USA Africa Dialogue Series - Soludo blows a gasket: Nasir el-Rufai’s Book as Intellectual Fraud?

"The book is grossly dishonest. It is amusing to read the purported conversations he had with President Obasanjo on the third term bid. One reads almost two or three pages as quotes from the conversation and most parts of the book are replete with similar long quotes of purported conversations (all in inverted commas). This tactic was deceptively employed to give the impression of authenticity to the claims of such conversations. Surely, it is impossible to report the proceedings of a meeting or conversation verbatim after the meeting. It would therefore mean either that he was tape-recording every private conversation he had with people or that he simply fabricated those long quotes. If he cannot produce the tape recordings of those conversations (which I believe he doesn't have), he should be honest enough to admit that he made up those stories/quotes. It is too cheap of him to fabricate those quotes and seek to exploit the gullibility of the reading public to damage other people.

I was amused by el-Rufai's disingenuous attempt to frame stories about the Economic Management Team, which he forced himself upon and probably destroyed. As pertains to me, he lied all the way in an attempt to concoct a mischievous narrative or plot. He calls Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala "Ngozi". I call her "Madam". He tells a fairy tale of how I was a student or protégé of Ngozi's father. Sorry el-Rufai, the respected Prof. Okonjo had left University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) before I became a student, and our paths did not cross until the mid-1990s (while my Ph.D was in 1989). If you even called Ngozi on the phone, she would have confirmed to you that she never got any consulting contract for me at the World Bank or any multilateral institution as you claimed. If you cared for the facts, you would have known that I began to interact with Ngozi in late 1999, in the fourth month of my 18-month consulting assignment at the World Bank (an assignment to which I was nominated by three pan-African Institutions – ADB, UNECA, and AERC – for the project on "Can Africa Claim the 21st Century"). You don't lie about matters that have records.

For your information el-Rufai, before I met anyone of you at the original Economic Management Team, I had (for a decade) lived in Ethiopia, United Kingdom, and United States of America (USA) and traveled to 45 other countries as an itinerant scholar and consultant; worked at the United Nations; been to Oxford, Cambridge and Warwick Universities; was a visiting professor at Swarthmore, USA; and consultant to 18 international organisations including the World Bank, IMF, OECD, EU, ADB, various UN agencies, etc. I have been consultant to different departments of the World Bank at different times, including being on the Chief Economist Advisory Council (CEAC) for the period 2005 - 2012 and no Nigerian had anything to do with any of them. I spent 19 months at the Brookings Institution, USA (January 1991 – July 1992; and three months in 1998) but according to el-Rufai, I went to Brookings after a consulting job at the World Bank (which would then mean 'after 2000'?). According to el-Rufai, I became Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in "mid 2005" instead of May 2004. He manufactures both the facts as well as the comments."

- Chukwuma Soludo

http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/nasir-el-rufai-s-book-as-intellectual-fraud-/146818/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

 

- Ikhide

 

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