By Farooq Kperogi

The last
presidential
election
was as
much a
political
contest as
it was a
linguistic
one.

In the
battle for the hearts and minds of voters, enthusiasts of President-
elect General Muhammadu Buhari on cyber space were by far the
most linguistically creative. They came up with original, persuasive,
catchy, memorable, and thought-provoking puns, which helped
construct a rhetoric of inevitability of Buhari’s victory. President
Jonathan’s supporters were caught flat-footed by the unassailable
rhetorical ingenuity of Buhari’s supporters. They came up with no
original puns of their own, and merely reacted with thoughtless and
rhetorically impoverished comebacks to the rhetorical demolition of
their candidate.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Whatsapp were
the battlefields of the rhetorical and linguistic contest between
Buhari and Jonathan. For instance, #Febuhari, which I adjudged
“Nigerian English’s most creative pun” has more than one million
public mentions on Twitter. This is also true of
#GeneralMarchforBuhari-or its many variations-which cleverly
manipulates the initials of General Muhammadu Buhari’s names. It
came forth a day after the February 14 polls were shifted.
Several people wrote to tell me that my wildly popular February 1,
2015 article titled “Is ‘Febuhari’ Nigerian English’s Most Creative
Pun?” might have contributed to the shifting of the date of the
election. They argued that I so intellectualized the intersection of the
pun and the date of the election that it scared the heck out of
Jonathan’s supporters in high places. So they chose to denude
Buhari of the specialness that a February 14 election date would
have conferred on him. Of course, my article had nothing to do with
the shift in the date of the election. That’s giving me way more
credit than I deserve.

But if the shift in the date of the election was a consequence of the
unsettling rhetorical auspiciousness of the date for Buhari, Buhari’s
supporters came up with an even more rhetorically expansive pun in
#GMB-which both stands for General March for Buhari and General
Muhammadu Buhari. The presidential and National Assembly
elections were officially designated as “general” election by the
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The elections
took place in “March.” And Buhari’s supporters said the “general”
election in “March” was for “Buhari,” thus GMB, which also happens
to rhyme with the initials of the president-elect’s name.

Additionally, the verb “march” has a multiplicity of meanings that
unite around the notion of walking for something, especially in
protest. So General March for Buhari hints at protest votes for
Buhari in response to the wrongheaded upending of “Febuhari.”
How ingenious!

I elected not to write on the rhetorical ingenuity of the #General
March for Buhari hashtag because I didn’t want to be accused of
jinxing Buhari’s victory again should the loonies in Aso Rock decide
to shift the date of the election yet again. In light of Buhari’s victory,
I have decided to republish a slightly shorter version of my February
1, 2015 article. Enjoy:

I am blown away by the morphological and semantic creativity in
the coinage of the term “Febuhari” by the contagiously ebullient
social media foot soldiers of APC presidential candidate General
Muhammadu Buhari. It’s a well-thought-out pun that
simultaneously exploits the ambiguities of sound, meaning, time,
and language to make a compellingly humorous yet deeply political
and rhetorical statement.

Puns, also known as paronomasia, are, by definition, a play on
words. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, puns artfully
manipulate “the different possible meanings of a word or the fact
that there are words that sound alike but have different meanings.”
Based on this definition, it is customary to taxonomize puns in
many different forms, but I’ll discuss only three types of puns in this
piece.

The commonest type of pun is the homophonic pun. This type of
pun depends on the similarity in the sounds of words to achieve its
effect. Examples are: “Why is it so wet in England? Because many
kings and queens have REIGNED there.” “Doctors need PATIENCE.”
In these examples, the writers exploit the similarities in sound
between “rain” and “reign” and between “patience” and “patients” to
achieve both humor and intentional ambiguity.

Homographic puns are the other common types of puns. They
exploit the similarities in the spellings of otherwise dissimilar words.
An example is: “There was once a cross-eyed teacher who couldn’t
control his PUPILS.” In this example, “pupil” is exploited for humor
and creative ambiguity. “Pupil” both means a schoolchild and the
black dot in the eye. In the context of the sentence, both senses of
the word convey two equally valid but different meanings. When
you’re cross-eyed, you can’t control the pupil of your eyes, and
when you’re a cross-eyed teacher, it’s hard to control unruly pupils
because you can’t see them clearly.

There is another type of pun called a recursive pun. It’s a two-
pronged pun that requires the reader to have some familiarity with
the first part of the pun in order to make sense of the second.
Example: “A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your
mother.” To understand “the Freudian slip” part of the pun, you
need to know about Sigmund Freud’s controversial Oedipus
complex, which basically says men’s subconscious desires to
sexually possess their mothers causes them to be hostile to their
fathers.

“Febuhari” encapsulates several of these categories of pun. Let’s
start with the obvious. The forthcoming presidential electoral
contest of which Buhari is a major contender against the incumbent
will take place in February this year. The similarity in sound between
February (pronounced fe-bu-wari in Nigeria and fe-biu-ari in
southern United States) and “febuhari” makes “febuhari” a
homophonic pun. In fact, in southwest Nigeria where most Yoruba
people don’t phonologically distinguish “h” from “e” in spoken
English (which some people have called the “h factor” in Yoruba
English) “febuhari” and “February” may actually sound alike in
everyday conversations. Similarly, in writing, “febuhari” and
“February” share striking orthographic similarities. The similarities
are not sufficient to qualify “febuhari in February” as a homographic
pun, but it closely approximates it.

It’s probably the rich cultural ingredients in “Febuhari” that make the
coinage particularly profoundly creative. The presidential election
won’t just take place in February; it will take place on February 14,
which is Valentine’s Day, celebrated worldwide as a day of love.
Now, here is where it gets really intriguing: “ifẹ” in Yoruba means
“love.” Thus, “febuhari” roughly translates as the clipped version of
“love Buhari” in Yoruba. There are two ways in which this is a
deeply poignant recursive pun.

First, Buhari’s social media aficionados have implored Nigerians to
show love to Buhari on “lover’s day” by voting for him en masse.
This political advocacy exploits the coincidence of the dates of
Valentine’s Day and of Nigeria’s presidential election in remarkably
inventive ways. In other words, the Buhari social media enthusiasts
(let’s call them “febuharists”) are saying: “let Buhari be your
Valentine this Valentine’s Day.” As people who are familiar with
Valentine’s Day tradition know, to agree to be someone’s Valentine
is synonymous with agreeing to risk all for the sake of the love you
have for the person. This love isn’t necessarily amorous; it often, in
fact, is agape love, as selfless, fraternal love is called in Christian
theological discourse. In any case, Valentine actually means
“strength” in Latin. The word shares lexical ancestry with “valor”
and “valiant,” which both mean bravery, heroism, gallantry, etc.
So the dimension of “febuhari” that means a call to action for
Nigerians to leave everything aside and vote for Buhari on February
14 requires a knowledge of the traditions of Valentine Day
celebrations. That makes it a recursive pun of some kind. Second, if
Buhari wins the 2015 presidential election, it would be because of
the political alliance he struck with the Yoruba people in Nigeria’s
southwest. In the three previous elections he ran for president,
Buhari’s appeal-and votes-were confined to the Muslim north. As
I’ve pointed out in previous articles, that’s never sufficient to win a
national mandate. What has changed in this election cycle is the
massive “ifẹ” (let’s just shorten it to “fe”) that Buhari seems to be
getting from the Yoruba people. If the unprecedentedly effusive
profusion of “fe” from Yoruba people for Buhari leads to his
electoral triumph in the February 14 election, it would give a whole
new meaning to “febuhari.”

Now, I am aware that President Jonathan’s supporters have come
up with a counter Twitter hashtag called “FailBuhari.” There isn’t
even the tiniest smidgen of linguistic creativity in the hashtag. It
suffers from several originality deficits. It doesn’t manipulate any
aural, semantic, or visual cues to convey any special sense. In other
words, it isn’t the least bit punny.

Maybe the creators of “FailBuhari” would have had better luck
inventing their own pun around “good luck,” the president’s first
name, which lends itself to countless punning possibilities. You
don’t have to like Buhari’s youthful and high-spirited online
devotees (some of whom can be insufferably obnoxious) to admit
that they have created Nigeria’s most ingenious political neologism.
Febuharists may not know what a pun is, but they will sure go
down in history as Nigeria’s best punners.


www.farooqkperogi.com/2015/04/from-febuhari-to-general-march-for.html?m=1