Buhari’s certificate: Need to reset national discourse By Philip Agbese

A PhD took us all to hell. He however didn’t bring us back as the popular saying would have expected. Instead he left us there. But this is no issue to those that are eternally bereft of vision. They seek to dwell in a whitewashed sepulcher instead of appreciating the inner beauty of a chamber lined with marble.

Common sense would have dictated that we collectively tackle the rot and infestation left behind by certificated leaders but these lucifer worthy entities would rather make issues of the certificate of President Muhammadu Buhari. Apparently not satisfied with the rot they bequeathed him they will rather prefer that he is unable to focus by dragging out that which has been thrashed out adequately with the pretext that they had only approached the scale of justice to adjudicate in their bellyaching.

They had failed before in the past because President Buhari’s tutelage in the United States where he got today’s equivalent of a Masters wouldn’t have been possible without the basic certificate that they had made an issue out of. Men of impeccable characters had severally attested to the existence of this document that some have now erroneously canonized as the manual for turning a country that has been pillaged by leaders past around. Had he not been so qualified would the various statutory bodies have cleared him to run for the elections  at a time when all these organization operated as proxies of the then sitting government?

The issue here is not some piece of paper, by now discoloured with age, same as which countless of today’s accusers cannot provide their own copies to save themselves from fates worse than death. The issue is that there exists a rank of people who think and know that President Buhari has set in motion the anti-corruption fight, an avenging angel that has ensured that none of their lazy yet to be born or existing but damaged offspring would benefit from the commonwealth that was looted without thoughts for the impact on the wider population of citizens who are too conscientious to appropriate even the lowest denomination they find on the wayside on their daily commute to backbreaking jobs.

Yet, no one from among these masses of Nigerians, further impoverished by the kleptomaniac disposition of certificate doubters, is making any racket on this matter. If anyone of such means make any issue of a certificate whose circumstances have been duly explained by Mr President, it must be that he or she is a victim of monetized dissent.

The slaves making this fresh round of distracting demand do so because once an entity is keyed on autopilot it tends to exhaust their energy until they eventually crash en-mass for no other reason than that they have no purpose to further fulfill in the absence of needless bellyaching.

The only value to their allegation, if it ever had any, was that its seed was first planted on a parched soil of bitter politics to stop President Buhari whose eventual victory was known to everyone the moment the All Progressives Congress, APC handed him the presidential ticket.

The indifference from Mr President’s side is profoundly golden. In addition to making a mess of themselves with the suit in court they had also sought to gain traction from it by alleging that having  an X number of Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs) on the defence team is an admission of guilt. They failed in the very simple task of recall for they would have seen that a closer description of what they are insinuating was committed by someone who was trying to stampede a judge from the court by showing up with 99 plus SANs.

Like US President Barrack Obama like President Muhammadu Buhari. From before he clinched the Democrat nomination till date, a tribe of guys who have lost it there have sustained their birther conspiracy in the mirage of a hope that the US number one citizen can be flummoxed or forced out of office on that account. What a lot of them will one day realize is that they water over eight years of their sorry lives while Obama improved the fortunes of the US in that span of time. Some of them even went off grid – living wild in wilderness – until he completes his tenure.

The moronic equivalent in Nigeria would end up worse. Mr President would complete his tenure without these hapless fellows making any constructive input to the debates leading to the formulation and implementation of far reaching policies because they are doubters of his certificate. And it would not be their first productive shot at compromising systems and processes.  Nigerians would recall that these were the same people that actively politicized the military by bringing serving officers into partisan politics to the extent that some of them became the mouthpiece for certificate deniers.

The remnant of this pointless charge would be led in the blogosphere and idle street corners by persons who, though possess conveyor belt certification but are nonetheless deficient in capacity to independently analyse issues and arrive at constructive conclusions, are in the need of the kind of quality education that accompanied certificates as at the time President Buhari got his. The conversation would thus be reduced into a trolling circuit without any redeeming feature to make it relevant to our national priorities.

The rest of us must therefore prove we are better educated than the certificate doubters by techs rolling the agenda for public discourse back to germane issues. How do we make those who bought the electricity distribution companies to stop their extortionist regime; how do we make sure the oil industry cabal do not find a new way to steal the country blind; how do we take out Naira back from currency speculators; how do we ensure that the goats that ate our yams do not define the perception of the anti-corruption fight; how do we prevent new goats from eating recovered yams; how do we expand the markets for the goods and services that will bloom from government’s commitment to diversify the economy; how do we provide more palliatives pending when the hard work of now begin to yield results?

These are the issues that should dominate public discourse and not a matter that had been laid to rest pre-election. We are the ones to press the reset button and we should do so now by teaching the degrees, masters and doctorate degree holding illiterates among us how to think.

***Agbese is National Coordinator, Stand Up Nigeria and contributed this piece from the United Kingdom.