Professor Uju’s Vulgarity and the Rest of us -By Sule Abubakar Mark

The sickness and death of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, popularly known by virtue of her most revered position as ‘Queen Elizabeth II’, has stirred up bitter controversies on social media among the always-ready contentious netizens, and, as usual, there’s splitting of hairs over inanities.

While the Queen was critically bedridden, Prof. Uju Anya, who is a university professor and researcher in applied linguistics and critical sociolinguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, cast the most objectionable slur on the Queen amidst her heart-wrenching, devastating complications which even later led to her death. Prof. Uju icily tweeted: ‘I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.’ She unabashedly said that without the littlest discretion, empathy and erudition that contemporary society expects from a scholar of her highly venerated education, exposure and age.

It has always been a primordial hunch in most African homes that the living should not speak ill of the dead. And even though you must do, you must understand that your speech must not be naive and ill-timed, ill-thought and illogical. Unfortunately, Professor Uju, a supposedly educated person has been found guilty of the most terrible rhetorical causticity. A person of her alleged high intellectual and academic calibre shouldn’t have said such a thing. It shows her moral laxity: it shows that she was brought up poorly because vulgarity, as I always say, is the belittling badge of the uncultured.

For Professor Uju to have made such a statement when the time was not ripe, it clearly shows that she lacks emotional intelligence, and that careless act of hers alone has equally shown that stupidity perforates her professed education. Such irreverent and objectionable language against the Queen and one of the cherished institutions by many people around the world should be condemned by all sane people. Even though she’s right, wisdom demands that the truth should be told at the right time. A professor should not be a rumbling, rusty, rustic rabble-rouser!

And as it has always been, in times of moral crisis, logic and commonsense are thrown out of the window, and then discretion is no longer the better part of valour. The social media is awash with spurious screeds, illogically skewed perspectives and mawkish poetry in defence of the US-based professor, and despite her contemptuous verbal abrasiveness, many Nigerians don’t see anything wrong with the nonsensical tweet. Since most people have decided not to see anything wrong in the piece of absurdist nonsense tweeted by Professor Uju, a sword of Damocles hangs over all of us, directly or indirectly. In one way or the other, we might pay for it if the British government decides to punish Nigerians. It’s saddening that some Nigerians try very hard to defend the silly statement. No one can use mesmerising sophistry in justification of intentional boorishness.

Professor Uju singled out only the Queen for her misguided and unguarded utterances because of the atrocities of the erstwhile colonial overlords. Africans were indeed cheated, beaten, suppressed, oppressed, dehumanised and brutalised to unimaginable heights during colonialism, but the high-handedness, embezzlement, injustice, killings, hunger, etc. that have destroyed the contemporary Nigerian society today are whose fault again? Are those the fault of erstwhile colonisers or the fault of the crop of megalomaniac vultures we have as politicians in Nigeria? Schools have been closed down for over seven months now, but the self-seeking political leaders are nonchalant. Sometimes, the white men’s racism is even better than the domestic xenophobia and tribalism we have in Africa and Nigeria respectively.

What has Professor Uju said about the domestic killings, tribalism, and other forms of corruption? Is she not aware that schools in Nigeria are closed? Are all these the faults of the colonisers again? Covertly or overtly, some of us must bear the far-reaching consequences of Professor Uju’s careless and senseless tweet. I can never justify the evils of colonialism, the inhumanity of colonisers, the greed of all the colonialists and whatever genocidal roles that the late Queen could’ve played in any human history, especially in the Nigerian-Biafran war, but saying what she said at this time, Professor Uju is very wrong!

Honestly, we all have the right to freedom of speech, but the earlier we logically accept that not all constitutional rights that are exercisable should be exercised, or simply put, should be exercised at the wrong time, the better for us all.

Sule Abubakar Lucky Mark,
Writer and Sociologist.
Federal University Lokoja
Email: suleabubakarmark2020@gmail.com