Another ASUU Strike?
So, ASUU is going on another strike that will maim the dreams, hopes, and aspirations of our young people, and Education Minister Adamu Adamu is sitting pretty in his easy chair as if nothing is going badly amiss?
And my friend Isa Ali Pantami who loves the
glory of academia so much that he went out of his way to beg FUTO to confer an unearned professorial title on him is also pretending not to see as the university system is about to collapse completely before his eyes. He loves the bragging rights that come with being called a
"professor" but not the sacrifice it takes to save the university system whose highest titular glory he swanks. Adamu Adamu and Pantami are far and away the closest ministers to Buhari. They can get the regime to meet ASUU's demands and save what remains of our universities if
they want to. Will they do this for posterity and for the future of the children of the poor who can't send their kids to private or overseas universities? No rational, sensible person can defend or ignore a situation where full professors earn less than 500,000 naira (which is
less than $2,000) per month! There's none of the demands of ASUU that I've read that can be called unreasonable. None.
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Fraudsters’ University of Technology Owerri (FUTO)
In this ongoing Pantamized fraudfessorial saga, the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, which I’ve chosen to rechristen as the “Fraudsters’ University of Technology Owerri” until it rescinds its fraudulent appointment to
Pantami, isn’t getting the deserved censure its fraud invites. In an interview with Saturday Tribune (tribuneonlineng.com/why-we-made-pa…), FUTO’s registrar by the name of John Nnabuihe spouted many outrageous inaccuracies that has caused me to question the very academic integrity of the
entire university. First, he said Pantami was an “Associate Professor” at the Islamic University of Madinah. He wasn’t. Saudi Arabia’s university system is modelled after the American system, and the minimum number of years required to be promoted to an associate professor from
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?
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
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