By Chris Agbedo
When The New York Times published Ruth Maclean’s report from Onitsha on 18 January, 2026, it did more than profile a little-known activist. It constructed a morality play with a familiar cast: the obscure African agitator, the gullible Western politicians, and the enlightened Western newspaper arriving just in time to rescue truth from misinformation. At the centre of this drama stood Emeka Umeagbalasi, screwdriver merchant and director of a modest NGO, recast as the unlikely villain whose statistics, allegedly plucked from Google searches and Christian interest groups, had helped to shake global diplomacy and even inspire Christmas Day’s ‘swift and vicious’ airstrikes by the invincible US’ military apparatchik. But journalism, particularly investigative journalism, should illuminate complexity, not simplify it into a convenient scapegoatism.
There is no doubt that Umeagbalasi’s methods, as presented by the New York Times, raise legitimate questions. Self-reported data, unverifiable casualty figures, assumptions about victims’ religious identities, and limited field presence are serious weaknesses for any researcher claiming authority in a conflict zone. These are valid grounds for scrutiny. Nonetheless, the tone and structure of the report went far beyond scrutiny; they verged on theatrical indictment.
The article painstakingly catalogues every trivial detail of Umeagbalasi’s person and environment: his height, the solitary ear-bud perched in his ear, his tiny market stall stacked with screwdrivers and wrenches, the wheelbarrows of sugarcane he sidesteps like an acrobat. These details, rendered with exhausting precision, do more than paint a picture, which is that they subtly infantilize the subject, reducing a complex actor in a violent nation to a comic prop. The reader is coaxed to see not a flawed researcher, but a circus figure, a roadside trader whose spreadsheets, against all reason, have supposedly bent the judgment of the U.S. Congress, convinced senators to cite his work, and even inspired missiles to leap from the White House to African soil. The implication is irresistible and dangerous that global policy disasters can be laid at the feet of one small Nigerian man of Igbo extraction, the normal default setting for the thriving scapegoating enterprise in Nigeria!
The narrative is irresistible in its absurdity, but that is the danger. In presenting Umeagbalasi as the pivot of global calamity, the article invites its audience to swallow a cock-and-bull story hook, line, and sinker. For a news stable of The New York Times’ stature, this is not mere storytelling; it is an audacious exercise in ridicule. It taunts the entire military apparatus, the intelligence community, and the machinery of global policy, all while elevating a screwdriver merchant to the heights of geopolitical influence. Readers are offered spectacle in place of analysis, caricature in place of context, as if the serious work of diplomacy, strategy, and intelligence could be upended by a small man from an equally miniaturized Dot Republic in his ahịa mgbuka market shop. In this roller-coaster of mockery, Maclean’s pen performs an unclean job, and the audience is made complicit in laughing at tragedy while missing the system behind it.
This is where journalism begins to drift into narrative convenience. The United States did not bomb parts of Nigeria or threaten to reshape its security relations because of a screwdriver salesman in Onitsha. It acted because of its own domestic politics, its culture wars, its evangelical lobbying networks, its strategic interests in Africa, and its long tradition of filtering foreign conflicts through ideological lenses. Senators Ted Cruz, Riley Moore, and Chris Smith are not blank slates waiting for an Igbo activist to write their worldview upon them. They represent entrenched political constituencies that have, for years, promoted the idea of a global Christian persecution complex.
To isolate Umeagbalasi as the prime mover is to misrepresent how power actually works. Even more striking is what the article downplays, that is, the industrial scale of lobbying now surrounding Nigeria in Washington. Reports of a $9 million contract between lobby groups and the Tinubu administration, which is aimed at managing Nigeria’s international image, countering genocide narratives, and influencing U.S. lawmakers, suggest a battlefield far larger than one man’s NGO. In that arena, professional consultants, law firms, religious pressure groups, and geopolitical strategists trade in narratives far more potent than anything produced from a living room in Onitsha. Yet these actors remain largely in the background, unnamed and unexamined, while the spotlight burns hotly on Umeagbalasi. This imbalance reveals a deeper peril in modern investigative journalism, i.e., the temptation to personalise structural problems. It is easier to tell a story about a man than about a system; easier to locate distortion in a single, fallible researcher than in the convergence of Western media incentives, U.S. electoral politics, security contractors, evangelical activism, and Africa’s chronic data vacuum.
Nigeria’s violence is real. Christians die. Muslims die. Farmers die. Pastors die. Imams die. Children die. Villages are erased without reporters present, without police records, without forensic counts. The Nigerian state itself admits, by its silence and statistical emptiness that it does not know how many citizens are killed in its endless low-intensity wars. In such an environment, imperfect data is not an anomaly; it is the norm. To pretend that “clean” numbers exist somewhere, waiting to be discovered by morally superior institutions, is a comforting fiction. The tragedy, therefore, is not merely that Umeagbalasi may have exaggerated or relied on weak sources. It is that global journalism, instead of interrogating the political economy of narrative production, chose to dramatise him as the symbolic author of an international deception. In doing so, it offers Western readers emotional closure: the crisis is explained, the culprit identified, order restored.
But Nigeria is not a crime novel. Its conflicts cannot be solved by unmasking a single character.
If The New York Times truly wished to serve the public interest, it would have pursued harder, less theatrical questions. Who funds the lucrative Christian-persecution narrative industry in Washington? Which lobbying firms vacuum Nigeria’s grief, refine it into policy memos, and sell it back to Congress as moral urgency? How do arms sales, election cycles, and ideological branding decide what qualifies as “truth” and what is dismissed as noise? Why does Nigeria, after decades of bloodletting, still lack a credible national database of violent deaths? And how does a reported $9 million lobbying contract quietly re-price human suffering in the global market of reputation management?
Those questions are more uncomfortable than profiling a man in a market stall. They require confronting Western complicity, not merely African error. They are not questions for market stalls. They are questions for boardrooms. Yet, while these structural engines of narrative production hum safely in the background, journalism points its microscope at a screwdriver shop in Onitsha and announces it has found the laboratory of world politics.
Then came Kaduna. Reverend Joseph Hayab, head of the Christian Association of Nigeria in the North, told international news agencies that 163 worshippers had been abducted from two churches, driven into the bush by armed men who sealed off the entrances like accountants closing a ledger. The figures were precise enough. The voice was clerical enough. The grief was real enough. But where was Madam Clean and her OMO detergent or Maclean toothpaste? Where was the New York Times? Was Reverend Hayab also required to produce a toolbox before his testimony could be taken seriously? Should his cassock be unbuttoned to reveal spanners and pliers, the official credentials of Nigerian credibility? Or is Maclean’s moral detergent allergic to clerical collars?
Perhaps a priest does not fit the preferred metaphor. A priest cannot be reduced easily to comic hardware. A priest complicates the story. He does not resemble a market prop in a parable about African incompetence. He does not supply the visual grammar of ridicule. So, he is ignored. Thus credibility becomes carpentry wherein some Nigerians are judged with calipers, others with silence. The tragedy is not only that bodies are carried into forests, but that some testimonies are buried in newsrooms, unexamined, unmocked, unuseful to the empire’s preferred storyline. That, too, is an editorial decision. And it is anything but clean.
Ah, Maclean! A name that smells of soap and virtue, yet here it washes not hands, but the fingerprints of empire, smearing them onto a Nigerian man’s shirt. In our land, we say: “The name on the calabash does not fill it with soup.” Clean-sounding words do not disinfect complicity. Another warns: “He who counts the yams in another’s farm forgets his own are rotten.” So it is with Maclean and her stable: measuring, cataloguing, mocking, while leaving the real rot, i.e., the lobbying, the contracts, the selective American ears untouched.
Surely, the surname promises hygiene, moral clarity, respectability; yet, it cannot purify a narrative built on omission, selective listening, and theatrical ridicule. Like a calabash labeled gold yet containing ashes, the name Maclean glistens in print but empties the page of truth. Soap cannot substitute for scrutiny. Cleanliness, after all, is action, not appellation. And in this story, the ritual is unclean, the altar perfumed, and the corpses of complexity left uncounted.