…Says Nigerians Frustrated With How Politicians Run Nation
Professor Pat Utomi, a political economist, and management expert alongside like-minded individuals, is actively involved in merger of opposition parties leading up to the 2027 general elections. In an interview monitored by OLADIPUPO AWOJOBI, Utomi shares insights on the essential steps required to rejuvenate Nigeria and bring it in line with developed economies. Excerpts:
A couple of years ago, you theorised about the political space of Nigeria and you brought a lot of people to- gether, and recently you joined others to work with the Labour Party and you didn’t win, you are planning another coalition again, what is the assurance that this will work. Also, what can you say about the government of your friend, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu?
I have not spoken with President Bola Tinubu in five years. What I can say is that what is happening in Nigeria is inevitable, the country was not constructed to suit the Nigerian people, it was constructed to suit the politicians. You have all these corruption everywhere. But I want to say that the Labour Party didn’t lose the election. All what happened is a farce. There is a legitimacy problem in Nigeria. I go around the world and I talk in very important places around, and I know what other people think about Nigeria, this is not a disputable matter at all. I have said it regularly what the EU, FDI and others said about the last general elections. But I don’t want us to go back to the election.
I am just trying to say that the Nigerian people have become so frustrated about the way Nigerian politicians carry on such that when Peter Obi came out, he resonated and around the world, and Nigerians in the Diaspora wanted him. If you look at the resurgence of many of the success stories in the world, they had the Diaspora base; from Japanese to Indian and Chinese Diaspora. So, the Nigerian Diaspora rallied very strongly around Peter Obi and a campaign that Nigerians had not seen in a long time happened. The point remains that how do we go forward from here. The fact is that the majority of Nigerians are young. A significant part of our population is under 25 and they are fed up, they are looking for something new and the generation is trapped in their values. Why is Nigeria not growing, why are the multinationals leaving? Nigerian politicians are cheating every term, they cheat during elections, and they cheat in offices.
United States public office holders are found in economy class, but a Nigerian minister would charter a plane to go somewhere next door. In a very poor country, you see a disconnect between the political actors and the people of Nigeria. When that is what happens what do you expect to hap- pen on moving forward with this population that is the majority? You need to know that they would not be able to hold down the majority anymore and it might be very costly for them. My friend from the United States of America, who would soon come to Lagos, imagined a scenario where there would be increased violence in Nigeria as an expression of frustration and you have seen it happening already. You have Boko Haram in the North, kidnapping in the South East, Niger Delta militancy and others.
A lot of your critics said you are just theoretising that you once supported the emergence of former president Muhammadu Buhari and you were even a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and that you are part of them. They said theory does not solve the problem…
Aren’t you see it happening? Ehat is the point of theory, it leads to action.
They said you are part of the ruling class and that you played a role in the founding of the APC…
How am I a part of them? I played a role in the founding of the APC with the expectation that we could make a difference, but we absorbed a lot of people from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and created a worse PDP and I walked away from the beginning. I was never involved in anything in the APC in any shade, form or anything.
You took part in the governorship primary in Delta State and they showed you politics…
That story going round is not true at all. The correct story was that they called a meeting and Gen. Lawrence Onoja (rtd) was the chairman, but it was a pre-determined scam and I literally walked away. I was going to move to the venue, but they advised me not to go. There was no plan to have an election there, there was no democracy. Nigerian politicians don’t believe in democracy and I needed to prove it, once I proved it, I just walked away and I wrote a book about it. You cannot just sit in one place and be complaining.
Having seen what happened, I am superior to somebody who sits in one corner and complaining. Do something before you die like the late Jerry Rawlings said. But as I wanted to do something I found out that we have people who are inappropriate about where the country is going.
In the event that the merger works, who would lead the party. You know the PDP feels that everybody should rally round Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, who would be 81 years old by November 2027, or will they pick a younger person like Mr Peter Obi?
It is too early to be talking about who, let’s talk about how, what do we need to do to make Nigeria one. When the time comes, we will tell you who will lead. I can tell you that in the last few days, I have had significant conversations with Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, Eng. Rabiu Kwankwaso, Mr Peter Obi and we are very clear on this matter. Let’s build a party that we desire and when we do, the people with the social movement subscribing to so- cial value and how they want the country to be would determine who would lead. This is what our country should be and not one individual claiming to be the best.
When the time is right, let us have those values, strategies that can take us away from these elites that take away the little that we get from oil into a sprawling growing economy the way India is happening and we can make progress. There are so many people who complain and they do nothing. Let’s get people who are thinking, sit down and think of how Nigeria can make progress. Is it not a shame, are we not ashamed to see the way Nigeria is, the poverty in the land, the anger in the land with all endowments that we have? Imagine that a huge percentage of foreign doctors in the USA are from Nigeria, why is this happening to our country?
You were a young man, when you had close contact with the government and some of the things we talk about were there and they are still there and nothing has changed. Why is it that we keep going back in this cycle of thinking, over 40 years the same thing are still there, how will the new party not go the same way?
There is enough evidence to prove this, the Nigerian political class has become anti-intellectual, we need to examine what the problems are and try and do something. In the 1950s, there were massive growth and development, essentially we had competitive communalism in the struggle among the regions, when they competed among themselves and this led to massive development. The jump in the phenome- nal growth in Nigeria is what you study and study again. But what happened between 1957 and early 1965 was the growth of manufacturing in Nigeria, after that what happened? A number of things, we had a convergence of soldiers and oil and this led to what my friend called bureaucratic prebendalism.
You see a big man at the top handing out stipends, the turning upside down of the Nigerian constitution prevented a federal structure and prevented us from bringing development and progress the way it happened between 1957 and 1965. Someone said it has got to a point that the civil servants own most of the big houses in Abuja. If we can sit down and talk to one another and recognise where things went wrong, if we can have a constitution that goes back to where we were in terms of sensitivities and sensibility of the ground norm, then it will be better. It’s not true that when things go wrong they cannot get better.
Look at the Malaysian story, when we had the civil war in Nigeria, Malaysians too were killing each other in 1969, but look at what happened when someone criticised the prime minister and he was expelled from the party, and he wrote a book. What he wrote in the book led to the resignation of the prime minister and he went back into the party and became the prime minister and pulled the Malaysian elites together. He then said to them; “look, I want everybody to sit down in this room and see where we are going because it is better for everybody to be inside the house pissing outside than be outside and pissing inside.”
That was how they were able to turn around the economy of Malaysia. It is possible to do it if we have people who are determined. There are Nigerians who are making sacrifice continually and we can find those Nigerians to make sacrifice to make this country work.
