By By Kunle Balogun
THE trending story of how Lady Vera Anyim, a law graduate, was accused by Pastor Paul Enenche, the Senior Pastor of Dunamis Church, of lying about her legal education has not stopped generating mixed reactions from netizens. With the pictures of Vera’s graduation ceremony going viral, most netizens surmise that Pastor Enenche should tender public apology to her. Of a truth, the suave pastor’s ecclesiastically disruptive manner of stopping Lady Anyim (who, in a poorly coordinated articulation that is unbecoming of a learned person like her, testified about how miraculously God helped her to break her family’s jinx) from giving a fake testimony in the church constrains some critical contemplation.
As a leader, there’s a constructive way of correcting one’s follower’s mistake without appearing somehow arrogant or intending to ruffle the latter’s feathers. More importantly as Christians, we have the bounden duty to correct others in love, just like Aquilla and Priscilla did to Apollo in the scripture. In his epistle to the Corinthians, Paul highlighted the qualities of Christian love. Pastor Enenche should have asked the woman to see her after church service and school her in how best she can improve herself as a learned woman.
On the other hand, Lady Vera Anyim’s saga is a study in rigorous scrutiny of the nation’s systemic dysfunction we constantly rue over as concerned Nigerians. This speaks volumes of our education system which is currently on a free fall as a result of compromise. Vera’s response to the effect that she earned a BSc in Law appears quite unpardonable a mistake for a thoroughly educated law graduate to make in this 21st Century Nigeria. As a nation, we may be living in hard times, but we have our sense of judgment intact. That mistake, to me, gives Vera away as someone who incontrovertibly engaged in dubious acts to earn such a prestigious degree.
Lady Anyim should have understood that becoming a lawyer comes with some rational expectations. One of such relates to good mastery of the English language which is the language of Court in Nigeria. An individual’s clear articulation in expressing ideas is a sine qua non for legal profession. Medical doctors, engineers and scientists can commit grammatical blunders (as they understandably do). I have once heard a professor say “Does he aware of that development?” instead of saying “Is he aware of that development?”. It’s such a scandalizing blunder! But lawyers shouldn’t. As learned people, they are supposed to be strangers to such egregious blunders. So, Lady Vera should have engaged English grammar teachers and texts to brush up on her communication skills. She would have escaped the public disgrace she pathetically got from the meticulous Dunamis Church pastor.
By the foregoing, I’m not trying to cast an opinion that we, as humans, cannot make mistakes. We can and we even do. Also, lawyers, too, can commit grammatical blunders, but such blunders should be negligible. Notwithstanding, some mistakes, like Lady Anyim’s, are too noticeable to pardon. Above all, there’s no mistake that is irremediable.
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