Professor of Political Economy and Management expert, Pat Utomi, shares his thoughts on the state of the country’s economy, politics and other issues in this interview with JESUSEGUN ALAGBE.
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There were speculations that you were going to be a Minister or at least be on the economic team of President Muhammadu Buhari. Were you not reached out to or you were simply uninterested?
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First of all, I think there is too much emphasis on form rather than content in our context as a people. I think what is always important is our ability to work together as a people to change the society.
There are different roles we can play as a people and it doesn’t matter when other people tend to criticise you as long as the right things are done. I was very uncomfortable with the whole rush of speculations leading up to that whole thing. What we wanted to do was change the direction of our country. We saw our country going in a set of wrong direction. Many of us said, ‘No, we can’t continue like this. This has great consequences.’ So we made our time, energy and every other thing available for the push. However, the only thing I can say is that the party (All Progressives Congress) did a terrible job at transition. They didn’t manage it well. Now we don’t see where the country is going; this is very obvious to me. But it is not a matter of who is where or not; that is not important.
Now, with the current situation of things, several Nigerians have been bashing this administration for not having a tight economic team. Do you share a similar view?
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I think what matters is do we have a set of cohesive ideas that are implemented by people who are very passionate about what they are doing, people who are trusted by those they are trying to lead? That is very important for any turnaround, because why you need a turnaround is because of loss of faith in the system. To get the system to run in a particular way, you need to have people who people have faith in. You could even have geniuses in the system who people don’t have faith in. They won’t get you anywhere. In that sense, therefore, I think we could have done a better job of trying to find passionate people who people have faith in and who also have clear faith in something.
Perhaps because the communication programme is also very poor, we don’t get a sense of where things are supposed to be heading, which may be there, but somehow it’s poorly communicated. So in that sense, there is a general loss of confidence in whether we as a party know where we are going or where the party is leading Nigeria to. Anybody who is sincere will tell you that. This feeling is pervasive to the extent that people like us who put everything on the line talking about change and all of that have been at the receiving end. People now ask us, ‘Where is that your change?’ I deal with this question every day. I can’t pretend that the change is there.
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So there’s no change anywhere…
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Well, there are some important things being done. There is a tendency to be a bit bashful about things in our context. Unless you have made a deep effort to understand why Nigeria’s circumstances are flawed, you won’t realise how terrible corruption is. In this country, aren’t you shocked when you hear all these revelations every day? I think no country should survive this level of graft. That this aspect is being focussed on is an important achievement on its own and nobody should take it away. I don’t even think we have gone as far as we should go. The style should be different. I have been singing this song of how corruption has crippled Nigeria for decades. Suddenly, Nigerians are beginning to ask, ‘Is it that bad?’ Yes, it’s that bad; it’s even worse than has been revealed. It’s much worse because there is a total lack of how much corruption has plagued the system. I mean some people are so bifurcated of their dispositions that they don’t realise what they are doing and the consequences for everybody. That’s why the guy in the National Assembly would say to himself, ‘What’s padding? Is it not just to put small things here and there and add everything up?’ To them in their conscience, what’s the big deal? For me, my argument for a long time has been that part of our problem is the structure. We don’t need this National Assembly at all as it is. I have been saying this since 1999. Nigeria does not need a full time National Assembly. We need a citizen legislature, a unicameral citizen legislature. For instance, if you are busy on your farm at Ile-Oluji (Ondo State) and you just go to the National Assembly for a few days to make laws, you won’t be padding. You won’t be looking for Ministers to blackmail to get money and all of that. So the structure of the country is wrong, the structure of the government is wrong. It assumes we are a rich country, which is not the case because of the way “oil thinking” damaged us.
We are running a system that is way out of line with our resources. This is a major problem. Another issue about where and the way things are that I think people don’t give enough credit to is that just a change of government was a huge achievement. About a year and a half ago, a foreign journalist was asking me about my disposition. I said, ‘Look, I have consistently spoken on the subject of institutions and human development.’ One of the biggest reasons Nigeria is not reaching its potential is because there is a community both within and outside the country that believes that the democratic ethos has not settled in Nigeria. If you look at how Nigeria and Ghana were being compared globally two years ago, if you looked at the Index of Economic Freedom, if you looked at the so-called Failed State Index, you would see Ghana way ahead of Nigeria. The gap has been wide. The question is why is Ghana so far ahead of Nigeria in the perception of people? Of course, everything is about perception. It is because Ghana had a change of government from an incumbent regime to another and then to another, in two cycles. Ghana is now seen as a more serious democracy. So for me, changing the government was an end in itself. It didn’t matter if we got a worse government. Just achieving that change was critical to institutional building in Nigeria. In the work that I did to ensure that change took place, that was, in fact, my top priority, before other issues that we’ve been battling with. Let us not feel as a people that because things are not going well right now, we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think we’ve achieved a significant thing by having a change of government. I think we are doing well by making people see how terrible corruption really is. But there is still a lot more to be done in that area.
Then we can look at other areas which are not working down the line.
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But could there be a real change when a government is changed but the people inside it and the system are not changed? Are we not stuck in the same cycle of having people with same old ideologies and principles just changing parties?
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You know things are progressive. At least people now know that if they do certain things which are wrong, they will be caught, if not today, but tomorrow. So they will be more careful. If you took everybody out, then you would get what we got at the beginning of the budget process. They took out the people who used to make budget and then they didn’t have anybody who has the capacity to make it, so the budget was a mess. Change is not about taking everybody out like that. In fact, part of my worry was that the people that we needed to retain were removed so fast. Look, this is part of the damage that the military did to Nigeria. A consistent unchanging public service that will change direction with some political leadership change is always better for the system because we need institutional memory. No organisation, whether it’s a business or government, can fare well if it lacks institutional memory — what the Germans call “veta shuuen.” We need that. So I even think we changed people much faster. Yes, many people argue that many of the politicians in the APC came from the Peoples Democratic Party, but let me tell you why that is not the end of the world. If the core leaders of the APC have been able to firmly establish their ideologies of what the APC stands for, those people coming in, wherever they come from, will have to re-orientate themselves. In human history, in the history of political parties, people have always changed their orientations, parties have always changed their orientations. Now, would you believe that the Republican Party in the United States used to be the party of the Black people?
Abraham Lincoln, who fought the civil war to emancipate the Blacks from slavery, was a Republican. But at a point in time, the nature of the leadership of the party changed; they changed their ideological dispositions and so the Blacks shifted over. So, saying people came from the PDP to APC is not really the issue. The question is that is the core leadership of the APC able to define its ideologies, the way it governs, thereby affecting the newcomers? My biggest concern in this regard was the electoral and the political party process. As a strong member of the APC, I think the political process has not been effective as it should be and I have never hidden this. I have said this to the Chairman of the party (Chief John Odie-Oyegun). Every time I see him, I ask him, ‘What’s the party doing?’ because the party should be the foundation. However, there is this tendency in Nigeria, and Africa as a whole, for political parties to be just about power. Once power is grabbed, everybody abandons the party and runs into government. Before the last elections, I was talking with the Director of the International Republican Institute in Abuja (Robina Namusisi) and she raised this point about one of the problems in many African countries. She gave the example of an African country that after the party won the election, almost everybody from the party became government official — from Ministers, to advisers, and so on — until there was nobody in the party again. Then when another election was approaching, they discovered they didn’t have a party direction. I think the same thing happened to the APC. We had a number of strong people at the party secretariat, but everybody focussed on the government and forgot the party and so we have a problem because of it. I have been raising this issue. Anytime I run into Chief Oyegun, I ask him, ‘Where is the party? Where are the policies? Where is your orientation?’ Anybody who runs into the APC must be schooled in what the party believes in so that nobody will just come and use the party as an electoral machine to get power. How do you expect them to behave in a particular manner? They cannot because they’ve not been told what the party represents and believes in. Maybe I should run for the chairmanship of the party.
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Are you considering doing that?
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Well, I don’t know, but it is a very
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