Political campaigns ahead of the 2023 elections have commenced in full gear and candidates have started dishing out their campaign promises as enshrined in their manifestoes.
Presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Mr Bola Tinubu is not left out. However, Tinubu has continued to make recurring speech errors, deviation, conscious or unconscious, from his apparently intended utterances.
Tinubu’s gaffes have left many speechless and at other times questioning if he is mentally fit to be Nigeria’s president. The former Lagos State Governor has spoken incoherently and erroneously severally in public, leaving his aides to labour to quell the errors.
In January this year, while addressing a delegation of women from Lagos State at an APC women’s conference in Abuja, Tinubu asked them to check the status of their PVC to make sure that their cards have not expired.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) immediately faulted Tinubu’s claim. Upon being apprised, Tinubu apologised, in a statement by his Media Aide then, Mr Tunde Rahman, for the incorrect statement and felt sorry for any confusion it may have caused.
In April, the APC presidential candidate came under fire when he mistook WhatsApp for Twitter. While addressing youths of the party at a rally held in Lagos, Tinubu claimed social media users could tweet on WhatsApp.
“Do you know how many of you are tweeting on WhatsApp right now? [intelligible] holds a database of 1.6 billion on WhatsApp alone,” he said
He failed to correct himself and specify that WhatsApp is a messaging platform owned by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and that its estimated users stood at two billion as of the end of 2021.
On the other hand, Twitter is a microblogging platform for tweeting about emerging issues and causes by politicians, journalists, businesses, and citizens.
On October 15, speaking at the seventh Kaduna Economic and Investment Summit (KADInvest), Tinubu claimed that Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai has the ability to turn a rotten situation into a bad one.
While Bayo Onanuga, his campaign spokesperson, laboured, however, in vain, to correct what many Nigerians saw as a huge blunder, Tinubu insisted he was right when he appeared before the Arewa Joint Committee at the Arewa House, Kaduna, two days later.
“Some people need to understand idioms. When I said he turned a rotten situation into a bad one, it is an achievement,” Tinubu stressed.
Chief of Tinubu’s speech errors was reported very recently. This month in Jos, Plateau State while officially flagging off his campaign, the APC presidential candidate, inadvertently blessed the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
Before realising and correcting his mistake, the did was done already; the slip had already been obvious. He said: “God bless PD…APC”. Not long enough, PDAPC started trending on Twitter.
At the campaign rally in Jos as well, Tinubu made another gaffe when he referred to the Director-General of his campaign council, Simon Lalong as Solomon Dalung, a former Minister of Youth and Sports Development.
On Thursday, November 17, at a town hall meeting in Imo state, Tinubu struggled to mutter a word that appeared like “hullabaloo”. He said, “Balabul, Blu Blu, Bulaba”.
Similarly, on November 25, during his campaign in Oporoza, Gbaramatu Kingdom, Delta State, the APC candidate said Deputy Senate President, Ovie Omo-Agege would be the next governor of “Niger Delta” when he meant to say “Delta State”.
On Saturday, November 26, while addressing his supporters in Lagos State, Tinubu mixed the permanent voter’s card (PVC) for APV when he urged his supporters to get their “APV” instead of PVC.
These many speech errors have left a lot of questions unanswered on what could be responsible for Tinubu’s gaffes. However, linguistics and neurology put together have the answers.
The study of linguistics teaches that there are several areas of the brain that play critical roles in speech and language. These are the Broca’s area, the Wernicke’s area and the angular gyrus.
The Broca’s area, located in the left hemisphere, is associated with speech production and articulation. The ability to articulate ideas, as well as use words accurately in spoken and written language, has been attributed to this crucial area.
Wernicke’s area, on the other hand, is a critical language area in the posterior superior temporal lobe. It connects to Broca’s area via a neural pathway. Wernicke’s area is primarily involved in comprehension. Historically, this area has been associated with language processing, whether it is written or spoken.
The angular gyrus allows multiple types of language-related information whether auditory, visual or sensory. It is located in close proximity to other critical brain regions such as the parietal lobe, which processes tactile sensation, the occipital lobe which is involved in visual analyses and the temporal lobe which processes sounds. The angular gyrus allows us to associate a perceived word with different images, sensations and ideas.
These areas are mostly located in the frontal lobe, the largest of four paired lobes in the brain’s cerebral cortex that is situated directly behind the forehead. The frontal lobe (the left and right frontal cortex) of the brain is vital to consciousness as well as functions that appear uniquely human.
It is instructive to note that speech and language difficulty commonly affects individuals with dementia and other neurological conditions. Patients may experience deficits in the form of verbal expression (i.e., word-finding difficulty) or comprehension (i.e., difficulty understanding speech).
One of the neurological conditions is Aphasia. Aphasia is the term used to describe an acquired loss of language that causes problems with any or all of the following: speaking, listening, reading and writing.
Some people with aphasia have trouble using words and sentences (expressive aphasia). Some have problems understanding others (receptive aphasia). Others with aphasia struggle with both using words and understanding (global aphasia).
Aphasia can cause problems with spoken language (talking and understanding) and written language (reading and writing). Typically, reading and writing are more impaired than talking or understanding. The severity of the aphasia depends on the amount and location of possible damage to the brain.
Damage to a discrete part of the brain in the Broca’s area, cited earlier, has been shown to significantly affect the use of spontaneous speech and motor speech control. Words may be uttered very slowly and poorly articulated. Speech takes on a telegraphic character. People suffering from Broca’s aphasia have great difficulty with repetition and a severe impairment in writing.
If damage encompasses both Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas, global aphasia can occur. In this case, all aspects of speech and language are affected. Patients can say a few words at most and understand only a few words and phrases. They usually cannot carry out commands or name objects. They cannot read or write or repeat words said to them.
Degeneration of the angular gyrus in the temporal lobe and inferior parietal lobe can lead to Logopenic Primary Progressive Aphasia (lvPPA). Typical symptoms include slowed speech with normal articulation, impaired comprehension of sentence syntax as well as impaired naming of things. lvPPA is probably associated with Alzheimer’s disease pathology.
Another type of aphasia is Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). This type of aphasia is caused by degeneration in the parts of the brain that control speech and language, the left, or “dominant,” side of the brain in the frontal, temporal and parietal regions that normally control language function.
This type of aphasia begins gradually, with speech or language symptoms that reflect the normal role for the site of initial degeneration. Eventually, problems spread throughout the broader language network of the brain. PPA subtypes include nonfluent primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and logopenic primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA).
These syndromes result from a variety of underlying diseases, but most often frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) (both tau and TDP-43 subtypes) or Alzheimer’s disease.
Meanwhile, damage to the posterior superior areas of the language dominant temporal lobe (often called Wernicke’s area) has been shown to significantly affect speech comprehension. In other words, information is heard through an intact auditory cortex in the anterior temporal lobe, however, when it arrives at the posterior association areas, the information cannot be sufficiently “translated”.
In contrast to Broca’s aphasia, the person with Wernicke’s aphasia talks volubly and gestures freely. Speech is produced without effort, and sentences are of normal length. However, the person’s speech is devoid of meaning.
In Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia, language functioning may be relatively spared in the early stages of the disease, but it is likely to decline substantially in the mid to late stages.
People with AD often have difficulty with language expression, word fluency and naming objects. Syntax and comprehension of language are generally preserved in the early stages, however, in the later stages, speech may become halting due to word-finding difficulties.
In other words, patients have great difficulty speaking in full sentences because of the effort that is required to find the right words. Writing skills may often be compromised. Speech comprehension may be significantly impaired during the end stage of the disease.
However, individuals who have suffered neurological injuries, such as stroke or traumatic brain injury, may also experience speech and language deficits, particularly but not exclusively, if the left side of the brain was affected.
Aphasia is common in people who have left-sided brain injuries. Speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills may all be affected to varying degrees. Should the stroke affect the parts of the brain that control muscles used in speech, those in the tongue, mouth and lips, speech can become slurred or slowed.
What do all these portend? It is no longer news that Tinubu has shown the characteristics of a patient with speech and language difficulty, associated with the frontal lobe, which works alongside other brain regions and contributes to overall brain function.
Memory formation, for example, depends on sensory input, which depends on numerous areas of the brain. As such, it is a mistake to attribute any one role of the brain to a single region.
A patient like Tinubu may need ongoing care, and doctors may continually reevaluate the treatment strategy. The team may include speech and occupational therapists, doctors, psychotherapists, neurologists, imaging specialists, and other professionals.
However, the APC presidential candidate is yet to come out clean on his bill of health. Tinubu deserves empathy from his allies in particular and Nigerians in general. He is tired and, obviously, weak, mentally, and should retire, not be beguiled into the office of president of Nigeria.
