- written by Silas Sakhos Ejiofoh -
A lot of people, by their dynamism and accomplishments, make somebody cry and live in anguish. They are the source of somebody’s agony. These people are most likely to belong to the Igbo race or are from the southern part of Nigeria. When Philip Emeagwali stepped up to receive his Gordon Bell Prize for an achievement in computer technology, somebody turned away in anger. Urgent help may have been needed to prevent one attention-seeking Farooq Kperogi, who claims to be a professor, from breaking down. But he found consolation in his refusal to accept the man’s genius by inventing a lie that ran faster on the internet than Emeagwali’s work created sensations back then. The falsehood grew big and was almost believed until the truth came and wiped off the lies. In his article entitled ‘Intellectual 419: Philip Emeagwali and Gabriel Oyibo Compared’ Kperogi tries to show that Prof. Gabriel Oyibo of the GAGUT Theorem fame fishes in the same fraudulent waters as Emeagwali. Away from their science world, Emeagwali is Igbo and Oyibo is Igalla. It is common knowledge that some Fulanis spend a lifetime beating around about Igbos; for obvious reasons. The Igbo man passes for what some people secretly crave. This rolls over into envy and then to the mass murders of Igbos that have been taking place in northern Nigeria and by Fulanis. This is why, because the Kperogis can’t claim ownership of people like Emeagwali or Oyibo, they take up positions in the media to take down these traditional enemies.
It is undoubtedly the reason why Kperogi wants to dispute scientific achievements on the pages of newspapers. He had taken his fight further afield to castigate the entire Igbo race. This is where one can locate his mind set. Unknown to Igbos, this person battled them in his master’s degree thesis entitled “A ‘tribe’ migrates crime to cyber space: Nigerian Igbos in 419 e-mail scams.” Count the number of years that have passed since Kperogi came out with that work and then consider the fact that he hasn’t relented, even though he has been ignored by the people he’s been waging war against. But, let it be known that 419 is a leftover of the scheming of, I hate to say it, Hausa/Fulani people, Kperogi’s people. It is the imitation of their game while they were in charge of Nigeria’s affairs that we now have, which is why most of the names involved are Hausa/Fulani names. It’s not as if they’re back benchers in the act. Besides, the roots of people caught in drug peddling, for instance, may elude us if the perpetrators bear foreign names. Kperogi is to be found in the attack on the Igbo lady Dr. Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke with the article ‘Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke’ Fake Doctorate and Professorship.’Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke’s Fake Doctorate and Professorship He would wake up and think of nothing to write than to pick holes in the grammar of journalists and politicians in Nigeria. It’s clear he’s suffering, but his most visible nightmare is Reuben Abati, a former Guardian Nigeria columnist and now the spokesman of Pres. Goodluck Jonathan.
This man Kperogi had thought that he was getting closer to becoming the chief press secretary of his fellow Fulani Mohammadu Buhari, had Buhari won the last presidential election. Then, he would have conveniently become the minister of education and then a head of state. Only if he knew that that very order of Fulani hold on Nigeria had since been loosened. What is going on in his mind is eight years of torture. Who knows? His exploits might land him in the Daily Trust chief editor’s seat.
His envy-riddled articles in Daily Trust attract praises from his northern brothers, who think that they have someone speaking for them. There’s nothing goading him on than his inner nature. He looks through his window after waking up from sleep to read that Reuben Abati is still in charge in Abuja. It’s not as if the overrated Reuben Abati is too good, but if Abati’s lost shoes were picked up by Kperogi, they wouldn’t fit Kperogi’s fake legs. We know Kperogi’s attempt to be like Abati is a joke, the columns in the Fulani-owned Daily Trust, notwithstanding. That will only happen if Daily Trust changes its name and Guardian swaps readers with Daily Trust.
Kperogi is somebody who was created by Kperogi’s falsehood. He has an academic record built on plagiarism. How can you engage in the exercise of criticism and at the same time steal somebody’s words? The way Kperogi understands authorship is to steal another person’s words. How can you hold onto stolen property and apply it in more than two articles of yours? This is what you have here, in his most recent attack on Abati and in support of his fellow Fulani, Buhari. He writes, “an expression whose meaning cannot be inferred from the meanings of the words that make it up. …” The words belong to somebody else. It appears in the same form “an expression whose meaning cannot be inferred from the meanings of the words that make it up” in somebody else’s write up. See: http://www.audioenglish.net/dictionary/idiom.htm
The educational level in Nigeria has indeed changed for the worst, as revealed in Kperogi’s writing. It is with pain that I discovered that Kperogi could open to some websites and take people’s words and publish them as his. He is hooked onto it that he hasn’t perhaps the capacity to use his own words. He serves his readers the same words that he got from elsewhere. Who will commend him for not using even a single sentence of his in an entire article in which he is supposed to be mocking Nigerians for their abuse of the English language? In this brief sample of Kperogi’s writing, I will serve readers the sources and websites from where he dipped his hands to take constructions that do not belong to him, then show how the same words appear in Kperogi’s lines. It will be a waste of time to cover the entire article, so we look at the first half of his famous piece ‘Top 10 Words Nigerians Commonly Misspell’ http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/farooq-a-kperogi/top-10-words-nigerians-commonly-misspell.html. We begin with Dana Attocknie.
Dana Attocknie: since English is notoriously non-phonetic http://www.mid-americabigfoot.com/index.php/the-news/56-written-by-dana-attocknie-native-american-times-
Kperogi: Since English is a notoriously aphonetic language
Robert Bruns: As such, there is a vast gulf between books orthography http://www.worldburnsclub.com/begin/robert_burns.htm
Kperogi: That is, there is often a vast gulf between its
Free Online Dictionary: (i.e., its method of representing sounds by written or printed symbols http://www.thefreedictionary.com/punctuation
Kperogi: (a method of representing the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols:)
The Spelling Society: and George Bernard Shaw remarked bitterly that a word like “ghoti” could just as easily be pronounced as “fish”: gh as in tough, o as in women, and ti as in nation: http://www.spellingsociety.org/news/media/dyslexia/reports.php
Kperogi: George Bernard Shaw, one of England’s most imaginative writers, who once humorously said that the word “ghoti” could just as well be pronounced “fish”/ if you followed some of English’s quirky spelling conventions: ‘gh’ as in “tough,” ‘o’ as in “women” and “ti” as in “nation.”
Listserve: follows our previous popular list of Top 10 Common English Errors http://listverse.com/2008/09/11/another-10-common-english-errors/
Kperogi: what follows is a list of common spelling errors in Nigerian written English
Lady S.: Why are native English speakers so bad at spelling their own language? http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080808104048AAFvsok
Kperogi: it needs to be pointed out that native speakers of the English language are just as awful with spellings
Allan Bell: This fact is further proof of the sociolinguistic axiom http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/bell1984.pdf
Kperogi: an axiom of sociolinguistic structure
Original: that there are no native writers of any language, since writing is a deliberate, learned activity unlike speech effortlesslyhttp://langs.eserver.org/linell/chapter02.html
Kperogi: writing can sometimes be deliberately used for mirroring certain speech.
Ken Barrett: which can be–and often is—acquired http://apt.rcpsych.org/content/5/4/250.full.pdf
Kperogi: which can be and often are more
Answerbag: What is most commonly misspelled word in the English http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/547990 a fact ironically attested to by the fact that even the word “misspell” is itself one of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language
Kperogi: But English has got to be the most misspelled language in the world
Ken Smith: the 10 most commonly most mispellt words, which include “argurment” for “argument”: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7546975.stm
Kperogi: Other commonly misspelled words in the English-speaking (or should say English-writing) world are “truely” (instead of “truly”), “arguement” (instead of “argument”)/
Carolin Tagg’s PhD work: text messaging is a largely unexplored and highly distinctive language” http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/253/1/Tagg09PhD.pdf
Kperogi: With the advent of textese (i.e., the distinctive language and spelling conventions of cellphone text messages)
After stealing Ken Smith’s material and not acknowledging him, Kperogi comes to say “It was this realization that persuaded a university lecturer by the name of Ken Smith who teaches in Britain’s Bucks New University to suggest that we should begin to accept frequently misspelled words as legitimate variants. For starters, he says, we should admit the following frequent misspellings into the pantheon of English spelling variants: “ignor,” [ignore] “occured,” [occurred] “thier,” [their] “truely,”[truly] “speach,” [speech] “twelth” [twelfth], “mispelt,”[misspelt], and “varient” [variant].
Original: lain is an orthographical anarchist: http://iainhall.wordpress.com/2008/0
Kperogi: But it’s easy to see that Smith’s suggestion is a recipe for orthographic anarchy
Original: Dr. Weil made sure to replace the Pantheons with his own Variant forces http://megaman.wikia.com/wiki/Pantheon
Kperogi: should be rewarded with admission into the pantheon of variants?
This is how Farooq Kperogi has been deceiving his own people from far away Atlanta Georgia. Nigeria, we hail thee. Will anybody conclude that because Lamido Sanusi and Farooq Kperogi are engaged in plagiarism that all literate Fulanis should go for plagiarism tests? The answer is no, of course.
Sakhos Silas Ejiofoh (irokoafrika@yahoo.com) writes from Wiesbaden, Hessen Germany
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