Social commentator and Professor of Communication at the Kennesaw State University, USA, Farooq Kperogi has described the lawyers representing President Muhammadu Buhari at the ongoing presidential election tribunal for questioning the citizenship of the Presidential Candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Atiku Abubakar as historically and constitutionally illiterate.
The PDP Presidential candidate is challenging the announcement of President Buhari at the Presidential election tribunal by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) as the winner of the February 23rd Presidential election.
Prof Farooq said this on his weekly “Note from Atlanta” opinion article titled “Atiku’s citizenship and Buhari’s illiterate lawyers“, saying the president has always had a penchant for attracting underwhelming, intellectual incurious rubes.
He said, “The law of attraction says like attracts like, which explains why Muhammadu Buhari is a magnet for mediocrities. Almost all his appointees are, like him, underwhelming, intellectually incurious rubes. It’s no wonder that even the lawyers he assembled to defend his unprecedentedly audacious electoral robbery are also risible dolts”.
“It isn’t only research illiteracy that plagues members of Buhari’s legal team. They are also constitutional and historical illiterates. Their constitutional and historical illiteracy is instantiated by their claim that PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar should never have been allowed to run for president because he “is not a citizen of Nigeria by birth” since he was born in what was called British Cameroons, which later became the Sardauna Province of Northern Nigeria in 1961″.
Read also: An unpopular opinion on the Atiku saga
Explaining the historical contest behind the controversy, Prof Farooq said the Nigerian constitution recognizes anyone born into what was then British Northern Cameroon as a Nigerian.
He said, “For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Atiku’s ancestors had always lived in British Northern Cameroon. Well, Buhari’s lawyers betrayed historical illiteracy in thinking that British Cameroons is and has always been synonymous with modern Cameroon. In the 19thcentury, the German Empire, like other avaricious European powers, expropriated a huge swathe of land in west and central Africa, which it called “Kamerun.” However, in the aftermath of the First World War (which is actually more properly a First European War), Germany was dispossessed of Kamerun along with other lands it had exploited”.
“In 1922, the League of Nations divvied up Kamerun between Britain and France. France renamed its own portion of the territory “Cameroun” and Britain renamed its own “Northern Cameroon” and “Southern Cameroon.” The two territories are non-contiguous. Britain retained control of Northern Cameroon and Southern Cameroon in 1946, the year Atiku was born, after the United Nations, which replaced the League of Nations in 1945, reclassified the Cameroons as “UN Trust territories.”
“On February 11, 1961, “subjects” of British Northern Cameroon, which had been governed by the same British colonizers that governed Nigeria, voted to join newly independent Nigeria. In other words, an independent British Northern Cameroon never existed at any point in history, and no one was ever its “citizen.” So which country do Buhari’s nescient lawyers expect people born in British Northern Cameroon to go and be president of? Or do they expect them to be stateless—or be second-class citizens in Nigeria— because of the historical accident of once being governed as British Northern Cameroon?”
” People born in British Northern Cameroon were never part of French Cameroun, which became independent in January 1960. They were even different from British Southern Cameroon, which voted to become part of French Cameroun the same day that British Northern Cameroon voted to be integrated to independent Nigeria. In fact, both northern and southern Cameroons were administered from Nigeria, a reason a prominent pre-independence Nigerian political party was called the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons”.
