Isa Ali Pantami and the gang of unconscionably mercenary and dizzyingly shallow PR team around him seem to think that if they can get enough people to congratulate Pantami on his fraudulent professorial “promotion”
(or, if you will, "appointment") and say it is “well-deserved,” that it would somehow deodorize its overpoweringly malodorous ethical stench and perhaps even legitimize it.But it doesn’t work that way.Fraud is fraud irrespective of what the beneficiaries of fraud do to defend it.
Someone from Gombe shared with me this congratulatory letter on Pantami’s fraudulent “professorship” that the Gombe chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) was instructed to write😂. I hope it’s a spoof because the atrociousness of the grammar in the letter is
almost criminal! Where next should we expect a congratulatory letter from to lend legitimacy to Pantami’s professorial fraud? After the cringeworthy letter from ATBU’s VC, I won’t be surprised if Pantami approaches the National Universities Commission (NUC). Although people do
change, the Professor Abubakar Abdulrasheed I know would rather resign than endorse intellectual fraud. Look, Pantami’s professorial appointment is undeserving, illegitimate, even illegal. Period! You can insult, smear, & attack me till the end of time. It won’t change that fact.
Pantami can bribe the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), the Nigeria Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), Jama'atu Nasril Islam (JNI), VCs of universities, governors, and so on to congratulate him on his fraudulent professorship in the most fawning ways imaginable,
but it won’t legitimize the fraud of his unmerited professorial appointment. In fact, the fact that he has a need to bribe and beg people to congratulate him is prima facie evidence of his self-awareness that he is perpetrating sky-high intellectual fraud.
This is frankly sad because Pantami, whatever you think of him, is a supremely intelligent man who has the potential to become a legitimate professor if he wants to. But he has allowed himself to be held hostage by conceit and a thirst for cheap, unearned glory.
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Prof. Tukur Sa’ad’s Obfuscation on Pantami’s Professorial Fraud
Someone called my attention to a response to my interventions on Pantami’s FUTO professorial fraud. It was supposedly written by a certain Professor Sa’ad Tukur who identifies himself as “a former Vice Chancellor.”
The long and short of the article is that non-academics with industry experience can be appointed to professorships. Haven’t I written exactly that in all my interventions? Has the man even read my articles before writing his?Or is he just engaging in what logicians call strawman
argumentation, that is, inventing a weak or sham argument that your opponent didn’t make in order to easily refute it? But Sa’ad undermined his own “defense” of Pantami’s fraud by admitting that, “I’m not saying Pantami can fit into the examples I gave.” So, why did he write?
Further Thoughts on Pantami’s Fake Professorship
Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami’s distressing professorial fraud is taking on multiple layers of soul-depressing duplicity. I’ll unpack some of them here.
After the unusualness of “promoting” Pantami, a FUTO non-employee, to an unworthy
“professorship” at FUTO was pointed out, his PR team went into overdrive to obfuscate, deflect, and muddy the waters by saying he was “appointed,” not “promoted” to his “professorship.” It’s one of the funniest and most unintelligent subterfuges I’ve encountered in recent times.
But here is the truth. Pantami’s PR firm called PRNNigeria put out a news release—at Pantami’s behest—to news organizations on September 5 saying he had been “promoted” to the rank of professor.guardian.ng/news/pantami-p…. The lead (i.e., the first sentence) of the news story reads:
5 Final Thoughts on Abba Kyari and Hushpuppi 1. As with everything Nigerian, the Abba Kyari/Hushpuppi fraud case has taken on a predictably ethnoreligious hue. I’ve read some people claim that Kyari is being targeted by America because he is a Muslim. Ha!Well, Hushpuppi is also a
Muslim. His full name is Ramon Olorunwa Abbas. Most Muslims will recognize Abbas as a Muslim name but probably not Ramon. Ramon is the Yoruba Muslim domestication of Abdulrahman. Read my July 13, 2014 column titled “Top 10 Yoruba Names You Never Guessed Were Arabic Names" to
understand how Abdulrahman became Ramon (which is also sometimes rendered as Ramonu or Raymond). The name is #7 on my list. farooqkperogi.com/2014/07/top-10… Kyari’s replacement, announced earlier today, is a Tunji Disu, another Muslim. Disu is the Yoruba Muslim domestication of Idris.
Used to Think “Bianca” and “Biafra” Were Igbo Words!
Don’t laugh too hard at my ignorance, but until fairly recently, I used to think Bianca was an Igbo name and thought any non-Igbo person who bore the name did so out of (benign) appellative appropriation—such as many Black
Americans who bear African names. Don’t blame me: the first person I ever knew to bear the name was Bianca Onuh Ojukwu, the former beauty queen who became former Biafra warlord Emeka Ojukwu’s wife. Through the logic of false attraction, I thought the “bia” in Bianca was derived
from the Igbo “bia” that means “come.” This notion was congealed in my mind because “bia” is probably Igbo language’s single most recognized word to other non-Igbo Nigerians. “Bia” is lexically frozen in my imagination in the trinitarian alternative indigenous name for Nigeria
False Dichotomy Between an App and a Country
A pro-regime apologist said he’d rather lose an app (i.e., Twitter) than lose a country. Nonsense! That’s called a false dilemma (or a false dichotomy) in logic. A false dilemma imposes an unnatural and deceptive limit on options. You
can have both an app and a country—like many countries do. You can lose a country without an app—such as Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, etc. And you can simultaneously lose an app and a country, such as Buhari’s Nigeria seems pigheadedly moving towards. But if your country’s fabric
is so brittle that it can be dismantled by the mere dissident chatter of disaffected citizens on an app, then you have no country to lose in the first place. If you really want a country, go do some work to have one so that mere insurgent chatter on an app can’t undo it. Start
You Can Ban Twitter, But You Can’t Ban Rebellion Against Injustice
You can ban Twitter, or even the Internet, but you can't ban the righteous emotions that injustice animates. Or the rage and angst that people ventilate on social media as a consequence of injustice. Only justice,
equity, tact, respect, good governance, etc. can ban them. Nigeria isn’t dysfunctional and insecure because of social media; it is dysfunctional, insecure, and tottering perilously on the brink of the precipice because of the incompetence, irresponsibility, & intolerance of the
Buhari regime, easily the vilest and most insular regime in Nigeria’s entire history. There was no Twitter when Nigerians fought totalitarian military juntas to a standstill. There was no social media or even mobile telephony when Nigerians organized and resisted the cancelation