#OccupyNigeria NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA’S GAME OF PROFESSORS AND PROPAGANDA

Dear Mrs Ngozi Okonjo Iweala:

Greetings and thanks for taking the time to read and react to my comments. I will be brief, mindful of your commitments at this particularly difficult moment in the life of our country. I’ve been following your interesting email exchanges with my sister and senior colleague, Professor Mojubaolu Okome, and have been more persuaded by her submissions than yours. You asked her to share your views in her intellectual circuit and she’s been kind enough to oblige. I wasn’t going to intervene because Aunty Okome has been saying all the things I would have loved to say to you but I woke up this morning to another round of exchanges and your submissions did not help my mood. Honourable Minister, to make your case, to press the argument of your government, you refer a respected Nigerian Professor like Mojubaolu Okome to Paul Collier’s article. Ma, this is an article in which this British meddler insults the Nigerian people. As far as he is concerned, we are foolish and ignorant tea-partyers. Our legitimate and historic movement, Occupy Nigeria, he dismisses in terms that are too painful to be rehashed here. Your wholesale endorsement of Paul Collier’s condescending article raises a lot of questions. Mindful of your time, I’ll ask just two:

1) Are you aware, Honorable Minister, of the outrage that the article in question has generated, especially in Nigeria’s online community? Are you aware of how Nigerians are reacting to yet another spectacular instance of rudeness and condescension by a Western meddler in our affairs? And if you are not aware of how Nigerians are reacting to the offensive article, isn’t that another evidence that Nigerian government officials are alienated from the Nigerian people?

2) Why does the government of Nigeria find it so easy to approve of these kinds of foreign interventions in our affairs, often even soliciting and funding such interventions, no matter how condescending, while dismissing the position of patriotic Nigerians? For instance, your government has embraced Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier. But this is the same government that dismissed Professor Chinua Achebe as ignorant and out of touch with Nigerian realities (Reuben Abati) when he commented on burning national issues in a statement rejecting the national honour he was awarded. If we are to take your government’s position to its logical conclusion, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier are more knowledgeable, more competent to talk about Nigeria than Chinua Achebe? They are more in touch with Nigerian realities than Chinua Achebe?

Greetings.

First, let me quickly commend your civility in the middle of very difficult circumstances.

I was not going to respond to your invitation for intervention because speaking to those in power in Nigeria, except in the “languages” of interrupting their pleasure, is often a waste of time.

However, given Prof. Okome’s intervention and my friend’s (Pius’s) excellent questions, I am compelled to add a thing or two.

We all have no doubt about either your competence or commitment, we clearly have problems with your paradigm and the competence and commitment of your political bosses.

Three brief questions given the limitations of this forum:

1. What other nation of the world would have such abundance of human and natural resources and regularly recruit the least competent into the topmost level of political leadership? This is a structural and historical question that escapes Sachs and Collier, as displayed in the condescension evident in their responses. The matter is beyond mere economic theories.

2. Haven’t we been here before? On that note, neither you nor President Jonathan can be wiser than Nigerians. As Achebe says, no matter how wise a (wo)man is s/he cannot be wiser that her/his clan; ‘no one wins judgement against his people’. If Nigerians have lived with these arguments in the past and have witnessed the continued and steady deterioration of their quality of life, what makes this different – especially coming from a president who is challenged on many fronts?

3. Please, provide a single social or political – even fiscal – evidence before the January 1 action that showed that this government truly understands the pain of Nigerians? Was it the scandalous self-provisioning for the Villa denizens that litter the 2012 budget or the sheer indulgence that is the life of federal legislators that would have convinced our people about a committed leadership? What is 25% pay cut for a pampered cult whose pay no one truly knows?

I am saying basically that you cannot throw neo-liberal solutions at fundamental structural – political and historical – questions that condition the tragedies that we have, and are, experiencing in Nigeria.

I have no doubt that as you found out under President Obasanjo, when they are done with using your credentials, they will move on to the next in their perpetual project of national humiliation.

You can start the change by telling the president the alternative to a genuine national dialogue on restructuring Nigeria is the collapse of the House.

I wish you well.