Anya, in her interview with PUNCH, noted that she also wrote about the late Founder of the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), Lagos State, Prophet T.B. Joshua, when she tweeted about his death and called him a “thief.”
Nigeria-born American lecturer, Prof Uju Anya, has revealed why she does not believe in the notion of speaking ill about the dead, adding that her tweet on late Queen Elizabeth II was not the first she would write about a dying personality.
Anya, in her interview with PUNCH, noted that she also wrote about the late Founder of the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN), Lagos State, Prophet T.B. Joshua, when she tweeted about his death and called him a “thief.”
Prophet T.B Joshua died on June 12, 2021 and was buried on July 9, 2021.
The female academician, a professor of Second Language Acquisition, Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, United States of America, has been in the eye of the storm since her tweet wishing the late Queen Elizabeth II “excruciating death.”
But Anya in the interview said she would not stop speaking out freely about the dead which is widely believed as unethical in African traditions, disclosing that "this is not the first time and it won’t be the last."
Responding to the question that people believed she should have been tactful with her tweets because death was involved, Prof Anya said, "You don’t tell people when to speak about their pain. It is offensive for anyone to presume to tell the child of survivors of genocide when and how to speak about the people who slaughtered their family and their group."
She went further, “Nobody has the right to tell me how to speak about my pain and how to express the profound rage that I feel about injustice in this world, not just about my family and the people, whom the British monarchy is responsible for.
"I don’t believe in the notion of not speaking ill about the dead. When the late Prophet T.B. Joshua died, I tweeted and called him a thief. This is not the first time and it won’t be the last.”