By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Formal Enthronement of Buhari's Illegitimate Rigocracy
Buhari's New SA on Infrastructure is INEC's Amina Zakari's Son
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
The Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal’s tendentious
and predictably predetermined judgement on September 11 that upheld Muhammadu Buhari’s
electoral fraud was not such much a defeat of Atiku Abubakar as
it was symbolic judicial violence on Nigeria and Nigerians.
As I pointed out in my April 20, 2019 column titled “Atiku’s Citizenship and Buhari’s Illiterate Lawyers,” Buhari assembled unbelievably ignorant
and rhetorically impotent lawyers to defend him, not only because he loves to
mirror his trademark incompetence in everything he does, but also because he
knew that there was nothing at stake for him in the petition since the tribunal’s
ruling was a foregone conclusion, as I pointed out in a social media post titled “WhyAtiku Isn’T Coming” a day before the tribunal’s verdict.
The tribunal judges, who were supposed to be neutral arbiters,
were infinitely more effective defenders of Buhari’s stolen mandate than his
own lawyers were. Imagine the severity of ignorance it must take for any
Nigerian to make the case that someone born in the former British Northern
Cameroon (and whose immediate ancestral provenance is traceable to the nucleus of
the defunct Sokoto Caliphate) is not a Nigerian citizen even when the
constitution explicitly confers citizenship on people that were born in British
Northern Cameroon.
Even the unambiguously partisan tribunal chose to not touch
such sophomoric legal and constitutional illiteracy with a barge pole. It dismissed it. That says a lot. Nevertheless, there are many fundamental respects in which
the tribunal’s ruling has wounded the very soul of Nigeria.
When (not “if” because this is all prearranged) the tribunal’s
verdict is upheld by the Supreme Court, it would mean that barefaced electoral
fraud perpetrated through the arbitrary manufacture of fanciful figures for an
incumbent office holder, intimidation of voters with the aid of the nation’s
security apparatuses, and all the other unmentionably unconscionable electoral malfeasance
Buhari perpetrated to hold on to power are now entirely legitimate.
The implications of this are many and varied. For one, it has
destroyed the vaguest vestige of hope that democracy will grow and thrive in
Nigeria. It will inaugurate unexampled voter apathy in the future since voting no
longer matters. Buhari’s predecessors also did rig elections, to be sure, but
they rigged elections that they would
have handily won because they had no opposition.
Buhari was the serial opponent of his predecessors, but
until 2015, he never even campaigned for votes outside the Hausaphone Muslim North
(he routinely ignored even predominantly Muslim Kwara and Kogi states and, of
course, snubbed the entire Christian North), so he couldn’t have conceivably
won a national election with such an insular focus.
Even Nasir El-Rufai
described Buhari in an October 4, 2010 article titled “Buhari Should Stick To Facts” as “perpetually unelectable because [of] his record as military head of
state and [his] insensitivity to Nigeria’s diversity and his parochial focus.”
Perhaps the most distressing implication of the tribunal’s
ruling is that education and even a pretense to honesty will no longer matter.
Buhari’s claim to possessing a school certificate is supported only by an affidavit
in his INEC forms, which turned out to be false. That’s a prima facie case of perjury.
He could very well have truly sat for his school certificate
exam and received proof of this. But that is not the issue. He consistently swore
under oath that his school certificate was in the custody of the Nigerian military.
It has now come to light that this is entirely false. The tribunal said this
lie is immaterial.
This doesn’t just legally endorse official mendacity, it
also disincentivizes education. It means any Nigerian can claim to possess any
qualification, and the only evidence that would be required for such claims
would be a mere affidavit. That’s why Nigerian social media is now suffused
with transgressively humorous affidavit-supported claimants to all sorts of
bogus qualifications. The most humorous yet instructive I have read so far is
from someone by the name of Osaze Jesuorobo.
He wrote: “First, I have a sworn affidavit stating that I
have the required qualifications to… be admitted into… Law School and that my
credentials are with the Director of Administration of NTA, the establishment I
retired from.
“Secondly, I have a recommendation from the Vice Chancellor
of the university I attended, the
University of Benin that I WILL PASS the final Bachelor of Law degree
with a Second Class Upper.
“Thirdly, since my records at NTA show that I have a
Bachelor of Law degree, I will present a statement from NTA Director of
Corporate Affairs to the effect that from their records, I have a Bachelor of
Law degree and was educated to university level even though the original, CTC
or photocopies of my credentials are not
in their possession.
“If the Law School requests... the originals and copies of
my credentials, I will tell them that there is nowhere in the 1999 Constitution
(as Amended) that says I must accompany my admission forms with copies of my
credentials. I will also tell them that their condition that I should attach
copies of my credentials is a subsidiary condition inferior to the Nigeria
Constitution.
“If the Nigeria Law School denies me admission for not
producing the credentials to back up my qualifications claim, I will sue the
Law School relying on the Atiku/PDP vs INEC & others (2019) per Garba
Mohammed (or is it Muhammad or
Muhammadu), JCA. I am waiting for the Nigeria Law School to dare me by refusing
me admission.”
This reminds me of a community college president in
California who sent out a mass email to the academic and non-academic staff of
his school demanding that he henceforth be addressed as a “Dr.” because some
nondescript university in the middle of nowhere awarded him a pay-to-play
honorary doctorate. The response of the staff was as sarcastic as it was
hilarious. Staff of the community college, most of whom didn’t have PhDs,
decided to also prefix “Dr.” to their names; they said they too had been
awarded doctoral degrees by some no-name university. The president got the
message and dropped his title.
But Nigeria’s situation is graver. Buhari will get away with
his subversion of law and decency, and the damage to the nation will be
irreversible. Related to this is the controversy relating to the spelling of
Buhari’s first name. The tribunal was reported to have said, “The question
about whether the name in the certificate is ‘Mohamed’ or ‘Muhammadu’ doesn’t
matter so long as the name Buhari is attached to the name.”
That’s a dangerously ignorant thing to aver. A more acceptable statement would have been
for the tribunal to say “Mohamed” and “Muhammadu” are different spellings/renderings
of the same name. Every time you use a different orthography to spell a name
that was originally written in a different orthographic tradition, you often
have several variants. Names originally written in Latin alphabets also have
different variants when they are written using different scripts such as
Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese, Thai, etc.
I can relate to this. I insist on my name being spelled as “Farooq,”
but my primary school headmaster spelled it as “Faruk” in my school leaving
certificate. Again, to my utter annoyance, Bayero University spelled my name as
“Farouk” on my certificate but, mercifully, my transcript has my preferred
spelling. So this isn’t unusual.
Buhari obviously prefers to spell his name as “Muhammadu.”
Even in 1961 when he applied for the Nigerian military’s qualifying exam, he
spelled it that way. Nevertheless, his principal, who was a white man, spelled
his name as “Mohamed” in his recommendation letter to the military on Buhari’s
behalf. It was obviously the principal’s variant that went into the official school
records.
The tribunal, being the gaggle of incompetent and
compromised partisans that they are, couldn’t defend their benefactor on an
issue as simple as variants of the spelling of his name.
Buhari shot democracy in 1983 with bullets and left it for
dead. But it managed to survive his attempted murder after a prolonged
convalescence. Then he came back in 2019 to finally kill it with rigged,
poisoned ballots. But when the story of Buhari’s premeditated murder of Nigeria’s
democracy is written, the role the judiciary played in endorsing and legalizing
it will take up reams of paper or disproportionately large nibbles of bytes.
Related Articles:
Questions Still Remain About Buhari's School CertificateFormal Enthronement of Buhari's Illegitimate Rigocracy
Buhari's New SA on Infrastructure is INEC's Amina Zakari's Son