Oga is on his own

Newspaper reports yesterday said the deputy director in the Presidency who wrote the speech that President Muhammadu Buhari read at the launching of the Change Begins With Me campaign and who liberally adorned the speech with a passage wholly lifted from US President Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory speech, is about to “lose his posting […]

Newspaper reports yesterday said the deputy director in the Presidency who wrote the speech that President Muhammadu Buhari read at the launching of the Change Begins With Me campaign and who liberally adorned the speech with a passage wholly lifted from US President Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory speech, is about to “lose his posting in the presidency.” Only? Is that the only price to pay for making your Oga to look one kind in the eyes of the world?

The unnamed source who dropped that hint to Daily Trust on Sunday said, “An investigation is going on and its outcome will determine the sanctions on those responsible. But the least will be the removal of the deputy director from the Presidency. He cannot work here. He may be asked to leave on Monday.” I am wondering how much investigation is required to find out who wrote a particular speech. I do not know how many speechwriters the Presidency has but even if they are enough to fill a hall, it is fairly easy to find out who wrote which speech. Most probably he e-mailed it, in which case all that investigators have to do is to check the Inbox. If on the other hand he brought the speech by hand, someone should be able to remember who it was that brought it.

Another reason why it should be easy to find out who did it is because in this country most government business, including speechwriting, is usually done at the last minute, in great haste, in chaotic conditions and under tremendous pressure of time. You cannot therefore forget who was involved. Years ago when I lived in Kaduna, desperate officials contacted me on several occasions, asking for help to write a speech at very short notice. In the years when I was editor of Daily Trust in Abuja, I also came to realise that most other government business is conducted in the same way. Almost every night, our Adverts Department officers will come to me with a late request to drop an already prepared page in order to accommodate an advert just brought in by a minister’s aide. On several occasions I asked why the material was coming in so late and I got the same answer, “I prepared it since morning but the Honourable Minister did not come to the office and vet it until this evening because he was attending meetings, and he says he wants it out in tomorrow’s paper.” After a while I stopped asking the question.

Now, government officials that write drafts of speeches are not always what you call speechwriters. In most cases when a ministry or an agency is organising a major ceremony to launch or commission a project or program and the president or governor is coming to the event, it is asked to submit a draft speech that the Oga will read. The ministry is unlikely to have a professional speech writer, so the minister or perm sec will ask the director in charge of the program to write the speech. Unfortunately, not everyone can write good speeches, even if one is otherwise good at his work.

In this particular case however, the Presidency’s reaction the day the plagiarism scandal broke suggests that the writer is a professional speechwriter. It did not say that a draft speech was submitted to it by the Federal Ministry of Information, which is in charge of the Change Begins With Me campaign. Ideally, if one is asked to write a speech that someone else will read, he should first of all go to the Oga and ask him for general guidelines about what he wants to say in the speech. In most cases this is not done; the president or governor is assumed to be too busy to sit down with a speechwriter to discuss what should be said. It is therefore up to the speechwriter to put himself in the boss’ shoes and write what he thinks the boss should say on that occasion, maybe with the help of assembled data.

Some speech situations are trickier than others. If for example the president is coming to launch a certain medical program, being a non-professional, the speechwriter could take some liberty with data and technicalities but you still need a briefing on policy thrust. The Change Begins With Me program however was a political program. A speechwriter cannot possibly know what is the best thing for the Oga to say there until those who created it tell him. It is possible that the speechwriter was left on his own to craft what he thought the president should say. He therefore followed the line of least resistance by copying passages from a speech that another big Oga delivered at another political occasion.

It was a dangerous thing to do because you could get caught. Even before the advent of Google, many academics, researchers, authors, journalists and politicians all over the world had been caught plagiarising other people’s works. With Googling, I thought the art of plagiarism will come to a sudden end. The only material that Google cannot detect is one that was never posted on the internet. If a speechwriter must plagiarise these days, he should at least lift from an obscure speech that was never posted on the web. 

Which is why I am calling on the Presidency to, in the name of Freedom of Information, reveal the name and pedigree of this deputy director who brought immense embarrassment to the President of the Federal Republic a few days before his meeting with Barack Obama. What is his professional background; is he an academic, journalist, linguist, author or what? Any of these backgrounds would have made him intensely aware of the gravity of plagiarism. Even if he is a mainstream civil servant, a deputy director must have clocked at least two decades in service and must be aware that you don’t copy other people’s intellectual works without attribution.

Or maybe he was not aware. I say this because it reminds me of a story I saw on NTA Kaduna one Saturday evening, many years ago. Agents of the Nigeria Copyright Commission, with armed policemen in tow, descended on Kaduna’s Ahmadu Bello Way. One by one, they entered book retail stores from Leventis to Katsina Road Roundabout. Schools were just reopening that week and the shops were full of textbooks and novels. When the NCC agents asked, not one of the shops had permission from the authors to reprint and sell the textbooks and novels. Not one. In fact, some of the shop owners said on television that they did not know that the books were other people’s intellectual property and that they needed permission to reprint and sell them. In that kind of national atmosphere, it is easy to see why a senior officer thought nothing about lifting a passage from someone’s speech without attribution. 

Which brings us to the small matter of vetting. Doesn’t the Presidency have anyone who vets draft speeches for accuracy, relevance, substance, tone, mood, grammar etc before the Oga reads them? If so, then that is disaster waiting to happen. I hear that there are some Ogas who rush to the venue of an event without so much as seeing their speech. They collect it right there and just read it. Any Oga who does that should listen to this story. There was a speechwriter whose boss never previewed his speeches. He always collected his speeches at the event and read them without any changes. One day the Oga offended the speech writer. So when they arrived at the next event, the speechwriter handed over to the Oga the written speech and he proceeded to read it. Page one was very well written and Oga read it happily. When he flipped to page two, it was blank. Written boldly across the page was, “Now you are on your own!”