Abuja — Is'haq Modibbo Kawu's June 4 back-page comment in the Daily Trust with the above title suffers from three fundamental flaws. The first-and the least problematic- is what I call the trouble with ill-digested ideological criticism of complex and nuanced national political economy issues, which has sadly become the hallmark of Kawu's commentaries.

The second and more serious flaw is the invidious unevenness in his apportioning of blames between Aliko Dangote and Femi Otedola in their current war of attrition. The third and, I think, the most ponderous of the flaws is the factual and historical inexactitude of the allegation against Aliko Dangote that Kawu chose to foreground to make his case. Now, let's address these flaws in turns.

It would seem that Kawu permanently perceives and dissects every imaginable issue from a predetermined and stereotyped ideological frame of reference that habitually fails to show the faintest sensitivity to the real living facts being analyzed. The ossified frame of reference that holds Kawu's thoughts prisoner is, of course, Marxism. This attitude--that is, unreflective obeisance to a totalizing worldview-- often gives rise to what social science researchers call the error of conclusion in search of evidence. And, of course, people whose thought-processes are guided by "conclusions in search of evidence," often sidestep any evidence that contradicts their predispositions. The consequence is that the truth is usually held hostage by narrow, well-worn, and discredited isms.

Now, how did the article in question betray Kawu's sadly familiar inclination for knee-jerk, unthinking, unconvincing, ideological criticism? First, he cites the example of the former USSR in a bizarre contrast of contexts to make the case that Dangote and Otedola were "shock therapy" billionaires in the fashion of the "emergency" billionaires of the former Soviet empire. This comparison is odious. While it is undeniable that Otedola was an unknown quantity before former president Olusegun Obasanjo arbitrarily catapulted him--along with such people as Andy Uba, Jimoh Ibrahim, Emeka Offor, Wale Tinubu, etc-- to the billionaires' club, it is commonplace knowledge that Dangote's wealth clearly predates Obasanjo's ascendancy to the presidency. If anything it was his industry and business acumen that earned him the respect and patronage of the former president.

The second moral burden of Kawu's back-page comment was its piteous inability to sustain the pretence of balance and "equal-opportunity bashing" that it led the reader, from the beginning, to expect. "[A]t the height of the bitter fight," Kawu wrote, "the Otedola camp accused Dangote of having been given the monopoly of supply of black oil, the basic energy source for the textile industry in Nigeria." Fair enough. But what ethical infraction did the Dangote camp also accuse Otedola of? Curiously missing. That was a basic journalistic, even moral, responsibility that Kawu failed miserably, perhaps deliberately.

He admits, for instance, that Dangote and Otedola "chose to fight dirty" and that "for weeks, we were entertained with salacious exposures in the media about the dirty deals which formed the basis of the wealth of these billionaires," yet he only isolated the allegation against Dangote by the "Otedola camp" to illustrate what is supposed to be a theatre of recriminations between these TWO camps. So far only ONE camp appears to have done wrong by Kawu's suspicious presentation.

But that's not even the most suspect of Kawu's intervention. Apart from unfairly marginalizing the "Dangote camp" in his choice of "allegations" to play up to make his point, he apparently believed what he himself called mere "allegations" and proceeded to pass ill-formed and, frankly, slanderous judgments on Dangote on the basis of the "allegations" of the "Otedola camp." This is dishonest, to put it mildly.

But it would have been tolerable if it were merely dishonest; Kawu's wild interpretive leap (which was balanced on the slender thread of false "evidence" provided by the "Otedola camp") that Dangote is responsible for the death of the textile industry in Nigeria is not only notoriously unfaithful to the facts; it is revoltingly calumnious and wicked. So what are the facts?

The truth is that the textile industry had already haemorrhaged badly, perhaps irreparably, and in the throes of death years before Dangote got the license to supply black oil. But Kawu deploys a sleight-of-hand argument to tenuously connect the supply of black oil with the death of the textile industry when, in fact, the latter preceded the former by many years. Since textile industries in Nigeria had effectively died even before Dangote got the license to supply the oil, it's clear that Kawu is simultaneously forging and fudging the facts to unfairly demonize Dangote.

Dangote himself was not spared from the severe decline of the Nigerian textile industry. He closed two of his textile firms in Lagos and Kano. Now, if black oil were the magic oil needed to lubricate and sustain the textile industry, as Kawu wants the reader to believe, Dangote's textile firms should have been alive and kicking now since he purportedly has a superabundance of black oil which he allegedly starves the Nigerian textile industry of in preference for exporting it abroad for a "very handsome profit in dollars."

It doesn't take much deep thought to unmask the shallowness, or ignorance, or mischief; or a combination of all of that, (pick your pick) of Kawu's woolly logic. But it's not half bad if Kawu, in his bid to do clumsily disguised PR for Otedola, refrains from invidiously maligning Dangote, whose calming influence on the current economic turbulence is so glaring.

Sanusi is of 175, Koki Quarters, Kano.