COMMONLY MISUSED ENGLISH WORDS, PHRASES, & TERMS, 19

March 19, 2022

NIGERIA’S SENATE PRESIDENT AHMED LAWAN GOOFS, BIG TIME!

This is “No Bullshiting,” by Harry Agina.

Greetings!

Nigeria’s Senate president, Ahmed Lawan, is my subject today for NBB’s “Commonly Misused English Words, Phrases, & Terms.”

You know, I’m the kind of guy who believe that perfection in English grammar is for those who have English as their native language. The rest of us, especially Africans, do not have to speak perfect English to impress anyone. Except, of course, it happens to be a requisite for your professional specialty, like an English language teacher, or something like that. We don’t want a teacher to teach us nonsense, meeeeeeeeen!!!

Those of us who are not English should be proud that we do speak other people’s language as well as we do. How many Brits can speak my own native language nearly as well as I speak their language, huh, huh, huh??? Well, that’s exactly how you should also feel if English is not your native language. So, you make some errors, so fucking what?! But that’s if you don’t pretend to be what you are not, of course. Oh, by the way, I have seen some of the owners of the English language with more errors than mine, meeeeeeen!!!

I have gone through all that preamble just to get to my lambasting of Nigeria’s Senate President, Ahmed Lawan. You already know that I seize every opportunity to condemn Nigeria’s worst enemies in her National Assembly, the loot-makers who  are called lawmakers. No apologies! Um huh, this time I want to talk about a video of Lawan that is currently making the social media rounds. I do have it for ya, at the end of this piece, as usual. Lawan fucked up in simple English grammar. I blog it under the NBB “Commonly Misused English Words, Phrases & Terms” because it is my closest category for Lawan’s goof. But, it is not really a very common error. I have never heard anybody make this particular error, not even primary school pupils.  So, it can’t quite be called “commonly misused phrase,” but this is where it is best suitable.

Yeah, I know, I’ve been beating too long around the bush. You wanno know Senator Lawan’s error already; right? Okay, I’ll tell ya, pronto! It’s a tautological error. He said, “A woman who was alleged to have killed her husband to death.” Our Senate president does not know that a “killed” man is already “dead,” hence, no need to repeat the word “dead.”

However, and this is a very important however, I wanno make it clear that I am not lambasting Lawan for the English grammar fuck-up, no sir, no ma’am! No wonder, I went through all that preamble that English is not Lawan’s native language. Hence, we don’t need to make a big deal of his fuck-up. After all, English people can’t speak his own native language as well as he does their language. Naturally, you now want to hear what it is that I want to lambast Senator Lawan for; right?

It is related to my recent blog on a bill in Nigeria’s National Assembly, which is chaired by Senator Lawan. Lawan and his fellow lootmakers want to raise the educational requirement for elective public offices, from Secondary School Certificate, to university degree. If you missed that commentary, not to worry. Here’s the link for ya; click away: https://nobullshiting.com/nigerias-educational-qualification-into-elected-public-offices/

The gist of that blog is that I disagree with raising the educational bar. My position is that the degrees are not necessarily good measure of the quality of the holders. There are persons with bunches of degrees but they don’t know shit. And, there are persons without degrees who are simply intelligent. I cited the example of the very first president of the USA, George Washington. The man remains the most respected, most appreciated among all the 46 presidents of America so far. He was also among the most brilliant, and he did not have any formal education at all, meeeeeeen!!!

Now, my point here is that our Senate president, Ahmed Lawan, purportedly, possess several degrees, but look at his grammar. He wants to reject Secondary School Certificate for elective offices, but I have never seen or heard a Secondary School student make his kind of error in grammar. We do have brilliant Nigerians who were not opportune to go beyond Secondary School, and many of them would give Nigeria much better leadership of our National Assembly than the fucked-up evil leadership of Lawan. Indeed, we do have millions of Nigerians who, like George Washington of the USA, have never entered any form of school, but they can be much smarter and much better leaders than what Lawan is giving us today.

Now, I rest my case, believing that you know that I ain’t bullshiting ya, meeeeeeen!!!

By the way, I wanno apologize for the delay in uploading Dele Farorimi’s video for my last blog. It took too long to upload due to poor internet connection. So, those who read the blog initially did not have the video. But, a promise is a debt, and  you may now go back to see the video. It got uploaded after two hours or so.

And now, here’s Lawan’s tautological error for ya:

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