By Moses Ochonu
For someone claiming an elevated moral pedestal, Pat Utomi’s Public Space and the Discipline of Honest Engagement (http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/pat-utomi/public-space-and-the-discipline-of-honest-engage.html) is marred by a worrisome descent to 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.
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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 (http://www.saharareporters.com/column52.php), which analyzed his troubling moral retreat in the Soludo-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.
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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 Ribadu’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 counterproductive 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.
So, 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 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 lost less charitable than it was. Every “clarification” intensifies—and vindicates—the outrage.
As Utomi posited, it is a false choice to suggest that fighting corruption precludes the protection of Nigeria’s fragile investor confidence. But the nature of Utomi’s intervention inscribed this false choice firmly on the debate. His invocation of the need for caution underlines his anxieties about the incompatibility of the two goals. My response, in the context of that artificial binary, is that if given a choice between fighting corruption and attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), I’d gladly trade FDI for a serious, sincere stab at corruption. Nigeria loses more money every year to corrupt capital flight than it gains from DFI. Recouping such funds and investing them internally in infrastructure and in other value-creating domains would free us from having to cast our economic lot with FDI, with all its stifling, socially insensitive conditionalities. At any rate the idea that unexposed, insidious corruption will preserve our integrity with international investors is backward logic. Concealed or not, corruption is a bar to FDI. Avoiding the public spectacle of anti-corruption, which Utomi counsels, will hardly alter this truth.
In the battle between ethically famished actors in the Nigerian political arena, no true progressive should be taking sides. His role in the unfolding national drama is that of a deeply interested spectator, desirous of a revelatory, if not a mutually annihilating, outcome. The encounter between Soludo and Yar’Adua’s lame duck presidency was a conflict in that mold. Utomi’s side-taking is inexplicable, even allowing for his proclaimed public good motivation. The absence of similar reactionary interventions in his history of public erudition raises legitimate divinatory questions of motive.
Utomi and Soludo were not on talking terms when the former rose to limit the ethical cloud hovering above the latter. That's adds another layer of background information to the episode. But it also raises cogent conjectures. Utomi was curiously silent on the current status of their relationship. If the two men now talk, couldn’t that be legitimately construed as a plausible signpost to the original motivation of Utomi’s intervention?
Fading Glories and New Voices
There are larger issues, however, in this brouhaha. The fulcrum of my incursion into this debate is the danger of moral fence-sitting—the peril of waffling—among Nigerian progressives. Utomi claimed to have earned the right to the ethical exceptionalisms that have marked his recent positions on anti-corruption in Nigeria. Fine. Anyone can nurse narcissistic fantasies of unquestionable moral authority. But his invocation of the public good is disingenuously opaque. A commitment to the public good requires consistent positional clarity from pundits and participants in public intellection, especially self-anointed moral gatekeepers.
Saharareporters is today a mecca for progressive Nigerians because of its tradition of even-handed, consistent critique of corruption. Its persistent refusal to speak through moral equivocation is the basis of its soaring popularity. Its critiques of corruption in Nigeria are without regard to subject, context, and the presence of situational mitigation. It refuses to take moral and intellectual refuge behind a nebulously defined, unconsciously elitist notion of public good. The website’s aversion to situational and personal exceptions in its anti-corruption effort, and its effectiveness, are a contrapuntal model for Utomi’s theory of situational ethical flexibility. The notion that ethical caution would preserve some virtuous big picture and should mitigate our exposure of corruption flies in the face of Saharareporters’ successes.
Utomi likes to test his moral outrage against Diaspora internet pundits and citizen journalists, who admittedly offer the most unforgiving critiques of the national predicament, and of the actors that perpetuate it. They are able to do so because of their physical and mental distance from the decay at home; their relative economic independence; and their regular access to the internet. There is also the factor of exile, which exaggerates the emotional impact of the national deterioration.
Diaspora Nigerians are capable of resisting cooptation in ways that Nigerians back home may not. This is because they are, for the most part, free of the existential anxieties that tug at the moral perches of Nigerians back home. As a result, their commentary can be uncompromising, angry, laced with fossilized moral certainties. Utomi knows that the moral temptations of the Nigerian media colors its commentary and reporting. He is also aware of the technological limitations and mortal dangers of citizen journalism in Nigeria. Should he not therefore be celebrating instead of lamenting the emergence of this vibrant internet Diaspora public sphere of tough questions and tough debates on the national malaise? The emergence of Diaspora internet reporting and punditry has opened a liberated space for holding politicians, bureaucrats, and morally-conflicted public intellectuals accountable. Utomi’s moral impulses should be receptive to this development and not resist it.
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Unlike Utomi, most Nigerians in the Diaspora are not invested in the Nigerian business sector, which survives almost entirely on direct and indirect government’s patronage. And which burdens the invested public intellectual with ethical and discursive encumbrances that fog out his analytical lens. Because of Utomi’s economic, social, and political entanglements in the Nigerian space, he cannot afford to adopt an analytical template secured on moral certitude. It would be bad for business, literally. This is precisely why he should welcome the complimentary moral voices of the Diaspora and not hold them in derision.
I make no excuses for the excesses and failings of Diaspora Nigerians. There are few groups of Nigerians that have earned their way to analytical independence, and Diaspora Nigerians are one such group. This is why I reserve some of my harshest critiques for Diaspora Nigerians who retreat home to prop up the rot. Or write articles justifying malfeasance. Even so, Utomi’s attacks against Diaspora pundits betray an intellectual insecurity which he neatly tucked away in the pre-internet days, when there was minimal, if any, scrutiny of the curious pronouncements of public figures.
Utomi’s favorite line of attack against “Diaspora internet warriors” is that they lack the informational backdrop to comment authoritatively on national events. This dated outlook ignores the unbroken access that Diaspora Nigerians have to the internet, which hosts the most comprehensive archive of Nigerian news. Utomi may be evaluating his interlocutors’ informational repertoire from his position as a plugged-in operative with access to privileged political and economic information. The independent punditry of the “internet warriors” can do without the loyalties, limits, and silences imposed by such privileged information sources.
There was a time when Pat Utomi ruled the Nigerian public intellectual space with tyrannical declaratory authority. He personified the proverbial big fish in a small pond, commanding the awe and admiration of a generation of disaffected Nigerians who flocked to his clear-headed engagement with national issues. Unfortunately, Utomi’s delusions of inexhaustible moral capital were nurtured by that aura of uncompetitive intellectual distinction.
At the height of Utomi’s monopoly over Nigerian public intellection, to challenge his vision was to unleash the wrath of an unquestioning lynch mob. But Pat exhibited a moral clarity that entitled him to the adulation, if not the intellectual hero-worshipping. The pond has since expanded to accommodate other compelling progressive voices, and Utomi’s recent moral contortions have drawn a backlash. Unaccustomed to having his honorary intellectual authority questioned, we’re seeing Pat Utomi at his impervious best, or worst. Unfortunately for us, his admirers, this shocking attitude is ironic in its mimicry of the traits we grew up loving Utomi for fighting against.
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