By Emmanuel Nduka
Uju Anya, a Nigerian Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, USA, recently turned down an interview request by British Broadcaster, Piers Morgan.
Morgan and Uju had been embroiled in heated criticism of each other on Twitter, after the former wished the late Queen Elizabeth II an “excruciating pain” in death.
In a tweet prior to the formal announcement of the Queen’s death, Prof. Uju wrote: “I heard the Chief Monarch of a thieving, raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
“If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star,” she wrote after the Queen died.
Responding to Uju’s tweet and inviting her for an interview on his show, Morgan wrote: “I definitely want to interview you. I’d like you to try repeating to my face that you hoped the Queen died in ‘excruciating pain.’ But I suspect like most vile ‘woke’ trolls, you won’t have the guts. Do you?”
“No, Piers. You want to interview me, because your career died in excruciating pain, and you need the ratings. But I won’t let you chase clout off me. Like I said, I no dey put food for my enemy mouth,” she replied in decline.
“Piers Morgan calling me “vile, disgusting moron” while his producer calling me for interview. Tufiakwa,” she added.
An angry Morgan reacted to her decline in another harsh tweet. “Like I thought, you don’t have the guts to repeat your disgusting slurs about the Queen to someone who would hold you to account for them. You’re not just a disgrace but a cowardly disgrace,” he said.
Her tweet drew mixed reactions from around the world, including from world’s second richest man, Jeff Bezos.
On whether her action affected her job, she said: “From what I’ve been told, there is no plan to sanction or fire me, and my job is not in jeopardy. My university leadership showed very clearly they did not approve of my speech; however, they stand in firm support of my freedom of expression on my own personal social media.”
While Prof. Uju portrays herself as a feminist and an advocate for social justice, especially for black people, Morgan is a critic who is very quick to make unsavory remarks against public figures on his uncensored show on Sky News.
