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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