A PhD took us all to hell. He however didn’t bring us back as the popular
\nsaying would have expected. Instead he left us there. But this is no issue
\nto those that are eternally bereft of vision. They seek to dwell in a
\nwhitewashed sepulcher instead of appreciating the inner beauty of a chamber
\nlined with marble.<\/p>\n
Common sense would have dictated that we collectively tackle the rot and
\ninfestation left behind by certificated leaders but these lucifer worthy
\nentities would rather make issues of the certificate of President Muhammadu
\nBuhari. Apparently not satisfied with the rot they bequeathed him they will
\nrather prefer that he is unable to focus by dragging out that which has
\nbeen thrashed out adequately with the pretext that they had only approached
\nthe scale of justice to adjudicate in their bellyaching.<\/p>\n
They had failed before in the past because President Buhari’s tutelage in
\nthe United States where he got today’s equivalent of a Masters wouldn’t
\nhave been possible without the basic certificate that they had made an
\nissue out of. Men of impeccable characters had severally attested to the
\nexistence of this document that some have now erroneously canonized as the
\nmanual for turning a country that has been pillaged by leaders past around.
\nHad he not been so qualified would the various statutory bodies have
\ncleared him to run for the elections\u00a0 at a time when all these organization
\noperated as proxies of the then sitting government?<\/p>\n
The issue here is not some piece of paper, by now discoloured with age,
\nsame as which countless of today’s accusers cannot provide their own copies
\nto save themselves from fates worse than death. The issue is that there
\nexists a rank of people who think and know that President Buhari has set in
\nmotion the anti-corruption fight, an avenging angel that has ensured that
\nnone of their lazy yet to be born or existing but damaged offspring would
\nbenefit from the commonwealth that was looted without thoughts for the
\nimpact on the wider population of citizens who are too conscientious to
\nappropriate even the lowest denomination they find on the wayside on their
\ndaily commute to backbreaking jobs.<\/p>\n
Yet, no one from among these masses of Nigerians, further impoverished by
\nthe kleptomaniac disposition of certificate doubters, is making any racket
\non this matter. If anyone of such means make any issue of a certificate
\nwhose circumstances have been duly explained by Mr President, it must be
\nthat he or she is a victim of monetized dissent.<\/p>\n
The slaves making this fresh round of distracting demand do so because once
\nan entity is keyed on autopilot it tends to exhaust their energy until they
\neventually crash en-mass for no other reason than that they have no purpose
\nto further fulfill in the absence of needless bellyaching.
\nThe only value to their allegation, if it ever had any, was that its seed
\nwas first planted on a parched soil of bitter politics to stop President
\nBuhari whose eventual victory was known to everyone the moment the All
\nProgressives Congress, APC handed him the presidential ticket.<\/p>\n
The indifference from Mr President’s side is profoundly golden. In addition
\nto making a mess of themselves with the suit in court they had also sought
\nto gain traction from it by alleging that having\u00a0 an X number of Senior
\nAdvocates of Nigeria (SANs) on the defence team is an admission of guilt.
\nThey failed in the very simple task of recall for they would have seen that
\na closer description of what they are insinuating was committed by someone
\nwho was trying to stampede a judge from the court by showing up with 99
\nplus SANs.<\/p>\n
Like US President Barrack Obama like President Muhammadu Buhari. From
\nbefore he clinched the Democrat nomination till date, a tribe of guys who
\nhave lost it there have sustained their birther conspiracy in the mirage of
\na hope that the US number one citizen can be flummoxed or forced out of
\noffice on that account. What a lot of them will one day realize is that
\nthey water over eight years of their sorry lives while Obama improved the
\nfortunes of the US in that span of time. Some of them even went off grid –
\nliving wild in wilderness – until he completes his tenure.<\/p>\n
The moronic equivalent in Nigeria would end up worse. Mr President would
\ncomplete his tenure without these hapless fellows making any constructive
\ninput to the debates leading to the formulation and implementation of far
\nreaching policies because they are doubters of his certificate. And it
\nwould not be their first productive shot at compromising systems and
\nprocesses.\u00a0 Nigerians would recall that these were the same people that
\nactively politicized the military by bringing serving officers into
\npartisan politics to the extent that some of them became the mouthpiece for
\ncertificate deniers.<\/p>\n
The remnant of this pointless charge would be led in the blogosphere and
\nidle street corners by persons who, though possess conveyor belt
\ncertification but are nonetheless deficient in capacity to independently
\nanalyse issues and arrive at constructive conclusions, are in the need of
\nthe kind of quality education that accompanied certificates as at the time
\nPresident Buhari got his. The conversation would thus be reduced into a
\ntrolling circuit without any redeeming feature to make it relevant to our
\nnational priorities.<\/p>\n
The rest of us must therefore prove we are better educated than the
\ncertificate doubters by techs rolling the agenda for public discourse back
\nto germane issues. How do we make those who bought the electricity
\ndistribution companies to stop their extortionist regime; how do we make
\nsure the oil industry cabal do not find a new way to steal the country
\nblind; how do we take out Naira back from currency speculators; how do we
\nensure that the goats that ate our yams do not define the perception of the
\nanti-corruption fight; how do we prevent new goats from eating recovered
\nyams; how do we expand the markets for the goods and services that will
\nbloom from government’s commitment to diversify the economy; how do we
\nprovide more palliatives pending when the hard work of now begin to yield
\nresults?<\/p>\n
These are the issues that should dominate public discourse and not a matter
\nthat had been laid to rest pre-election. We are the ones to press the reset
\nbutton and we should do so now by teaching the degrees, masters and
\ndoctorate degree holding illiterates among us how to think.<\/p>\n
Agbese is National Coordinator, Stand Up Nigeria and contributed this piece
\nfrom the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A PhD took us all to hell. He however didn’t bring us back as the popular saying would have expected. Instead he left us there. But this is no issue…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles-opinions"],"yoast_head":"\n