Nigeria: Atiku’s Citizenship and Buhari’s Illiterate Lawyers
Published: 22/Apr/2019
Source: The Nigerian Voice
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D
The law of attraction says like attracts like, which explains why Muhammadu Buhari is a magnet for mediocrities. Almost all his appointees are, like him, underwhelming, intellectually incurious rubes. It’s no wonder that even the lawyers he assembled to defend his unprecedentedly audacious electoral robbery are also risible dolts.
Take, for example, Festus Keyamo, Buhari’s reelection campaign spokesman and one of the lawyers defending his stolen mandate. In the run-up to the presidential election, Keyamo took self-righteous umbrage at scientific polls that predicted that Buhari would lose the election, and his point of attack against the polls was that pollsters merely sampled a little over a thousand Nigerians even though Nigeria’s population is close to 200 million! He wondered why neither he nor anyone he knew had been polled!
Apparently, Keyamo has no earthly clue that scientific opinion polls base their snapshots and predictions on something called sampling and that 1,000 is a fair sample to make predictive statements about potential voting behaviors. Gallup, which has accurately predicted American presidential elections since 1944—except in 1948, 1976, 2004 and 2016—polls no more than 1,000 people. You don’t poll every member of a population to make generalizable predictions about the population in research.
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In 1922, the League of Nations divvied up Kamerun between Britain and France. France renamed its own portion of the territory “Cameroun” and Britain renamed its own “Northern Cameroon” and “Southern Cameroon.” The two territories are non-contiguous. Britain retained control of Northern Cameroon and Southern Cameroon in 1946, the year Atiku was born, after the United Nations, which replaced the League of Nations in 1945, reclassified the Cameroons as “UN Trust territories.”
On February 11, 1961, “subjects” of British Northern Cameroon, which had been governed by the same British colonizers that governed Nigeria, voted to join newly independent Nigeria. In other words, an independent British Northern Cameroon never existed at any point in history, and no one was ever its “citizen.” So which country do Buhari’s nescient lawyers expect people born in British Northern Cameroon to go and be president of? Or do they expect them to be stateless—or be second-class citizens in Nigeria— because of the historical accident of once being governed as British Northern Cameroon?
People born in British Northern Cameroon were never part of French Cameroun, which became independent in January 1960. They were even different from British Southern Cameroon, which voted to become part of French Cameroun the same day that British Northern Cameroon voted to be integrated to independent Nigeria. In fact, both northern and southern Cameroons were administered from Nigeria, a reason a prominent pre-independence Nigerian political party was called the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons.
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Read further: https://www.thenigerianvoice.com/news/277578/atikus-citizenship-and-buharis-illiterate-lawyers.html