By Oseloka Zikora
When Chinedu Nebo, then a ministerial nominee spoke of casting out
witches and demons during Senate screening, he must have thought that he was
deploying an innocuous metaphor which any reasonable person would ordinarily
decipher. He was mistaken. He unfortunately did not reckon with the notorious
nature of human mischief.
Since then, the venerable gentleman has been spurned and lampooned not by a
few vintage Nigerian public commentators mostly posturing to belong to an
exclusive club of knowledgeable ‘power experts’ from which the distinguished
Professor is an alien. Whereas the frustration and anger of Nigerians concerning
the abysmal power situation in the country is understandable, yet it begs reason
to engage in scapegoating simply to score cheap points or put a fall guy in the
hangman’s noose.
Take for instance the recent Nebo bashing by Ijeoma Nwogwugwu, in the July 1,
2013 edition of ThisDay. In a piece entitled “Of Nebo and His Demons” Ijeoma
dealt what can be considered the most unkind cut thus far. For Ijeoma, “the
problem with Nebo is that he hasn’t got the foggiest clue of how to manage the
power sector”. One of the specifics for the sweeping use of hyperbole was that a
certain foreign-based analyst opined that Nebo having come from an institution
with less than $15m in annual budget “is a cold feet in corporate boardrooms,
and may not articulate financial, legal and maximally productive
arguments/scenarios to entice and appease, while appealing to investors to take
Nigeria’s power sector seriously.”
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