SHAMEFUL!!! President Buhari’s June 12 Announcement Speech Gets “F” For Bad Grammar, As He Faces Big National Embarrassment

Grammarian and Newspaper Columnist, Professor Farooq Adamu Kperogi, has said that President Muhammadu Buhari’s June 6th statement, announcing the change in Democracy Day, and conferring National Honour on Late Mooshood Abiola, would get a “F”, Fail, if a WAEC examiner were to grade it.

Farooq in his article for Daily Trust, titled:
‘Nigerian Words and Expressions that are Untranslatable into English’, said that the statement’s “mortifying grammatical howlers”, almost derailed him from writing on the chosen topic for his weekly “Politics of Grammar” column.

He disclosed further, that he had been previously derailed by the “grammatical transgressions” in the President’s Democracy day speech.

Farooq wrote: 

I had planned to write this article last week, but the egregiousness of the grammatical transgressions in President Muhammadu Buhari’s Democracy Day speech, was too much to ignore. I was almost derailed again by the mortifying grammatical howlers in the President’s June 6 press statement, that among other things, announced June 12 as Nigeria’s new Democracy Day. 

From indiscriminate capitalization, to incompetent use of articles, to inelegant, error-ridden phraseology, to misuse of words such as “distract” for “detract”, and basic proofreading errors, the letter was disappointingly sub-par. It would get an “F”, if a WAEC examiner in English were to grade it. We wail with distress and in national self-pity every year, over mass failure in English in School Certificate Exams, but our President’s official speeches and letters cannot pass muster with WAEC examiners in English. What message does that send to our Secondary School Students? Well, that is not my preoccupation for now.

See Buhari’s statement below