Still on plagiarised speech

A lot of dusts was raised recently over President Mohammadu Buhari’s speech during the launch of  ‘Change begins with me’.
The President was said to have lifted from the 2008 inaugural speech of US president, Barack Obama. Immediately the incident occurred, the presidency acknowledged the “deliberate error”and promised that it would investigate and mete out appropriate punishment. A deputy director in the presidency has since been identified as the culprit. The errant presidency official whose name is unknown is said to have been redeployed from the presidency, true to the president’s words. But more on that.  The president however enjoined Nigerians to look beyond what happened and focus on the message.
Unfortunately, such tendencies cannot be said to be new. One of the often-quoted lines in the president’s inaugural speech, ‘I belong to everybody, I belong to nobody’, equally had a whiff of doubt trailing its originality, especially when it became so popular among Nigerians and further cemented the perceived independence of the president from those who would have wanted to appropriate the presidency as a result of what they considered their role his emergence as president of the country.
Trust Nigerians, they quickly researched into that part of the speech and came up with a verdict that the speech was not original to the president.
In a piece written by Ken Tadaferua, he traced what could be considered that aspect of the president’s speech to a similar statement made by late French Army General and President of France, Charles de Gaulle when he said,  ‘Je suis un homme qui n’appartient à personne et qui appartient à tout le monde’, which in English translates into, ‘I am a man who belongs to no-one and who belongs to everyone’. But this did not gain the opprobrium  that the ‘Change begins with me’ speech attracted. Since the incident and to forestall future occurrence, the presidency promised to instal a new digital process which would include tools that would detect plagiarism.
It is in the light of this that I feel that the punishment, for the deputy director, should be cautiously applied. Like most Nigerians, it was obvious that he had been labouring under a burden occasioned by lack of working tools. While not supporting the act of plagiarism, I want to state that the official was working under conditions that are at best not too convenient for such an important task of writing the president’s speech. Probably, if the digital tools which the presidency now wants to make available, had been installed, what happened would have been prevented.
The above is just by the way. My contention today is my aversion to the idea of the president reading off a prepared speech which does not convey his personal conviction. I would have thought that when the president of any nation speaks to his people, what is always contained in those speeches are their personal belief and  conviction. Such speeches are expected to be a product of what they hold dear to their heart. It also sets a tone for the administration’s plan, and it becomes the fulcrum from which ideas of governance would spin off.
In January, 1961, America’ s President John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave this line in his inaugural address, ‘my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country’.That speech is one of the famous speeches in this century and it was a call to patriotism. It gave fillip to America’s love and idealism. It is what imbued the Americans with the can-do-spirit, that spirit that placed them at a pedestal to which other nations aspire and which has led to that excellence in deeds in God’s own country.
Earlier in his speech, Kennedy had spoken of what would later set the tone for the role of US in world affairs. ‘Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty…Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are — but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out… — a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself”.
The reference to Kennedy’s speech was to show how a leader’s power of conviction encapsulated in a speech can galvanize a country, how it can give direction and set the tone for the present and generations unborn. It is such speeches that citizens, which include the actors in that government identify with and take a cue from because such speeches are from the heart. It is a reflection of the thinking of the leader. It is not a speech prepared by a deputy director that does not reflect the leader’s personal conviction.
From signals we are getting from the presidency today, it is obvious that speeches we hear do not reflect the thinking or the conviction of the leader. The leader only read what was prepared for him. That is why  plagiarized lines go unnoticed by the leader.
Taking it further, when a leader mouths speeches that do not reflect his thinking, we now have ministers and those with him working in confusion and at cross purposes. It is why the whole country would waste so much time and energy discussing assets sales and the minister (of information) would tell us that we had all be wasting our time, blowing hot air because the government had not said anything about selling any national asset. So who flew the kite and how did we all start discussing an issue that didn’t have the imprimatur of the presidency? It is also the reason why actors (Ministers, heads of agencies and parastatals) in the administration would have different opinions about issues of such business importance as reducing or not reducing interest rate.
This should not continue. Nigerians expect a leadership that is organized. A leadership that is in charge of our fate and the only person that can make this happen is the president. His words must be based on his conviction. His words should give direction and inspire the country and those working with him. Enough of the wilderness experience.