Nigeria Is On The Road To Somalia – Utomi

Saturday, 19 March 2011 

Professor Pat Utomi cuts the picture of an entrepreneur, intellectual and politician of repute. Severally, he has kicked against the system as operational in Nigeria and advocated change. The former director of Lagos Business School and presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Mega Party (SDMP), alludes that a new concept of leadership needs to be introduced in the country as the democracy in existence is just a ‘gangster arrangement for extracting economic rent from the system. He further attributes the heroic welcome accorded former Nigeria Ports Authority chairman, Chief Bode George as a reflection of this.Excerpts

Not much has been heard of your campaigns. How has it been?

The campaign comes as expected with many challenges, but it also comes with a very firm promise in that it elevates your consciousness on why this is such an important exercise. Every day I discover why our country unfortunately has not made much progress in spite of God’s grace.

I have particularly been struck by a number of things in recent times that go to the heart of the matter, and sometimes, people talking on the streets don’t connect to those kinds of things. Sometimes our elders, politicians and so-called business leaders either don’t get it or pretend not to, but it is going to catch up with all of us very soon.

Let me give you a couple of things that entered my universe of thinking in the last four days. I was reading a report from Brazil in one of our newspapers, about people trying to get the former president of Brazil, LuizInácio Lula da Silva prosecuted. As you know, Da Silva was an extremely popular president who worked very hard for the Brazilian people. Everything was booming. This is a hero, but Brazilians have gone to court, saying that while he was president he went somewhere and after he came back, the presidency sent out thank you notes to those he saw, and they said that he did at government’s expense what should have been a private matter. They have gone to court for him to be prosecuted for using public funds to send out thank you notes.

While he was still president, da Silva flew from Brasilia, the capital, to Rio on official assignment. It happened that his party was having a party caucus or something in Rio. He stopped over and attended while he was still incumbent.

Some people went to court that he used public money for party matters, the court ruled against him and refunded the cost of fueling the plane. The Jonathan government has crippled the Nigerian government. All the public resources of our country are being used to persue personal political campaign’s of the PDP. The state governors have pillaged the treasuries to advance their political interest.

So you see, the collapse of the civil society is part of Nigeria’s trouble. The civil society has collapsed just like almost everything else in our country. So I look at Brazil, I look at Nigeria and I can understand why today we talk about BRIC economies; Brazil, Russia, India, China. Nobody is putting “N” in it or calling it BRINC because nobody thinks Nigeria is going anywhere.

Secondly, one Saturday I was flying to Abuja and there was a small guy in Agbada, surrounded by two other guys on the plane. I was wondering who he was. There was an evident movement which tried to suggest that he was of some kind of importance, but I didn’t pay any attention. He didn’t look like somebody I had ever met.

I was sitting in seat 1A and he sat maybe two rows behind. When we landed, there was this rush to come to the door for them to be the first people to exit. So I stepped back so that we, the lesser citizens would wait for them to exit. As we disembarked, we saw a big crowd with cameras and they started yelling “oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, ah, ah. “So I asked the managing partner of KPMG, who was also on the flight who the short guy was and he told me it was the former MD of NPA who was released from prison that day with Bode George. He started telling me the Bode George story because I didn’t follow the thing, and I didn’t watch it. He said it was live on TV.

Whichever way you look at it, it was for stealing, simplicita. And all I could think of was my friend from Shagamu who was telling a story of growing up in Shagamu in the late 1950’s and somebody in the neighborhood sighted a policeman going into a house. It wasn’t that they knew he did anything, the policeman was seen going to their house and they became lepers in the community. Nobody would associate with them because a policeman was seen going to their house.

Now I see people who are coming out of prison for a criminal offence being celebrated on Live Television as if they were war heroes and I definitely knew something was wrong with the heart and soul of my country. Values shape human progress. If we have gotten that wrong, progress can’t take place.

You mean crash the democratic system?

Crash the whole thing. It is not working for Nigeria, it will not work for Nigeria.

So how do we crash it?

By proving to the world that it’s a joke. That is what this is about.

But we have spent close to 12 years…

Of a joke. Show me one road that has been completed in Nigeria in 12 years.One road. The dualisation of theLagos-Ibadan expressway? One Canadian diplomat was coming to a meeting with the Concerned Professionals and other Civil Society Groups three years ago and he had gone to speak to some group in Ibadan. When he arrived the meeting, he said that driving on the Lagos/Ibadan expressway was a violation of the fundamental human rights of all those who travelled on it.

The Lokoja/Abuja dualisation has been going on for more than eight years, it has killed half of Nigerians, literally speaking, and it is still not completed. It is not working, the system is not working, and the country is not working. Why are we fooling ourselves? This democratic system is just a gangster arrangement for extracting economic rent from the system. It is not working.

You just prescribed that we should crash this democratic experiment, what is the alternative?

First of all, we need a new constitution. All this patching is not working. We need to start from ground level. You need to have a system that is owned by the people. Have you ever seen a country where the people are so completely alienated from governance? The people don’t feel that the government is for them or about them. Anybody you talk to just shrugs: “God will catch them one day.”

So my role is essentially to highlight the fact that this is not a working system. You talked about the Senate and all that. When I started out, my goal was to see if we could build an alternative institution, a political party that brings together progressive forces. When you have that kind of viable political force with a complete agenda of literally starting afresh, then you can make progress.

When I woke up on January 1, 2010, my New Year resolution, which I told my wife, was that I won’t run for anything. I was out of it. I had worked with young people for so long. I would continue to work with young people in one way or the other to shape their minds so they can realise they can rebuild their country. But I kept getting pulled in. You know this Chief Enahoro’s idea-build a mega summit movement, and I was just a follower.

One day I travelled, came back and was told I was chairman. I said, “oh is that the story?” On another day, I was told that I had to be candidate because they needed somebody to rally around to make the point I have been making about constructing a new Nigeria. So I said okay. But you see, what is required is so fundamental and requires commitment. We have a dying country. People don’t realise it, but we have a dying country.

Do you think it would do us well if we postpone the elections and go into a conference to re-arrange things before we can say we are ready?

It is hypothetical, as you say. But they won’t do it. We are going to have an election and it is going to be a complete mess.

Jega or no Jega?

Jega or no Jega. You see, that is another part of Nigeria’s problem; this turning to Jega. What we need are strong institutions, not strong men. We are obsessed with strong men. Where will Jega be? How many places can he be? They will run rings round him such that he will just be wondering what is happening.

Is Jega’s constant demand for more money part of the confusion?

That is one of the reasons I say we should crash this system. What I mean is that we have to change it completely. We cannot run such an expensive democracy. We are now living for the democracy instead of the democracy living for us. Let us go back to the parliamentary system where a group of us in our village nominate one guy who we think is good for our village to go and represent us for a total cost of next to nothing. If he doesn’t do well, he comes back. This system is not working.

You sound thoroughly sad..

When I was growing up, I was raised in a country of promise. I grew up expecting the world. As I am entering the sunset of my life, I looked back and all the promises have failed. Look, Ben Nwabueze, a professor of constitutional Law, an extra-conservative man in his 70s, says Nigeria must have a revolution; that there is no way out but a revolution! This is not a flippant statement. He is conservatism personified and he is 70, saying revolution is inevitable. He is not mad. He is talking about a country that has failed and the only thing that can save it is upturning the system.

Politicians have been campaigning, but a lot of Nigerians say they are just making noise…

We have not had campaigns in this country. At the risk of sounding funny, I was the only one who campaigned in 2007. I was considered a joke but I was the only one who campaigned in the sense that Americans campaign. Maybe because I didn’t have money. I had three or four vehicles and we went round this country. I was in every state in this country in 2007. I was in Kano at least five times. At least on three occasions I travelled between Kano and Abuja at about 11pm by road. I see people jump into an airplane to Adamasingba Stadium with a huge crowd of people that they had paid and given uniforms. They clown around for 45 minutes and go. That is not campaigning. They are just making a joke.

What do you think the media is not doing right?

The media should point out that what the PDP is doing is not called campaigning; that it is a charade, a circus. A ruling party runs on its record, an opposition party runs on its vision, the strength of his vision. Compare the vision of the opposition with the record of the incumbent. Of course, as you know the PDP cannot run on its record. There is no record to run on. It has destroyed the country.

Call one PDP trustee and ask him to show how the quality of life of the average Nigerian is better today than it was in 1999; even he cannot justify it. Everybody knows that the life expectancy in Nigeria is worse today than it was in 1999. Everybody knows that infant mortality in Nigeria is one of the worst in the world. Everybody knows that Nigeria is almost at the bottom of the African competitiveness index, that Nigeria’s economy is one of the least competitive economies in Africa. Ironically, Tunisia, where this crisis started from, is Africa’s most competitive economy. So you can imagine in Africa’s least competitive economy, Nigeria, what should be happening.

I think our problem is oil. Because it can be used to service the greed of a few and make them bent on worsening our lives, it continues. The Economist interviewed me in 1996 when Abacha was in power and I said I wished Nigeria could find a way of giving the oil to its soldiers and politicians and say, tackle this, leave Nigeria, leave us alone and go away, that Nigeria will be more prosperous. Because oil services this corrupt bureaucracy and political machine, there is a semblance like we are functioning. If it was not there Nigerians would know that they either have to build their future or they would become Somalia, and I am sure that they will vote for building their future and Nigeria will be a truly prosperous country. The endowments of this country are enormous. The endowments that can make this country truly great even without oil are phenomenal.

What are you bringing to the table in your campaign?

Ideas are the most important thing to bring to an election campaign. Barack Obama is president of United States, not because of anything else he brought to the table, but because he can think. You know that in Nigeria, they think the intellect is a disadvantage. They call it theory, but there is no practice without theory. You have to think out, see the possibility before you can put it to practice.

Nigerian politicians who are very anti-intellectual have managed to convince Nigerians, including journalists, that thinking is theory. So we have a serious problem. The problem we have is the collapse of culture. The value system has crashed completely and Nigerians cannot even tell right from wrong, what makes for progress or what distracts from it. It is not that there are no roads.

How about security?

Security is very critical, very important. I mean if people are not secured they cannot do anything. Again, I will decentralise policing in Nigeria. I will go for a fiscal arrangement where the federal government will provide grants to the states and the funding of the police force will be a state matter. We need a state police force, not a federal one. Policing is about being in the community, knowing the thieves. If you are in Abuja and you are sending people to Akwa Ibom to protect them, they will collude with the kidnappers. When a man from Ikot Abasi is policing Ikot Abasi, he knows that it is his personal business and at first point he knows the families that steal.

So the police need to be adequately funded and decentralised. They will say politicians used the local police to harass their enemies in the 60’s. That is a naïve argument. Don’t we use federal police to harass our enemies if we are the government in the centre? The way to deal with that is that whenever any issue involves fundamental human rights it immediately becomes a federal issue as it is in America.

So decentralise policing, invest heavily in creating a new police force, re-educate the policemen and make policing a prestige institution. Right now policing is seen as something for any drop-out to go into. I have no problem making a university degree the minimum requirement to be a policeman because you need them to be enlightened to understand what they are doing. If all that you do with your budget as government is education, health care and security, the country will make progress.

How would you tackle the waste in the system for instance, by trimming the size of government in Nigeria? Well I used to say that one of the first things I would do in the first six months is to slash government massively.

People who said revolution was impossible in Nigeria site the example that in Nigeria we are so polarised along ethnic lines, religious divides and there is the influence of money that the people at the top use in dividing us …

How many of the millions of unemployed Nigerians get some of the money they share? How many can you share to? How much does Nigeria earn from crude oil? Countries don’t get rich from selling one commodity like oil, countries get rich from producing things. So how much is that crude if you begin to share it? And if there are 3-4million unemployed graduates, how much will you share to them to prevent 1 million of them coming together to bring the whole system down? It’s just short-sightedness.

Okay let’s spell it out, how do you want us to crash this democracy and start to rebuild?

We have to sit before the Nigerian people and discuss where we are, which is that we are nowhere. If so many millions of Nigerians are unemployed there is no constructive plan; don’t tell me I will vote N50billion for employment to get Nigeria working. The engine has knocked but we are pretending. You know, when a person is in the hospital on life support system they think he is alive because there is life support.

In Nigeria there is a life support system called crude oil earning. The country has crashed. It’s all about how to share that life support, and what eventually happens is that one day the doctor will pull the life support and death will officially be recognised, but you were a living dead anyway. That is what Nigeria is right now, a living dead on life support system of crude oil revenue.

Now, if people are not able to sit down and say politicians are not serving Nigeria, all of us politicians are not serving the Nigerian people, then what should they say? What is a democracy? And you don’t say it by taking up NTA airtime in song and dance. You say it by standing before the Nigerian people in townhall meetings one-on-one; but they definitely won’t want it to happen. You think Nigerians will wait forever? If we don’t organise to have a true democracy, one day the youth will take it over.

Do you see that happening very soon?

I don’t know when it will happen, but I am just talking as a scholar who has studied societies. I wrote a piece that was in the papers this weekend, the poverty conspiracy. All I am just trying to do is show you historically what has happened in other parts of the world. Argentina was at par with the United States in the 1930s by the 1990s Argentina was down to West African level GDP. It had moved from first world to the third. The US had gone on to become the world’s preeminent economy.

You don’t have to read Gerald Diamond to know that collapse has come to Nigeria. Unless there is a massive rethink, Nigeria’s life support system is designed to last only for a short period, and what you will get is Somalia.

Somalia?

Nigeria is on the road to Somalia. Look at what is happening with Boko Haram, Jos, the Niger Delta? We are using some money to sustain the so-called amnesty, how long can we continue that? Those same boys will resume. The governor of Niger was shouting the other day that Boko Haram people were coming to his state. All over the place warlords will be in charge just because the elite have not shown responsibility in the way they have governed the country.

A US report predicted a few years back that by 2015 Nigeria would be a failed state. Do you now see that happening?

It is not in my interest for that to happen. What I thought that prediction should have done is cause us as the elite to rally around and say our country must not go that way; instead we just continued doing the same very things that will bring us to that point. Look, there is an index, a failed state index. The difference between Nigeria and Ghana is more than a hundred countries; Ghana is as far away from being a failed state as Nigeria is as close to being a failed state.

For many, Nigeria is already a failed state. Most South Easterners are so passionate about the homestead that they go home every month. They have their mass return in Easter, and everybody goes home for Christmas. I was at a meeting in Abuja of leading politicians from the South-East; some of them had not been to their hometowns in three years because of insecurity primarily. What do you call a state that people are so insecure? A failed state