its kind in the evolution of the two – party system here, most Nigerians have looked forward to it as a rare opportunity for the two major presidential candidates (General Muhammadu Buhari in particular, who as it were is in the eye of the storm) beyond their party manifestoes and broad promises to square off face to face and answer crucial questions bordering on the state of the nation in front of millions of television viewers.
For a party said to be as confident as the All Progressives Congress (APC) there is nothing to fear in a televised debate between General Buhari and “a Kindergarten President” like Goodluck Jonathan which a leader of the party, Chief Bisi Akande, said Jonathan is.
The importance of televised debates cannot be overemphasised because the first one in the history of America between J.F Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon had tremendously helped the former, who was in the opposition, to defeat the later in the Presidential election of 1960. Again, the second one held in 1976 had helped Mr. Jimmy Carter, another opposition candidate, to defeat Mr. Gerald Ford, an incumbent president. A contestant like Buhari who believes that he wants to cash in on Jonathan's weak points ought to have embraced the debate. It is shameful and contemptuous for him to have done so.
A major opportunity which Buhari missed was that he should use the platform of the debate to clear the air on his alleged forged certificate. That Buhari dodged the debate clearly shows that he has something to hide on this issue. He was obviously afraid of the fireworks that would have followed. It is interesting to note that the certificate issue was brought to our attention by none else but the APC’s defected stormy petrel and gadfly, Chief Femi Fani – Kayode, showing that one single well-educated and intelligent defector could be more valuable to a party than a million defector governors and assembly men with no brains. That a man like Buhari noted for principle has such a big skeleton in his cupboard is simply incredible. It has seriously dented his saintly reputation. Here is a former head of state and a holder of our highest national honour now struggling to defend himself in a terrible case of perjury and a possible forgery. Little wonder the saying “ If you want to know your real pedigree or family tree, join politics”. This certificate saga has shown that corruption is a monster of diverse colours and forms. We must not cry havoc only when corruption takes the colour of election rigging; the shape of cash or cheque missing, or a minister permitting an aide to do “what is needful”.
No, we should and must also cry havoc and even protest loudest when corruption puts on the toga of certificate scandal coupled or not with perjury, more so in an education intoxicated country like ours. Christopher Columbus, regaling himself in the pecuniary value of his buccaneering voyages was quoted to have said that “with money one can send people to heaven”. In Nigeria with a certificated education, even at the WASC level, one can vie for the highest post in the land. This certificate scandal proves Summerset Maughan right that the most useful thing about principle is that it can easily be sacrificed on the altar of expediency.
How tragic because, based on their sweeping anti – corruption pretentions – something with which they seem to have won many souls especially among the impressionable youth in the Southwest and core North – the APC and Buhari were the least expected to be involved in such a despicable affair because according to the Holy Bible in Mathew 5:13 “you are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing, but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men”. Nothing can be more damaging for a party like the APC which everyone had seen as the proverbial Caesar’s wife who must be above aboard.
Today we have come face to face with a typical case which the Romans would probably term Corruption Optima Pessima, that is to say in English, the corruption of the best is worst - the same thing Shakespeare referred to when he said that “lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.” It is bad news for Buhari. But is gratifying to note that President Goodluck Jonathan has continued to show not only rare understanding but also good sportsmanship, good conscience as well as empathy, for he must have been the brain behind the indispensable window of alternative debate which now provides General Buhari the much – needed opportunity to specifically take a question or two on the certificate matter and clear the air as to whether in truth he sat for the 1961 WAEC examinations. About this matter, as in many others, history will surely be kind on Jonathan. Yet as the whole episode cannot be wished away by newsroom spin doctors, it is our duty to persuade the general not to allow the golden opportunity of this debate to slip through his fingers, for according to Shakespeare “there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken on to the floods leads on to fortunes, but omitted all the voyages of their life end in shallows and mysteries”.
As for the media, I am the least surprised that in relentlessly persistently hunting President Jonathan they would one day shoot themselves in the foot, for according to the Greeks, when a thing goes too far, it produces unintended results. In their overzealous but less clever attempt to pull wool over our eyes in the name of defending Buhari, newsmen and women who were not yet born in 1961, the year the man claimed he wrote his “school certificate” exams, have only succeeded in ridiculing themselves and doing Buhari the worst favour by rushing those make – believe credentials to the press. Little wonder Viscount Alfred Charles Harmsworth had to describe journalism as a profession whose business is to explain to others what it does not understand. Otherwise how do we explain a situation where the press would unabashedly publish that fresh – looking, photo – bearing testimonial and result sheet as true copies of credentials awarded 54 years ago, forgetting entirely that WAEC only started affixing pictures on its certificates of recent but had conducted its first exams in 1953 and has been awarding certificates since then, even if up to sometime in collaboration with London and Cambridge.
Questions in Hausa Language were set for the first time in 1956 i.e. three years after WAEC took over from the two British examination bodies and so any one who took the exams in 1961, and passed eight clear years after the takeover, must have received a WAEC certificate, duplicate of which must be found in its Accra head office. But as things stand now, Accra has written to say there is nothing like that. Certainly, if it is not available there, Cambridge has nothing like that because as from 1953 no British University by – passed WAEC to conduct school exams in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and The Gambia. What this means is that by that elaborate but reckless publicity the press had done Buhari, and no less itself, a no – thank – you favour that easily ridicules everyone.
culled from ThisDay.
By Godwin Nzeaka
After several days of moving back and forth over the much advertised Presidential Debate, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), finally scorned the organisers of the event. He refused to participate for no good reason. The event was put together by Channels TV, Arise TV and Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN). Even though the debates have been postponed because of the shift in elections date by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), there is no assurance that Buhari would ever attend the session in future.
Before the latest rejection of the debate by Buhari, he had earlier spurned the same debate put together by the Nigeria Election Debate Group (NEDG), alleging bias and hidden agenda on the part of the organisers.
Although it is said that such debates scarcely benefit Nigerian politics as they have no constitutional force, the 2015 exercise being the first of its kind in the evolution of the two – party system here, most Nigerians have looked forward to it as a rare opportunity for the two major presidential candidates (General Muhammadu Buhari in particular, who as it were is in the eye of the storm) beyond their party manifestoes and broad promises to square off face to face and answer crucial questions bordering on the state of the nation in front of millions of television viewers.
For a party said to be as confident as the All Progressives Congress (APC) there is nothing to fear in a televised debate between General Buhari and “a Kindergarten President” like Goodluck Jonathan which a leader of the party, Chief Bisi Akande, said Jonathan is.
The importance of televised debates cannot be overemphasised because the first one in the history of America between J.F Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon had tremendously helped the former, who was in the opposition, to defeat the later in the Presidential election of 1960. Again, the second one held in 1976 had helped Mr. Jimmy Carter, another opposition candidate, to defeat Mr. Gerald Ford, an incumbent president. A contestant like Buhari who believes that he wants to cash in on Jonathan's weak points ought to have embraced the debate. It is shameful and contemptuous for him to have done so.
A major opportunity which Buhari missed was that he should use the platform of the debate to clear the air on his alleged forged certificate. That Buhari dodged the debate clearly shows that he has something to hide on this issue. He was obviously afraid of the fireworks that would have followed. It is interesting to note that the certificate issue was brought to our attention by none else but the APC’s defected stormy petrel and gadfly, Chief Femi Fani – Kayode, showing that one single well-educated and intelligent defector could be more valuable to a party than a million defector governors and assembly men with no brains. That a man like Buhari noted for principle has such a big skeleton in his cupboard is simply incredible. It has seriously dented his saintly reputation. Here is a former head of state and a holder of our highest national honour now struggling to defend himself in a terrible case of perjury and a possible forgery. Little wonder the saying “ If you want to know your real pedigree or family tree, join politics”. This certificate saga has shown that corruption is a monster of diverse colours and forms. We must not cry havoc only when corruption takes the colour of election rigging; the shape of cash or cheque missing, or a minister permitting an aide to do “what is needful”.
No, we should and must also cry havoc and even protest loudest when corruption puts on the toga of certificate scandal coupled or not with perjury, more so in an education intoxicated country like ours. Christopher Columbus, regaling himself in the pecuniary value of his buccaneering voyages was quoted to have said that “with money one can send people to heaven”. In Nigeria with a certificated education, even at the WASC level, one can vie for the highest post in the land. This certificate scandal proves Summerset Maughan right that the most useful thing about principle is that it can easily be sacrificed on the altar of expediency.
How tragic because, based on their sweeping anti – corruption pretentions – something with which they seem to have won many souls especially among the impressionable youth in the Southwest and core North – the APC and Buhari were the least expected to be involved in such a despicable affair because according to the Holy Bible in Mathew 5:13 “you are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing, but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men”. Nothing can be more damaging for a party like the APC which everyone had seen as the proverbial Caesar’s wife who must be above aboard.
Today we have come face to face with a typical case which the Romans would probably term Corruption Optima Pessima, that is to say in English, the corruption of the best is worst - the same thing Shakespeare referred to when he said that “lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.” It is bad news for Buhari. But is gratifying to note that President Goodluck Jonathan has continued to show not only rare understanding but also good sportsmanship, good conscience as well as empathy, for he must have been the brain behind the indispensable window of alternative debate which now provides General Buhari the much – needed opportunity to specifically take a question or two on the certificate matter and clear the air as to whether in truth he sat for the 1961 WAEC examinations. About this matter, as in many others, history will surely be kind on Jonathan. Yet as the whole episode cannot be wished away by newsroom spin doctors, it is our duty to persuade the general not to allow the golden opportunity of this debate to slip through his fingers, for according to Shakespeare “there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken on to the floods leads on to fortunes, but omitted all the voyages of their life end in shallows and mysteries”.
As for the media, I am the least surprised that in relentlessly persistently hunting President Jonathan they would one day shoot themselves in the foot, for according to the Greeks, when a thing goes too far, it produces unintended results. In their overzealous but less clever attempt to pull wool over our eyes in the name of defending Buhari, newsmen and women who were not yet born in 1961, the year the man claimed he wrote his “school certificate” exams, have only succeeded in ridiculing themselves and doing Buhari the worst favour by rushing those make – believe credentials to the press. Little wonder Viscount Alfred Charles Harmsworth had to describe journalism as a profession whose business is to explain to others what it does not understand. Otherwise how do we explain a situation where the press would unabashedly publish that fresh – looking, photo – bearing testimonial and result sheet as true copies of credentials awarded 54 years ago, forgetting entirely that WAEC only started affixing pictures on its certificates of recent but had conducted its first exams in 1953 and has been awarding certificates since then, even if up to sometime in collaboration with London and Cambridge.
Questions in Hausa Language were set for the first time in 1956 i.e. three years after WAEC took over from the two British examination bodies and so any one who took the exams in 1961, and passed eight clear years after the takeover, must have received a WAEC certificate, duplicate of which must be found in its Accra head office. But as things stand now, Accra has written to say there is nothing like that. Certainly, if it is not available there, Cambridge has nothing like that because as from 1953 no British University by – passed WAEC to conduct school exams in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and The Gambia. What this means is that by that elaborate but reckless publicity the press had done Buhari, and no less itself, a no – thank – you favour that easily ridicules everyone.
culled from ThisDay.
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