It emerged late last week that Communications and Digital Economy Minister Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami (or his agents) possibly instructed Zamfara State governor Bello Muhammad Mutawalle to place an advertorial in the Daily Trust to congratulate Pantami on his “promotion to the Rank of Full Professor of Cybersecurity” by an unnamed university."Pantami is not qualified to be promoted to the rank of professor in the two universities he has some associations with. Most importantly, though, he is not qualified to be appointed professor by and at any university in the world because he does not teach, research, or render service at any university now" - Farooq Kperogi.
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| ... Isa Pantami displaying an award |
(In the advertorial, Mutawalle repeated the dishonestly hyperbolized claims Pantami cherishes and promotes, such as the claim that he has over 160 publications—which don’t show up in any scholarly repository—and that he was trained at Harvard, MIT, and Oxford even though he only attended a few days’ workshops there while in government. He used the American English “full professor” that the Islamic University of Madinah where Pantami taught also uses to describe what is simply called “professor” in British and Nigerian terminology. Since Mutawalle isn’t an academic, it’s obvious that Pantami wrote the advertorial for him.)
