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Yusuf Abdi Faarax
It is almost two decades
since our homeland lost central government, the crumple
administrations brought down many things with them. Many
of us are desensitized to the civil war and some of us
wonder those that talk about government and civil war.
Principle and pride, copyrights and courtesy among
vitally important traits we forfeit as people everywhere
we live today. Academically speaking,
knowledge is pivotal in this delicate world that balance
pride and principle, in this scale hangs our entire
existence and universe as whole.
Many things get eroded
among them-almost everything; specifically academic
field was hit harder. Entertainments field is at the
verge of extinction. How often did you meet someone who
is listening to a song and when you asked who does this
song belong to? They will respond, naming someone who
was not even alive when that song was created. Poems is
recited without giving due credit to the owners- in
short plagiarism become normal things, doing it will
enhance pride and buy praise then being opposite.
Breaches of copyright
cases have been observed within our community.
Credentials have been lie about; claims of inappropriate
credentials and unearned titles made everyone seemed
educated while we are not, this does not mean we can’t
earned them. The claims such as being journalists,
doctors, lawyers and PhD holders while majority of them
never set foot in classroom arena or for that matter
have less educational background then they declare.
Plagiarisms of any forms are bad thing, unethical and
immoral, these concepts are imbedded with students when
they are in middle school (5th grade) and
this is universal code of conduct.
The absence of copyrights
watchdogs, respect for bulk of intellectual property and
lack of role model pegged our society to the past
century. Further, since the social order is lagging
behind in every aspect of live, the issue of abusing
copyrights has immensely increased in the Somali
society. Our society is already vulnerable; therefore,
it couldn’t afford another additional cost. This
personally bothers me a lot and I feel the obligation of
at least to shed light on these problems.
Since I am looking things
from academic angle, let’s make use of evidence.
It was October last year when Ali Gedi resigned from
Somali prime minister post, making vacancy of the
position, numerous individuals from abroad and back home
stood up and showed courageous enough and interest in
filling that vacancy among them was candidate from
Columbus, Ohio who claimed that he has Doctorate Degree
while later founded out that it was disingenuous and
misleading information towards his educational
background. Further interesting, it was our local media
guys who failed their responsibility; in the least, they
couldn’t ask prove of the credential of the person they
are publishing. Yet, they call themselves reliable
sources so they want us to believe.
Having seen that, early this week I came
across interesting flyer. It was well designed flyers
that displayed the amount of time and efforts that were
put by evoking attention. Sadly unfortunate, on
displayed was academic looting in unmatched amount of
scale. Students were given scholars title, shop owners
were given an achievist and cultural artifact historian
and the list goes on. In addition, this media take other
articles and claim as their own. They consider
themselves as force that has power to shape how society
think and have influential impact on our way of
thinking.
Life is experience and
success is series of failure, if we fail to correct each
other, if we fail to learn from mistakes, if we fail to
appreciate those that have academic credentials we have
no hope, it will farther damage our already broken moral
compass. We are human and we make
mistakes-Sometimes we give unearned title to someone, or
say, write and take something that are not ours and
claim it, this can happen unintentionally. But worse
people on earth are those that accept the title that are
not theirs and those that make habit of stealing
intellectual property. In this academic age, honesty is
highest jewel of man. Honesty is vital ingredient for
reputation building. And thus, this makes safeguarding
intellectual property everybody’s business,
responsibility.
Yusuf Cabdi Faarax is a
student at The Ohio State University and can be reached
at Yusuffarax_29@hotmail.com |
