Freegift75:
Aisha Buhari’s Embarrassing Grammatical Infelicities at USIP
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.”
www.farooqkperogi.com/2016/08/aisha-buharis-embarrassing-grammatical.html?m=1#.V6bvtF5HOXV.facebook I am nt surprised when her husband speaks English as if it is Latin, this is olodo regime. Buhari with an F in WAEC English will b worse |
