By Farooq Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
I usually don’t respond to responses to my public
interventions. The only times I do so is if a response not only drips wet with
intolerable ignorance but also has the potential to replicate its nescience
among unsuspecting learners. The response of one Sylvester Udemezue—whom I was
told is a law lecturer at the Nigerian Law School—to my widely shared
explanatory piece on the difference between “impeachment” and “removal from office” fits this bill.
The man wrote a tortured, rambling, grammatically awkward,
and logically impoverished rant as a riposte to my article that he could have
written in just one paragraph.
And that paragraph is this: “If the word ‘impeach’ is used
in the Nigerian constitution (by its makers) to mean ‘remove from office,’ it
follows from our discussion above that there is nothing wrong in the
interpretation/use of ‘impeach’ in Nigeria by Nigerian media practitioners and
by the Nigerian populace to mean ‘removal from office.’ Accordingly, it is
totally incorrect, and it may even be described as a form of display of acute
ignorance, for anyone to say that the makers of the Nigerian Constitution have
‘passed their ignorance … to the Nigerian populace.”
Forget the dreadfully poor grammar and ungainly structural
monstrosities of the article, especially for a law professor: this is
astonishingly infantile logic. My argument is that the drafters of Nigeria’s
1999 constitution misused the word “impeachment” throughout the document. The misusage
can't be vitiated by the fact of its being in the constitution. It’s like
saying a factual error in a newspaper ceases to be an error if the newspaper
sanctifies the error as fact.
The use of the term impeachment to mean “charge (a public official)
with an offense or misdemeanor committed while in office” isn’t an exclusively
American English usage as Udemezue misleads his readers to believe. The term is
universally understood as such in the educated anglophone world. The fact that,
by his admission, Udemezue didn’t know this until I pointed it out doesn’t
change that fact.
As an everyday word, “impeach” simply means to call
someone’s honesty or truthfulness into question. In fact, lawyers, including
Nigerian lawyers, routinely “impeach the credibility of witnesses” in the
court. I am assuming that Udemezue practiced law before teaching it—or perhaps
still practices it as he teaches it. When he had cause to impeach the
credibility of witnesses in legal disputations, did he always cause the
witnesses or their lawyers to be removed from judicial proceedings—or to be
automatically declared guilty—without the judge’s judgement?
If impeachment means accusation of impropriety and not a
final judgment of impropriety in even demotic speech, why is Udemezue all bent
out of shape because I pointed out that the Nigerian constitution erred in
equating impeachment with removal from office? What sorts of people are
teaching our law students?
If this is any comfort, many Americans also wrongly equate
impeachment with removal from office because impeachment rarely happens here.
To underscore the prevalence of the misusage of the word—or at least a
potential for this— in the US, The Associated Press Stylebook, which we like to
call the bible of American journalism, has an entry on the word.
Here’s the notation of the word in the AP Stylebook:
“impeachment: The constitutional process accusing an elected official of a
crime in an attempt to remove the official from office. Do not use as a synonym
for conviction or removal from office” [emphasis original].
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