PeeCeeJay By Jideofor Adibe

Between Soludo and Okonjo-Iweala

pcjadibe@yahoo.com 

 

I will like to start this disinterested intervention in the media feud between Professor Chukwuma Soludo, former Governor of the Central Bank and Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Co-ordinating Minister of the Economy, with a full disclosure: I have known Soludo from our undergraduate days (1980-1984) at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and we have been close friends at least from our days as postgraduate students at the same University (from 1985). We were also contemporaries in student union politics - he contested to be the students’ union secretary in 1982/1983 – just as I contested to be the Director of Transport, (I was elected).

I struggled within myself whether I should really write this article or simply call Soludo and give him my piece of mind on his exchanges with Dr Okonjo-Iweala. The conflict was on whether, as a public intellectual, I should dabble into the debate and say my mind or bypass it out of loyalty to a friend.

My personal opinion is that the media feud and the puffing and huffing between the two distinguished professionals has inevitably diminished and demystified both. What accolade awaits the person who throws the murkiest mud in their critical constituencies – the Economics Society, their Igbo ethnic group and the technocratic class – among others?  On the contrary their below-the belt exchanges raise a fundamental question of the extent to which our technocrats, especially those regarded as role models, have imbibed the necessary ‘technocratic temperament’.  I will define this as emotional intelligence and the ability to remain calm under pressure or make one’s case with grace and panache even in the face of provocation.

While I blame both professor Soludo and Dr Iweala for the mud-fight, I will apportion the greater blame to Soludo, for being the first to throw a barrage of punches below the belt.

In his first salvo, ‘Buhari vs Jonathan: Beyond the Election’, Soludo claimed that his aim in writing the article was to stimulate a debate because, according to him,  nearly five years after he called for  “real debates” to begin in the run-up to the 2011 elections, “the real debate is still not happening.”  When I read this I felt that Soludo was either indulging in Nigerian politicians’ usual license with hyperboles or was simply condescending towards the rest of us. If “real debates” never really happened since Soludo called for such in 2010 – as he claimed – it means that opinion writers, columnists and commentators in both the print and broadcast media on various aspects of our national life have been talking crap (or “commentaries” – as Soludo often calls it) or that it is only him, the philosopher king, who will be capable of igniting such “real debates”. I am not sure how such apparent haughtiness will resonate among his fellow public intellectuals. This is only a digression.

There are a few issues with Soludo’s first article, which made many people read other motives into it:

One, Soludo failed to observe the first rule in what is called ‘fair comment’ in defamation law. This is simply a practice where, if you want to critique a person or regime, you have to ensure that you also recognize and give credit to the person’s or regime’s strengths. For Soludo, neither the APC nor the Jonathan-led PDP government has done anything right - though he reserved the harder punches for the government. It is precisely for failing this ‘fair comment’ test that some accused him of attention-seeking with his writing.  Also by criticizing in hyperbolic language, without giving credits where they are deserved, he opens himself up to charges of the Obasanjo hubris, “if it is not from me or done by me, then it cannot be any good at all”.

Two, when Soludo gave an ‘F’ to the management of the economy, he also by innuendo gave an ‘F’ to Ngozi Okonjo Iweala who is the Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy. Here again Soludo failed the ‘fair comment’ test. Can an economy that has really been growing on an average of six per cent per annum in a period of global recession be scored an ‘F’? Can any good teacher, (except one animated by vendetta), really score a thesis supervised by another lecturer an F – as Soludo apparently did with the economy? Had Soludo given credit to one or two sectors of the economy before scoring the economy an average of ‘C’, or even ‘D’, people can at least excuse that as his own opinion. But an ‘F’? What quality of work do we really as University teachers score an F?


Three, in addition to scoring Okonjo Iweala an ‘F’ in the management of the economy (a very personal attack in my opinion), he also criticized the President for “outsourcing” the management of the economy (apparently to Dr Iweala). In another dig at Ngozi Iweala, Soludo reminded us that that the Constitution envisaged that the Vice President should be the Coordinating ‘Minister’ of the Economy, not Ngozi Iweala.

Four, using Obasanjo – who is known not to be a friend of the Jonathan regime - as the benchmark for assessing the Jonathan regime and making the latter come short on each count is bound to arouse suspicion in the camp of Jonathan’s supporters – as it did. Remember the saying: the friend of my enemy is my enemy? Moreover, even if Obasanjo is such an administrative and economic genius as Soludo projected him (I have respect for Obasanjo’s courage and famed capacity for working long hours but I also see him as seriously flawed), you cannot judge any weather only by its clementine side. While Obasanjo might have been a good economic manager as claimed by Soludo, it is also on record that impunity, including the kidnapping of a sitting governor and series of unsolved political murders, marred his regime.

Five, Soludo’s comments on Peter Obi also failed the ‘Fair comment’ test. True, Peter Obi may not be as academically gifted as Soludo (Soludo never ceases to allude to Peter’s Third Class degree and to his own First Class degree), but he did well for himself even before becoming Anambra State’s Governor.  Obi’s achievements as Anambra State Governor may have been exaggerated but to argue that he did nothing in Anambra state is clearly to be uncharitable.

In her rejoinder to the Soludo article entitled, ‘Soludo’s self-serving article deficit in facts, logic’, Dr Ngozi Iweala, through her media assistant, Paul Nwabiukwu, did no service to her image. Rather than a dignified response  that would tersely address some of the issues raised  by Soludo, Dr Iweala,  chose to mimic Soludo’s pettiness by calling him “an embittered loser in Nigeria’s political space” (as if it is a crime to lose an election) and labeling him Nigeria’s worst Finance Minister (which is really ridiculous).  She also intemperately claimed that “there is definitely an issue of character with Prof. Charles Soludo and his desperate search for power and relevance in Nigeria.”  Could Dr Iweala have used such a language against any of her colleagues when she was at the World Bank?

Soludo’s second salvo, “Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and the Missing Trillions (1)” is a continuation of the irresponsible and vainglorious exchanges between the two, this time sinking to a new low. We are told that Okonjo Iweala did not really secure debt relief for the country but merely led the team that negotiated the debt relief (as if the leader of a delegation is not often credited with the achievements of such a delegation – hence we can talk of Udoji Award, the Orosanya report etc.).

I was disappointed in Soludo’s articles because I do not believe that the personality that comes across in those write-ups do justice to him – the way I know him. What often comes across in several of Soludo’s public engagements is his competitive and ‘aggressive’ side.  Sometimes I wish that the human side of Soludo comes out more in his public engagements. He has an endless repertoire of wisecracks and his company never bores.

From our undergraduate days, Soludo has always been competitive and always wanted to think big – or bigger than anyone else around him. For those who do not know him well, this can come across as intellectual hubris – which can be variously interpreted as either arrogance or self-assuredness.  This is both Soludo’s strength and his fatal flaw. We all already know that Soludo is very talented and gifted. To keep blowing on it comes across as being self-conceited.

I do not know Ngozi Iweala and have never met her one- on-one.  I therefore cannot speculate on what animates her. But I certainly expected a different pattern of response from her, given how highly many people regard her in this country.

Criss Jami, a budding American poet and existentialist philosopher (born only 29 May 1987) and the lead singer of the rock band Venus in Arms (based in Washington, D.C) appeared to have successful people like Soludo and Okonjo-Iweala in mind when he advised: “The biggest challenge after success is shutting up after it”. Elsewhere he also wrote: “Be careful not to appear obsessively intellectual. When intelligence fills up, it overflows a parody.” Michel de Montaigne, one of the most influential philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre, also reminded us that “On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”