Nigeria Content Online

A reader of my One
Man’s View of the CPC Convention wondered why I did not subject Messrs
Atiku Abubakar and Goodluck Jonathan to the same scrutiny.

Another said he
detected personal issues which he did not specify, as well as contempt
for the rural citizen who contributes more than the urban elite. He
said that “the qualification of mastery of English is a function of a
captive mind,” adding that the Chinese who have recently done more than
most to pull their people out of poverty never bothered to master the
English language.

All my writing is
the reflection of personal experience. I have had some experience
interviewing applicants for employment. It is the most interesting
candidate that receives the closest attention, the one that detains you
the longest. If I have not commented on Jonathan or Atiku then consider
the possibility that that explains why. Put another way, I chose to go
shopping in the General Buhari Department Store because I value good
reputation and it has a reputation as a good store selling good
products at affordable prices. I was disappointed that the products
that I was interested in as displayed in the store, and as I lifted and
closely inspected them, were of a very substandard quality. Hence, what
I wrote.

I said Buhari has a
poor speech writer. Let me explain why there should be no doubt about
that and why it matters. A writer must be conscious of the audience he
is addressing. If village people do not watch television, then he
should not use their language in his television address. A speech
writer should in addition be aware of who will deliver the speech.
English, like most human languages, contains synonyms, words which
convey the same or similar meanings as other words. If the writer knows
that the deliverer has a problem with the correct or intelligible
pronunciation of “fetch,” he should use “get.” If he does not know, or
if he does and doesn’t use the more accessible word, then it is clear
to me that he does not know his job. The point is that a speech should
not contain surprises which divert, rather than focus our attention.

Last year I saw in
an American journal the picture of a page in the draft of an address
prepared for US President Barack Obama. The President had made some
edits by hand. If you take a close look, you will notice that
everywhere there was a passive tense, Mr Obama had modified it with the
active voice. That was smart. He was to read it out loud. The active
voice works better. This is the sort of attentiveness that I require in
my leader. It is not an impossible ask nor is it foreign to Nigeria. We
had that kind of leader in Chief Awolowo.

The day after the
results of the 1979 elections were announced, Awolowo’s UPN held a
meeting at the Federal Palace Hotel in Lagos. After the meeting, a
radio reporter accosted Chief Awolowo with a question about the
controversy surrounding the interpretation of the declared results. The
way the reporter posed the question showed that he did not understand
the issue. What Awolowo did was to tell him that, rephrase the question
properly, and then answer it. I was a young boy at the time but I was
very much impressed. In fact I wrote an essay a few years ago about how
something else that Awolowo once said has had a lasting influence on my
life. If I appear hard on Buhari it is because he offers nothing to
inspire any young boy today.

Nevertheless, I was
well aware that my argument about the usage of English could be
dismissed as elite snobbery, hence the care I took to provide a
specific context for it. English is what unites us; if you want to
reach everyone then you stand a much better chance if you speak it in
an accessible manner. Another thing you could do, of course, if you are
the Nationalist you think you are is to speak in your native Hausa with
an English interpreter alongside you. Better yet, given that the
Chinese have a National language of their own, you could tell us your
plans for giving effect to the Constitutional recognition of Hausa,
Yoruba and Igbo. We will demand that those plans are made very clear.
How, for example, are you going to make Hausa an effective modern tool
of communication in Nigeria? Have you considered that despite our many
advanced-degree-awarding University Departments of Hausa with their
professors not possessed of captive minds, the only true Hausa
dictionary available is the result of the work done by an Englishman in
the 1930s? Have you noticed that the development of most of the new
information technology terminology in Hausa has been funded by the
Voice of America and the BBC? Is there an Igbo word for potassium
permanganate, and if not, how do you propose to create one? In which
schools will all this language learning take place? Do you have
sufficiently large numbers of speakers of Tiv able to teach Yoruba?
Provide a plan that has answers to these sorts of questions and I can
begin to take you seriously.

Confront me with an
argument that discussion about English or Hausa speech is really old
fashioned and not forward-looking and I will take you even more
seriously. Today’s world is one in which many young people are able to
conduct five or six conversations simultaneously using tools Made in
China, which is what enables the Chinese to do what they do for their
rural people. Dora Akunyili can express her horrow at the usage of the
term Naija, but it will not go away. A new version of English, and
Yoruba, and Igbo circumscribed by a 160 or 140 character communication
boundary is fast evolving. What new opportunities does it present for
Nigeria? What if General Buhari had not made an underwhelming personal
appearance at the convention at all? Imagine instead of that busy,
overcrowded podium, a large screen Made in Naija. In a large attractive
font, we are reading tweets or texts as Buhari sends his presumed
anti-corruption message from his home in Daura: “i wont steal n wont
let u,” “if u steal its jail 4 u,” “even if u r in d cpc.” He will have
his critics but I won’t be one of them. It will surprise in the right
way. It will capture the imagination of his immediate audience, but
also that of the outside world. Here was a leader with a novel approach
fully in tune with modern realities. Out of Nigeria! “i will ensure dat
all laws n rules r en4cd,” “if u will break dem beta leave d cpc now,”
“leave now.” It would have been interesting for me personally, as that
last text came in and focus switched to the audience, to see whether
Senator Faruk Bunza, who led the Convention to approve Buhari’s
nomination would get up and leave. Bunza, the same man who sent four of
his boys to my home to threaten me because I wrote a confidential
letter to him explaining why his plan to build a department store at a
bend on the road, on land crudely excised from one residence,
surrounded by two other residences was a bad idea, and why it was not
too late to convert the building into a residential one. The only
reason they didn’t beat me up, they said, was because I was not an
Nyamiri. If you do not have your vision of a good country articulated
in clear and unmistakable terms, such as is enforced by a 160 character
boundary, any old barbarian can rally with you.