Q and A on the Semantics of “Vice President as Coordinator” and “Chook”By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. this week’s Q and A, I am only able to feature two questions: the meaning of the (in)famous description of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo as a “coordinator” of the nation in presidential communication to the Senate and the proper verb to use to denote piercing of the skin.Question:President Muhammadu Buhari, in his recent letter to the Senate, wrote, “While I am away, the Vice President will coordinate the activities of the government.” This is generating a lot of controversy in Nigeria at the moment. From the perspective of language, what would you say? Did the president err? Or are people overreacting?Answer:The president’s choice of words represents, for me, an interesting clash of content and context and of denotation andconnotation. On the surface (that is, in terms of content and denotation), the intent of the letter appears harmless and unambiguous: Yemi Osinbajo was elected Vice President, and has now been temporarily tasked with “[coordinating] the activities of the government” in the absence of the president. Looks normal.But when you dig beyond the surface, that is, when you go into the terrain of context and connotation, it isn’t normal. First, because there can’t be a vacuum in governance, the person who stands in for the President while he is away for an extended period (and temporarily relinquishes his office) can no longer be addressed by his or her former title. In other words, Osinbajo can no longer be addressed as Vice President; he is properly the Acting President until the president returns and takes over from him.The president’s letter anticipates that Osinbajo would act as a temporary replacement for him.To refer to Osinbajo as “Vice President” in the same sentence where “while I am away” appears implies that the president will still exercise substantive powers from his hospital bed in London. But the overall spirit of the letter vitiates that sense. After all, the letter said the president had no idea when he would return.Similarly, when you read the letter merely “on the lines,” you might be led to supposethat the president actually intended to transfer substantive powers to the vice president when he said the VP would “coordinate the activities of the government” (since that is what the president presumably does), but reading “between the lines” leads to a different conclusion.Here is where context comes in. Recall that Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala used to be called “Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy.” In spite of her gratuitously superfluous title (who else but the finance minister should coordinate the economy?), she was still just a minister. Her being “coordinating minister” didn’t make her the president.Referring to Osinbajo as Vice President and coordinator “of the activities of the government” undercuts and undermines his power as Acting President. It means that, just like Okonjo-Iweala, he is still Vice President (presumably answerable to a higher authority in Abuja while the president is away) who is nonetheless saddled with an additional, extra-constitutional responsibility to “coordinatethe activities of the government.”If the letter had said, “While I am away, the Acting President will coordinate the activities of the government,” the “coordinator” part of the sentence would have been of no consequence. It goes without saying that the president “coordinates the activities of the government,” and that whoever acts as hissubstitute would do the same. The fact that the letter had a need to state the obvious while not conceding the title of “Acting President” to a person who is standing in for the president raises a legitimate semantic quandary.But it may well be that the drafter or drafters of the president’s letter are mere incompetent users of the English language, which would render all the feverish interpretive frenzy the letter has generated pointless.
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