By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi I am aware that this article won’t endear me to several of my thin-skinned Buhar...
By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
I am aware that this article won’t endear me to several of
my thin-skinned Buhari/APC partisan readers who, interestingly, wildly acclaimed
my past articles that pilloried former First Lady Patience Jonathan’s sidesplitting
grammatical transgressions. But I am
never one to shy away from embarking on what I’m convinced is a just and fair
undertaking because of a fear of backlash from mawkish, hypersensitive crybabies.
In any case, in my Saturday column—and in my Facebook status
updates—I have defended Wife of the President Aisha Buhari against Gov. Ayo
Fayose’s brash and reckless calumny against her. In an ironic twist, it was her
bid to give the lie to Fayose’s charge that she couldn’t visit the US without
being arrested that caused her to come here and give a speech at the United
States Institute of Peace (USIP) that is the subject of this column.
Mrs. Aisha Buhari’s speech at the United States Institute of
Peace didn’t rise to the level of former First Lady Patience Jonathan’s
legendary contortion of English grammar, but it was inexcusably egregious
nonetheless, not least because it was supposed to be the product of preparation
and forethought.
In general, the speech was riotously incoherent, lacked
lexical and semantic discipline, and was peppered with avoidably ugly and
elementary grammatical infractions. Mrs.
Buhari vacillated between reading from a prepared script and speaking off the
cuff. But the prepared speech and Mrs.
Buhari’s extemporizations were indistinguishable: both were tortured, infantile,
error-ridden, and cringe-worthy. Winston
Churchill’s famous putdown of his opponent—"He spoke without a note and
almost without a point."—seems to apply to the Wife of the President. (Watch the video below.)
Below are highlights of the infelicities that stood out like
a sore thumb during Mrs. Buhari’s 10-minute speech at the United States
Institute of Peace in Washington, DC:
1. Subject-verb
agreement. Like Patience Jonathan—and former President Goodluck
Jonathan—Aisha Buhari doesn’t seem to have any respect for subject-verb concord
rules in English grammar. These howlers illustrate this: “I want to…thank the
international community for giving us a
solutions…,” “those that needs
to be…,” “the school have been
running…,” “adult ones that needs
the opportunity.”
Most people know that a singular subject (such as “the school”)
agrees with a singular verb (such as “has”) and a plural subject (such as
“those,” “adult ones”) agrees with a plural verb (such as “need” instead of
“needs.”) That means the Wife of the President should have said, “those that need
to be,” “the school has been running,” “adult ones that need the opportunity.”
Of course, “a solutions” is a self-evident bloomer: you
don’t pluralize a noun that is preceded by the indefinite article “a” because
“a” signals nominal singularity. In other words, “a solutions” is both
ungrammatical and illogical since it implies nominal plurality and singularity
simultaneously. It is either “solutions” or “a solution.”
2. Redundant pronoun.
Pronouns typically take the place of a noun and save us the torment of ungainly
repetition. That’s why, in Standard English, pronouns don’t typically appear in
the same sentence as the nouns they refer to. In her USIP speech, Mrs. Buhari
said the following: “As you are all
aware, Boko Haram issue, it is a global issue attached to terrorism, which need
[sic] to be addressed globally.”
“Boko Haram issue” is the antecedent for the pronoun “it” in
the sentence quoted above, which makes the pronoun superfluous since it appears
in the same sentence as its antecedent. “Boko Haram is a global issue…” would
convey the same meaning—and without the ungrammatical baggage. I admit, though,
that redundant pronouns of the kind I identified in Mrs. Buhari’s speech occur
in nonstandard native English dialects. But we are talking of an official
speech in a formal context in a foreign, English-speaking country.
The sentence also violates the basic principle of
pronoun-antecedent agreement. The principle says, “A pronoun usually refers to
something earlier in the text (its antecedent) and must agree in number —
singular/plural — with the thing to which it refers.” The phrase “which need”
refers to “Boko Haram issue,” which is a singular subject that needs a singular
verb, i.e., “needs.”
3. A curious
resultant “done.” During her speech, Mrs. Buhari praised the University of
Maiduguri for remaining open even in the worst moments of Boko Haram insurgency.
“The university really done us proud,”
she said. This is a misuse of the past participle “done” that linguists call
the “resultant done.” It is curious because it is typical of the informal,
nonstandard (and sometimes illiterate) speech of the American south.
In Standard English, the sentence would be reworded as, “The
university has done us proud.” If we want to be faithful to Mrs. Buhari’s
lexical and structural choice, we would rephrase it as, “The university really
did us proud.”
4. Buhari’s
government as a “recent regime.” Mrs. Buhari puzzlingly referred to her
husband’s administration as “the recent regime.” Here is the context: After thanking the
“international community” for its military and financial support that led to
the defeat of Boko Haram, in a rather awkward transition, the Wife of the
President said, “In which the recent
regime has done so far considering what we inherited—the level of insecurity in
the country—we can now say that we successfully fought the Boko Haram
insurgency.”
Apart from the weak, messy transition, that’s some really
dizzyingly incoherent verbal blizzard!
But the bigger issue is that she called the current
administration “a recent regime.” There are two problems with that. First, the
word “recent,” especially when it is applied to administrations, implies an
immediate past, that is, that which precedes the present. It is both
ungrammatical and illogical to speak of an incumbent administration as
“recent.”
Second, there is always a tone of disapproval when a
government is referred to as a “regime.” That is why the word is often reserved
for military and other totalitarian governments. Even the Associated Press Stylebook defines “regime” as “the period in which
a person or system was in power, often with a negative connotation. For
example, Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Nazi regime.” I hope Mrs. Buhari doesn’t
consider her husband as the honcho of a regime.
5. “Academicians.”
Mrs. Buhari called university lecturers
in the audience “academicians.” Well, it’s OK to refer to university teachers
as “academicians” in Nigeria and in other non-native English-speaking
countries, but it doesn’t hurt to learn the proper form when you address native
speakers in their own territory. Educated native English speakers call
university teachers “academics,” not “academicians.”
Here is an abridged version of what I wrote on this in my December
6, 2015 column titled, “Academician” Or “Academic”? Q and A on Nigerian English
Errors and Usage”: [A]n ‘academic’ is someone who teaches or conducts
research in a higher educational institution, typically in a university. In
British and Nigerian English, academics are also called ‘lecturers.’ In
American English, they are called ‘professors.’
“An ‘academician,’
on the other hand, is a person who works with or is honored with membership
into an academy, that is, an institution devoted to the study and advancement
of a specialized area of learning such as the arts, sciences, literature,
medicine, music, engineering, etc. Examples of academies are the Nigerian
Academy of Letters, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Academy of Music, the
Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and
Antiquities, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,
etc.
“Not all academics are academicians and not all academicians
are academics. In other words, you can teach in a university, polytechnic,
college of education, etc. and never be made a member of an academy, and you
can become a member of an academy without ever being a teacher or a researcher
at a higher educational institution. Note that while most academicians are also
academics, most academics are never academicians.
“A little note on
pragmatics is in order here. Although many dictionaries have entries that say
‘academician’ and ‘academic’ can be synonymous, this isn’t really the case in
actual usage, at least among educated native English speakers. It is considered
illiterate usage in British and American English to call higher education
teachers and researchers ‘academicians’; they are properly called ‘academics.’
Many dictionaries merely capture the entire range of a word’s usage without
discriminating socially prestigious usage from uneducated or archaic usage.”
Concluding Thoughts
Mrs. Buhari obviously needs a lot more help than she is
aware of and is getting. She is grossly ill-served by her speech writer, who
also probably manages her social media accounts. The recent grammatical
bloopers from her Facebook page (which were quickly cleaned up after she became
the object of ridicule on social media) could be an indication that her speech
writer is also her social media manager.
Given how much she is
thrusting herself into the public eye, her poor grasp of English grammar will
soon become grist to the humor mills—like it was for Patience Jonathan. She can
avoid this by doing the following: (1) recede to her quiet, unobtrusive self,
(2) bone up on basic English grammar, (3) surround herself with people who give
a thought to grammatical correctness and completeness, or (4) speak in Fulfulde
or Hausa and get an English translator.
Postscript:
Mrs. Aisha Buhari spoke at George Mason University, Washington, DC, not at the USIP.
It's "sore thumb," not "sore thump."
Postscript:
Mrs. Aisha Buhari spoke at George Mason University, Washington, DC, not at the USIP.
It's "sore thumb," not "sore thump."
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"(4) speak in Fulfulde or Hausa and get an English translator." this got me cracking...!
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