David Umahi Is Too Small…

 By Obi Nwakanma

David Umahi, Minister of Works under this administration, is not a very likeable man.  He is crude, and not really very polished.

*Umahi

Mr. Umahi trained in engineering at the old Anambra State University of Technology (ASUTHEC), now Enugu State University.

It was not a bad school.

But in the period David Umahi went there, it was not among the top dog schools for engineering in Nigeria.

And so, it was quite rich for David Umahi to claim, in a standoff with the Arise TV News journalist, that he was a “professor” in the practice of engineering. Well, of course, clearly, he was sounding off, in a manner of speaking.

Startling claim

Still, it was a startling claim, and I am very happy that the gentleman in Arise, Rufai Oseni, took him to task on it, and caused him to quibble and to redirect.

Professors are not technicians.

They are not road construction foremen. I am sorry for what they have reduced them to in Nigeria, but typically the professor is not a title earned by assumption, it is earned by solid research, wide-ranging writing, and by the acclamation of one’s peers in the field – folks who have labored almost ascetically in the same theatre of knowledge, who acclaim his/her specific, original contribution to a unique area of research and teaching.

It is a chair endowed in a university.

I am not talking about the kind of poorly organized, poorly defined, poorly run, poorly established, and atrociously funded universities we now have in Nigeria, and an education system which has long been subverted by people in power, like Umahi, because, one, they have no clear sense of the mission and place of the university in nation-building, and two, they are often threatened by people with superior knowledge.

Typically, professors are producers of ideas.

They do not trade in the kind of bullshit David Umahi was parleying on TV in that Arise interview with Mr. Oseni.

Umahi is too small to be a professor. He has not the learning, the carriage, or the output to make such a claim.

Embarrassing language skills

He speaks poorly – he actually has embarrassing language skills – and makes the kind of elementary mistakes and howlers that put to question his years at the Government College Afikpo; and he festers with the numbing crudities of the arriviste.

It was all clear in his huffing and puffing with Mr. Rufai Oseni.

The journo had asked him a question, and reminded him of how he, the Minister of Works, “reported” him to the President for raising issues with him. David Umahi could not contain himself. “You are too small for me to report you to the President!”, he said testily. Too small? 

A Nigerian citizen too small for Umahi to report to the President. Why? Because Rufai Oseni is a journalist. Apparently, in Mr. Umahi’s scale of things, journalists were inconsequential, and Rufai Oseni was thus inconsequential.

I mean, what could he do? Who was he? He was not a moneybag. He did not command a battalion. He was just a talking head on TV.

So, the likes of Umahi did not deem him of consequence.

 Mindset

This is the real mindset of those like Umahi, who assume that the public office they occupy raises them above Nigerians.

That is not only false, it is dangerous self-regard. But who really is David Umahi? Who is he to imagine that a very visible member of the Fourth Estate is “too small” to be taken seriously enough to report to the President?

Some bumkin from Ohaozara, who made good hustling small contracts in Port-Harcourt before he joined Ebonyi politics to being governor because the likes of the Ekuma Nkamahs, the Abanis, the Tortis, Orjis, the Otis, the Idams, the Mgbadas, the Ibiams, the Agom-Ezes, and such like, left town in search of wider waters, because they felt that Ebonyi was too small for them.

Thus came Umahi, self-loathing and self-aggrandizing in a toxic mix that was unleashed on the South-East in general, and Ebonyi in particular. He was Buhari’s favorite honcho in the East. He decamped from the PDP and was used by the Buhari regime to decimate the South-East.

At some point, some people would have to do a proper work on the instincts that compelled Umahi to work against his Igbo people in his toxic alliance with the administration that clearly despised them, and was open about their disdain of his kinsmen and fellow citizens.

It might be the result of what those who know such matters called ‘Stockholm Syndrome.’

It might be the result of a deeper crack.

But what is generally known among an overwhelming majority of the south-easterners is that people like David Umahi are not to be trusted.

They are the kind the Igbo call ‘Sabo,’ and there is a reason for it.

There is oftentimes the assumption, and it was well recorded, that David Umahi was a “performing governor” compared to his peers in the South-East. Not that he had much to compete with anyway. But it is generally said that he built Abakiliki and gave it a new look. That he invested much in public works, and elevated infrastructure – particularly the ‘Flyovers.’ The man went crazy on Flyovers. In a society where such things are novelties, they mark a certain kind of curiosity, like the sort kids find at Disney. It would blow your mind for a little while, then it will grow old.

Two questions

Thus, two questions now haunt Umahi’s time in Ebonyi: One, what was the point of his infrastructure plan in a state without solid economic foundations, and two, what direct impact and benefit were all these concrete monuments where kids still go to bed hungry, and the well-being index remains pretty low, pari-passu other states of the South-East?

He governed like a tyrant – the Eze Onyeagwanam – and did not make many friends in Ebonyi. He was a bully, and he was disdainful of the rule of law and its demands for accountability.

There was no one to hold him to serious account. The media axis of the East is literally comatose. So, David Umahi could get away with so many things, including commissioning white elephant projects.

The white elephant projects include an airport which no one uses, and whose terminal, according to reports, has been hired by a church for its use; the King David University – in a state with an already established, but poorly funded state university and a federal university, and which had no immediate pressure of higher education access; and, of course, there were the many Flyovers to nowhere! But dear Nigerians, just imagine the governor of a very materially challenged state, building an eyesore of a university with public funds, and naming it after himself – King David – his imperial majesty, lord of lords, and El-Shaddai of Ebonyi State.

That is why so many people think that he is narcissistic! I think this is what he brought in to the studio at Arise TV, and thought he could bully and browbeat his way out of a very serious question. The question is about the horrendous and astronomical cost of the Lagos-Calabar Atlantic Highway; the first project embarked upon by the Tinubu administration, clearly earmarked without appropriation by the National Assembly, but criminally costed. How can a kilometer of road, according to the contract, cost over N4.9 billion? It did not add up compared to equivalent road contracts.

Rufai Oseni’s question was completely legit. But Umahi blew a fuse, huffed, puffed, and fumbled, in a most embarrassing way. He was trying to shut Mr. Oseni down.

“Keep quiet and stop saying what you don’t know. I’m a professor in this field. You don’t understand anything. I understand engineering very well. You have no knowledge of what you ask. You have no knowledge of what you’re asking,” the Minister fumed.

He clearly expected to throw out a number, and for Mr. Oseni to say, like the British sitcom of that same title, “Yes, Minister.” The point is that David Umahi has long been used to having both his way and his say without scrutiny. No one in Ebonyi had seriously taken him on.

The lack of very serious media in the East allowed him to get away with hokum. He grew complacent. Entitled. But somebody needs to tell King David that he is too small to shut up a serious journalist doing his constitutionally guaranteed job. He is now in Abuja, and Abuja is not Abakiliki.

*Nwakanma is a US-based poet and professor