ABATI NEVER STOPS DEFENDING GEJ
Abati Replies Jonathan’s Critics
7 hours ago 14481
Editor’s note: A famous journalist and publisher Dele Momodu in a piece titled “Where is ex-president Goodluck Jonathan?” criticizes former president’s silence over the $2.1bn arms deal scandal.
Reuben Abati, a spokesperson to Jonathan, in what seems to be the answer to Momodu’s article, blasts public intellectuals, saying that Nigeria suffers the decline of public intellectualism.
Reuben Abati
Where are the public intellectuals?
Something sad has happened and is happening, and is getting worse in our society: the decline of public intellectualism. And so I ask where are the public intellectuals?
Once upon a time in this country, the public arena was dominated by a ferment of ideas, ideas that pushed boundaries, destroyed illusions, questioned orthodoxies and enabled societal progress. Those were the days when intellectuals exerted great influence on public policy, and their input into the governance process could not be ignored.
Ideas are strong elements of nation building, and even where interests are at play, you know the quality of a country by the manner in which a taste for good thinking propels the leadership process.
Public intellectuals are at the centre of this phenomenon: they include academics who go beyond their narrow specializations and university-based scholarship to take a keen interest in public affairs and who use their expertise and exposure to shed light on a broad range of issues.
They also include journalists, writers and other professionals who question society’s direction, and offer alternative ideas.
The beauty of public intellectualism is that the intellectual at work is a disinterested party, he is interested in ideas not for his own benefit, but for the overall good of society, and he does not assume that his opinions are the best or that he alone understands the best way to run society and its organs. The product of this attitude is that discourse, a culture of debate, is encouraged and in the cross-pollination of ideas, a good current of thought is created; truth is spoken to power.
Public intellectualism began to decline
As the years went by however, public intellectualism began to decline. In 2006, Jimanze Ego-Alowes published a book titled How Intellectuals Underdeveloped Nigeria and Other Essays, an allusion to the complicity of intellectuals in the crisis that had by then engulfed the country. Four years later, Rudolf Okonkwo in an article titled “the world of the Nigerian public intellectual is a zoo. The Comedy of Our Public Intellectuals” observed as follows: “It is a zoo full of nihilists. Some are sectarian in their outlook and others are humorless. Some are eccentric while others are comical. But one thing they all have in common is an over-inflated ego of their importance in the scheme of things.”
The flame of public intellectualism in Nigeria is now almost a flicker
I don’t know about over-inflated ego, but I do know that the flame of public intellectualism in Nigeria is now almost a flicker. There are extremely few new significant voices, saying anything of consequence, the soldiers of old have become old, the fire in their belly, now subdued. It is as if our academics have lost interest in public affairs, as only a few of them maintain a column or write an occasional piece or take on public issues in the manner of the likes of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Segun Osoba, Claude Ake, Bade Onimode, Ola Oni, Mokwugo Okoye, Mahmud Tukur, Yusuf Bala Usman, Ayodele Awojobi, Biodun Jeyifo, Femi Osofisan, Stanley Macebuh, Odia Ofeimun, Niyi Osundare, Chinweizu, Kole Omotoso, Yemi Ogunbiyi, Bode Sowande, Patrick Wilmot…The opinion pages of the newspapers are no longer vibrant. There is so much “opinionitis”, but debate is rare and rejoinders are always self-serving.
What has happened is that politically neutral intellectuals have now become scarce; the typical intellectual of today is not public in the sense in which that word is used; he is in reality affiliated to partisan and sectional interests. The intellectual influence in Nigeria’s affairs is thus diminished because of obsession with individual interests: academics are now at best “acadapreneurs”: the intellectual as an entrepreneur.
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