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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 Buh...

By Farooq A.  Kperogi, Ph.D.

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.

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23 comments

  1. What can I say ?I can only say THANK YOU for not getting tired .

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  2. what a write up sir...Thank u for elucidating more better than there scumbag brain

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  3. Unsuccessful white wash! If Atiku goons can hack the INEC server as you suggest, what stops them from uploading the phantom votes to give him a win? You are simply blinded by hate that you resorted to even depending a convicted
    and disgraced judiciary thief.

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    1. I can see your level of illiteracy in IT matters but I am only afraid if it did not affect all your reasoning faculty. If Atiku teams can apparently hacked into inec server and smuggle result as you said,why has inec refused to allow atiku to access elections material as ordered by the tribunal?, the data in inec were stored with dates, the Mac address and server is known to inec,if inec suspects hacking, then they should check the correlation of the E8 form with the data found on the server.Inec server being hacked is a diversionary story which Nigerians cannot accept. APC cooked and forged data to give buhari a stolen mandate,but inec chairman kept the real result as a leverage to the bribe APC gave to them in case they come for him. But unknowingly to him,he is not that smart as PDP agents. This is the beginning of a new revolution in Nigeria. A new Nigeria loading

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  4. 1) If Buhari's lawyers are statistically illiterate, so is Atiku Abubakar. He claimed that the astounding victory of Buhari in Borno and Yobe states was impossible because there was insurgency in those states! But he didn't question his "success" in the South-South where the militants literally took the law into their own hands to ensure PDP victory.

    2) Atiku, by aligning himself with the US government and companies since before the election, appears to show a certain degree of unpatriotism. He thinks the US can overturn the Nigerian presidential election results through the back door so he could realise his life-long ambition of governing the country. In 2023 he will be 77 years old, not too old to recontest. Let him wait for that opportunity rather than contesting the results of a poll he obviously lost.

    3) I think the charge against his birthplace allegedly rendering him unfit to contest an election in Nigeria is ridiculous. However, it wasn't Buhari's lawyers who first raised the issue; it was in fact the pro-Biafra group leader Nnamdi Kanu (from his hideout abroad) who initially cast doubt on Atiku's Nigerian citizenship, which then went viral.

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  5. Militants and bokoharam are not the same. Militants aren't killing civilians in the south. Bokoharam kills civilians in the birth east and Buhari has failed to secure the north east.

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  6. You just succeeded in displaying your superfluity of mediocrity and nothingness as enunciated by Dr. Kperoogi.

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  7. Desperation taken too far. They wish to hold on to power but they lack the wherewithal to use it judiciously.

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  8. I will try and be fair enough, sir You did good in justifying that atiku is truly a nigerian and i respect that but in trying to say atiku actually won the 2019 election with all due respect that is not acceptable and You are blinded by hatred toward buhari and his administration

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  9. I think those that removed history from our school system we're deliberate for times such as this! Your blog has revealed much about the country I never heard or knew about...as for the case in court, I have long lost hope in Nigeria as a nation.

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  10. It's easy for all to see that buhari lost the election. But the herd and hoards of followers won't agree. Their lawyers even made it worse. They have been jumping from pillar to post

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  11. Sometimes, one is almost forced to resort to posting one of those memes on social media that says - I'm only here to read the comments. The level of idiocy by pro-regime trolls and the audacity with which they display their idiocy is unnerving. Knowing that these comments come from victims of Buhari's ineptitude makes it even worse. Most of them are young people whose future are being mortgaged for pittance. They are the people to which a Newsweek writer once wrote - blessed are the youths for they shall inherit the national debt. These idiots are ever so ready to defend the indefensible and so pumped in their idiocy that they have no quest to learn. They will therefore die in their stupidity. It is great to see that you have the courage to drop the facts with historical evidence for them, but they are so blinded by unquestioned loyalty to a regime that gives no hoot about their survival to thank God for someone who has the time and the duty of educating them.

    Just keep doing what you are doing. I am sure there is a silent majority of your readers who are taking mental note of how the cabal ruins the present and jeopardizes the future. As Castro once told his interrogators - .

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  12. Assuming that part of now Nigeria in which Atiku was born as stated was under UN Trusteeship as stated by Mr Kperogi, going forward they then became part of Nigeria in 1961. It could be argued that they could have decided to join any other country but Nigeria seemed more attractive to them. At the time that they were under the UN Trusteeship, they could not be said to be part of any country, it was at that time that Atiku was born into a place that was neither Nigeria nor any other country but that UN Trusteeship which itself wasn't really a country. The fact that they joined in 1961 does not and shouldn't mean that the Nigerian citizenship so bestowed on them could be back dated to include the period that they were within the Trusteeship which was when Atiku was born. The qualifying criteria is that he should have been born in Nigerian territory of Nigerian parents which in this situation wasn't the case. Is being under UN Trusteeship the same as being citizens of any country they choose to pitch their flags later in the course of time? Meaning while they were under the UN Trusteeship they were also Nigerians as that is the only situation that Atiku could have been born on Nigerian territory. If that was the case ie believing they were already Nigerians , what was the necessity of the plebiscite as that was what bestowed Nigerian citizenship on them in 1961. That Atiku is a Nigerian is not in question as he would have acquired that status from his parents no matter where he was born. Being stateless which the UN does not support could not be equated or approximated to being Nigerians as in that case any other country could also be seen as having the same folks of Jada as her citizens.My simple opinion on this is : Atiku's birth place became part of Nigeria in 1961 following the referendum, before that ie around the time of his birth in that location till 1961 his nationality was an exercise in nebulosity.

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  13. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  14. Jada was given to the British to administer by the UN under some sort of Trusteeship arrangement. It was then administered by the British alongside of Nigeria . Jada at that time was recognised as part of Northern Cameroon and in 1961 decided to be part of Nigeria via a referendum. Prior to 1961 Jada couldn't have been referred to as part of Nigeria and imho I believe the folks of Jada weren't Nigerians until 1961. The courts would be in the best position to judge this overall.

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  15. Atiku is not from Nigeria and he cant govern the country, but a sitting president cant present his secondary school result has the right to rule? Thank you Prof. its just unfortunate that we found ourselves in the midst of dummy fools in this country.

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  17. Obaje Jerry IchabaJune 2, 2019 at 8:15 AM

    Atiku's nationality is obviously Nigeria. The law provides that "either" of one's parent or grand parents must belong to any community indigenous to present Nigeria. Atiku is a product of inter-state marriage, one of his parents being a native of Sokoto state. APC's claim is justhe ridicule Atiku.

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  19. This blog is really good shedding some light on how Illiterate Lawyers can be. I really want to thank the author for such an amazing blog about judiciary system. If you are looking for Real Estate Attorney Miami FL then you can check the following website.

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