Language should be understood. When you are an elected officer, representing a people, as a politician, every word you speak in the English Language should be able to travel into the understanding of the populace so they can assess whether you are speaking for them or against them. But in Nigeria this is utter gibberish. It is legitimate to be incomprehensible.
I have no doubt that the so-called Honourable Patrick Obahiagbon is a fool who plays around jargon with platitudes too confusing, even to himself to comprehend. When language fails to be understood as expressed in the media or by the politicians who hold our trust then we are in trouble.
I love words. I love simple and easy going words. Maybe I should blame my poor parents who never had enough resources to send me to the high-sounding names – those schools that enable you speak things that could be disastrous to human ears. I attended a community school. I had stayed in the village more than anyone of my age because my father could not afford to leave us in the hands of strangers as tender as my younger brother and I were. He was a carpenter. He cared little about language in course of his job but it gave him pleasure when what we spoke sounded pleasant and simple.
When we returned to the city the only school that could be trusted because of distance and fees was a community school around the place where we lived. The teachers barely spoke correctly. The language we heard there was same with what we heard on our streets, by the same people we had escaped from, the hoodlums.
Language is life to those who treasure it. And it sickens to know that the custodians of the rules of grammar are so inadequate and incompetent in our schools. One day my younger brother who is about five years old brought home an invitation letter from his school to my parents. It was supposed to be a PTA meeting. No sentence in that letter was correct. Even popular words were mixed up. The pathetic side is that it took them three years to spell his name: Fortune, correctly.
It is difficult to correct an old man. And when it is easier to deceive the younger ones we should be careful who speaks to our children and who they listen to. A bad grammar is painful to the ears, when I listen to a speaker of such tears voluntarily run down my cheek. One dies quickly if sentenced to solitary with series of bad language blasting through the speakers. A bad language hunts your soul.
Mr. Patrick is a murderer. He has killed many through those same words he claims to express for the people. The most amazing truth is that the people his statements are directed at do not understand a hint of what he is expressing. What sort of a speaker would he be, then? He makes us laugh and he makes us sad, and so he makes us stupid. I knock off the television set whenever he appeared; speaking those retarded language of his.
Speaking and writing, reading and listening – conversation, generally should bring pleasure. The honourable Patrick has gone a step further to open a Twitter account where he dishes out his missiles to eliminate more Nigerians. This is genocide and he should be charged for that. The honourable Patrick, in the words of a popular comedian, needs some Jesus.
There is almost no difference between a teenager who takes a loaded riffle to a theatre to shoot at innocent people and a politician who is paid through tax payers’ money to murder same tax payers with bad, gigantic language which serves no purpose but is dismally flat and uncomfortable. This kind of thing, to me, is rubbish.
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