Moses Ochonu
5 January 2009
opinion
For someone claiming an elevated moral pedestal, Pat Utomi's Public Space and the Discipline of Honest Engagement (Published on Nigerianvillagesquare.com) is marred by his descent into pettiness and defensive rage.
But his last outing in defense of his imaginary discursive fiefdom was worse; it was a feast of ad hominems, directed primarily at those he calls distanced and uninformed internet warriors. Compared to that outing, his latest railing against his critics represents an attitudinal improvement. But let's not dwell on attitudes; we've all got them, and we can't help who we are.
In Pat Utomi's current offering, he goes after posters on his facebook page who disagreed with him on Ribadu. He shreds a BBC journalist who asked him the wrong question in the wrong manner. He rails against uninformed critics and pundits; headline-happy Nigerian journalists lacking a capacity for nuanced understanding; Diaspora internet pundits, his perennial nemesis, and everyone else who has found his recent interventions in national affairs curious, if not disturbing. For good measure, Utomi dredged up an ancient grudge he has harbored on my piece, Pat Utomi's Unraveling (also published on Nigerianvillagesquare.com), which analyzed his troubling moral retreat in the Soludo-African Finance Corporation (AFC) affair.
Employing a diverse array of underhanded analytical maneuvers, Utomi questioned the morality of his critics; interrogated their motives; and eviscerated their experiential antecedents. He insinuated a connection between his critics and a certain Nigerian governor by virtue of the accidental convergence between their views on Ribadu's travails. He then imperially proclaimed himself the moral superior of his critics, a saintly intellectual voice whose every pronouncement should be met with sheepish approval. He has earned the right to be wrong without evoking critical responses, he proclaimed haughtily. He has, he claimed, the scars of battle to underscore his passage to political and moral infallibility. What a dollop of self-flattery!
Ribadu's canonization
Let's start with Ribadu, Utomi's prefatory preoccupation. In spite of Utomi's dirty trick of suggesting that critics of his position on Ribadu share some ideological or analytical kinship with the Ribadu-loathing governor referenced in his piece-a subtle dig at their ethical commitments-it should not take a determined read to locate the moral biography of his critics' disappointment with his postulation on Ribadu. Probable admirers of Utomi's previous moral clarity, they were clearly troubled by his curious willingness to venerate Ribadu and to simply condemn his persecution without balancing it with a patriotic denunciation of Ribadu's many inexcusable failings in his job as head of the EFCC.
Ribadu inspires mixed, even conflicting, moral and analytical impulses. He is the Nigerian pundit's most complex subject. The best way to intervene in the Ribadu debate is therefore to strive to balance the two sides of the man's complex persona. To simply stress his successes-meager as they were-and retrospectively rewrite his EFCC stewardship without highlighting his many moral compromises and political maneuvers is to render an incomplete account. Conversely, gloating over Ribadu's travails and focusing obsessively on his failures without acknowledging his admirable, if largely loquacious, courage, and the political dilemmas that he must have navigated is to be unfair to him. Even so, Ribadu's failings cannot simply be theorized as the manifestation of man's natural imperfection, as Utomi does. Ribadu donated his courage and incorruptibility to Obasanjo's political shenanigans. Not satisfied with this abuse of power, he insulted Nigerians routinely by arrogantly declaring Obasanjo and his corrupt minions to be beyond moral reproach. The selectivity of his investigations mirrored this tragic mindset.
Ribadu didn't just disappoint Nigerians who kept the EFCC nourished with public goodwill. He insulted them. In the process he and his boss may have in fact set the war against corruption back irretrievably. Their politically discriminatory efforts against corruption, their zealous illegalities, and the unprofessional and ultimately counterpro-ductive way in which Ribadu went about the business of fighting corruption may have established a perverse gold standard for his successor and her boss. The pedagogical imprint of Ribadu's politicized war on corruption is discernible in the disastrous climb-downs of Yar'Adua's anti-corruption efforts. It is clear that Yar'Adua and Mrs. Waziri are excellent pupils of the Obasanjo-Ribadu school of anti-corruption. Ribadu's tenure inspires nostalgia only because of the perfection of his methods by Mrs. Waziri and Yar'Adua.
Let's empathize with Ribadu and condemn the unholy determination of the Yar'Adua administration to deepen Ribadu's humiliation. Ribadu's on-going persecution defies the logic of even the most bare-knuckled strategy of politics. But most things about this administration defy political logic anyway. Yar'Adua's pursuit of Ribadu is driven largely by his political insecurities, as are his recent assaults on the media. These actions have courted public anger. But let's not redirect our righteous anger from Yar'Adua to the canonization of Ribadu. All things considered, the man is unworthy of such beatification. Ribadu could have made several potentially heroic choices. He exercised his choice, constrained it may have been, in a personalized, unpatriotic manner. He chose to serve the whims of corrupt power instead of the people.
Contrary to Utomi's hyperbolic claim, few Nigerians go so far as saying that Ribadu deserves his current treatment. Most Nigerians are simply indifferent to Ribadu's plight, interpreting his persecution as yet another power play between dueling, self-interested tendencies in a decaying system. This public aloofness is comeuppance for Ribadu's misguided choices as Obasanjo's obsequious sidekick.
With these realities in mind, Utomi's eagerness to repack Ribadu as a hero because "our young people have too few heroes" comes across as the most pungent demarcation yet of his own curious world of defeatist moral relativism.
Unlike Utomi, I can understand the perceptive sophistication of his facebook critics. They understand that a critique of Ribadu's failings can coexist with a critique of this administration's petty pursuit of him.
Soludo-AFC scandal as watershed
Utomi's obvious grouse was with a narrative of all-embracing accountability that my piece unleashed. My point in that piece was to question the ethical ancestry of Utomi's position on Soludo-AFC, which had been reported as an appeal for the cessation of Soludo's investigation on account of the damage it might do to Nigeria's investment worthiness. I then used the episode as a heuristic to critique a social myth of intellectual infallibility that is undeservedly accorded fabled men of morality and competence in our society. This myth precludes the scrutiny of these individuals even in their most morally troubling moments.
Utomi's jarring response claimed journalistic misrepresentation as the source of that interpretation. He wasn't against Soludo's investigation. He only wanted the government, the architect of the probe, to be mindful of the damage such probes might do to investor confidence by creating a perception of instability and undermining institutional integrity.
I strongly disagreed with the premise and logic of Utomi's argument, but I let it slide because I didn't want people who are essentially on the same side of the Nigerian political battle line to strafe each other to the delight of Abuja. But Utomi has made it impossible for me to ignore his provocations. So here is my response to Utomi's now clarified position.
The perspective is fraught with moral confusion, and reverse logic. In the same breath it claims to endorse Soludo's probe but warns that it may give off the wrong vibe to foreign investors. If the warning was not a subtle device to communicate Utomi's disapproval of the probe, what was it advanced to accomplish? At the time of Utomi's comment, the investigation in the AFC was being wrapped up. There was as yet no discussion of redemptive or punitive action. Why then was Utomi prematurely concerned about the danger of "precipitous action"? The semiotic dissonances in Utomi's evolving clarification of his Soludo-AFC position betray what his admirers now fear. His engagements at the seamy intersections of politics and business in Nigeria may have caught up to him, knotting him in a moral quagmire and blunting his analytical edge. Every effort at retrieving himself from this dilemma results in a more revealing Freudian outburst. In fact, if Utomi had fleshed out his position as elaborately as he now has done, my inaugural critique would have been a lot less charitable than it was. Every "clarification" intensifies-and vindicates-the outrage.
To be cont'd
Ochonu is an Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
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