By Nnamdi Nwigwe
08037024609
Prof Nebo
The acceptance of a ministerial appointment by Prof. Chinedu Nebo, the great reformist former Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, UNN, must worry many of our people who really care about the fate of Nd’Igbo in this country.
Our highly respected Archdeacon in theChurchofNigeria Anglican Communionhas been ill advised to agree to serve as a minister in a Government that has proved incapable of confronting corruption and being seen to have done so.
What we know of Prof. Nebo and his zero tolerance to any form of misdeeds make him an “ odd man out” in a cabinet that, though filled with many distinguished men and women, has hopelessly compromised itself by letting go the muck that is the lot of our dear country today.
Many who know Nebo, say he is not going to change his no- nonsense posture against anything that appears to him to lack rectitude.
Ask both students and lecturers who were with him when he served as the CEO at UNN.
The Prof. would soon realize that one cannot clean the cesspit by jumping into it.
His kinsman Prof. Barth Nnaji, whom he has apparently been invited to replace, managed to co-exist with President Goodluck Jonathan and his team for a little over one calendar year, before he was kicked out. There has to be an early return of our Lord Jesus Christ and a revolutionary cleansing of our polity for Prof. Nebo to remain a Minister in the Federal Nigeria Executive Council by Christmas 2013!
One would have been happier if the Prof. had decided to get into the Senate or even the House of Representatives if his academic environment has become boring to him.
In the Executive Council, he will not be allowed to be his own man.
President Goodluck Jonathan, may have the best of intentions to approach him to help make something out ofNigeria.
But the forces against him are enormous and so far, he has been unable to tame the tigers and hyenas that claim ownership of this country.
It has been said that beneficiaries of a system are its stoutest defenders.
We in Igboland cannot continue to let our best men and women to be ensnared into big appointive positions and then rubbished because they sought to demonstrate their true Igboness by working hard and refusing to bring shame to their people by stealing or tolerating those who shamelessly do so.
Let’s go back to the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
He called out a brilliant Igbo son, Prof. Fabian Osuji, to assist knock the vast Education Ministry into shape. Obasanjo, was later to sack him in a nation-wide live radio and television broadcast for unproven offences which, he said, “others” were also guilty of but were never disclosed and dealt with.
At the Central Bank of Nigeria CBN a world renowned Igbo economist, Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, received the nod of the President to trim the size of our bloating currency note, the Naira.
The Czars of Nigeria, whose loot of the treasury was likely to be badly affected, swung into action to abort the Soludo reformation.
The Late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, peremptorily cancelled a project that was about to take off.
And to put the icing on the cake, he let the crusading knight go at the end of his first tenure when he could still be reappointed.
Then came Jonathan. Did you not see how he irreverently treated another Igbo savant, a Professor in Robotics, Barth Nnaji, who had started making a headway in rescuing the tattered image of NEPA?
He must have stepped on some big toes in his bid to do what he thought was right to see NEPA function as it should.
And now in his desire to please the South East, he has picked another respected Igbo scholar, Archdeacon Prof. Chinedu Nebo, to come to be rubbished if he dares bring his evangelistic broom near the owners of the land.
Prof. Nebo, is a potential Presidential material.
He needs not be messed up by men in Jonathan’s cabinet, and beyond, who are not yet ready to seeNigeriatruly cleaned up.
Let Nd’Igbo discourage their brightest and their best from accepting appointive offices in which they can easily be thrown away like a banana peel.
How one wished there was an authentic Igbo socio-political body that is respected and accepted as a genuine Igbo mouthpiece.
One would have appealed to that organization to prevail on Prof. Nebo to pull out of the Government immediately, giving a reason of “urgent academic imperatives.”
Let us not wait for another Igbo personality to be shabbily treated again by a President more concerned with pleasing political acolytes than getting the country truly returned to the path of sanity.
If we had such an Igbo group, it would have loudly shouted “blue murder” and demanded immediate apologies from the President in the very insensitive manner he recently sacked another Igbo top official, Mrs. Rose Chinyere Uzoma, as the Comptroller General of Immigration.
The cheek of it all is that newspapers operating outside Igboland demurred that many Igbo junior staff are being recruited into the Immigration Command. And Jonathan struck.
Why the disgraceful treatment of an officer who was due for retirement in only a question of weeks?
Why the fanfare with which her sack was announced?
And barely 48 hours after Mrs. Uzoma’s exit, her boss, the Minister of Interior, Patrick Abba Moro, set up a probe panel to look into the orchestrated allegations against a loyal hard working lady who was due for retirement in February, 2013.
Why the haste to humiliate her out of office in January, 2013?
The relevant committees in the Senate and the House of Representatives should look into this matter or demand that a similar investigation panel be raised for every Federal parastatal to determine the mode of their recruitment and tell us the configuration of both their senior and junior staff, State by State.
The National Council of Women Societies NCWS has been loudly silent over such a callous mistreatment of one of their own.
And NAWOJ, the National Association of Women Journalists; where are you?
Can’t you speak and defend a fellow woman, who is visited with such an infra dig treatment?
DISCOURSE
