By Adeola Akinremi
Plagiarism is not a trivial matter. President
Muhammadu Buhari made a terrible mistake last Thursday. He plagiarized
President Barack Obama’s speech to launch “Change Begins With Me.”
So
you didn’t notice that our president lifted from Obama’s 2008 victory speech
and passed it off as if the words were his own? The argument will rage, but the moral problem of plagiarism on a day Mr.
President launched a campaign to demand honesty and integrity from the people
is what we should concern ourselves with.
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| *President Buhari with US President Obama at the Whitehouse |
I’m
not a wailing wailer and I don’t like the downfall of any man but I also don’t
like to be deceived. The
very last thing you should do when you’re launching a campaign like this is to
be dishonest with the people.
As
Buhari talked down on Nigerians during the launch of the campaign spearheaded by
no other person, other than the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Muhammed,
known for his trash-talk, particularly for the opposition, I started following
the speech line-by-line. I
was alarmed to make the discovery. It was a scandal that escaped the attention
of our newspapers. It is one of two things: either people don’t pay particular
attention to Buhari’s words or we are a nation of anything goes.
Only
in July, Melania Trump, the wife of the Republican White House hopeful, Donald
Trump, was caught in the web of plagiarism after she spoke at the Republican
National Convention. She plagiarized Michelle Obama’s speech. It was a big
headline on television screen and national newspapers. Indeed it was a “global”
headline. Yes,
a prime part of Buhari’s speech to the nation last Thursday to launch a
campaign encouraging new culture of transparency, attitudinal change and hard
work among Nigerians was plagiarized from America’s President Barack Obama’s
2008 victory speech.
Buhari’s
speech during the launch of the “Change Begins With Me”, a new national
orientation campaign, contained largely the same sentiment and arrangement of
words that President Obama used in his 2008 victory speech after he was elected
the first American black president.
The
president lifted a whole paragraph from Obama’s speech and passed it off as his
own when he said: “We must resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship,
pettiness and immaturity that have poisoned our country for so long. Let us
summon a new spirit of responsibility, spirit of service, of patriotism and
sacrifice, Let us all resolve to pitch in and work hard and look after, not
only ourselves but one another, What the current problem has taught us is that
we cannot have a thriving army of rent seekers and vested interests, while the
majority suffers.”
