Patrick Okedinachi Utomi, popularly known as Pat Utomi, is a man of ideas. A professor of political economy and a management expert; Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants of Nigeria; politician and a former presidential candidate; founder of Centre for Value in Leadership (CVL); founding member of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Utomi is passionate about Nigeria.

But he, like many other well-meaning Nigerians, feels disappointed the way the country has turned out.

In this exclusive interview with IKECHUKWU AMAECHI and EUGENE ONYEJI, Utomi, who insists that Nigeria is not a democracy because elections have not done the job of determining what the will of the people is, gives the two main political parties – APC and PDP – a very hard knock even as he says, “I don’t know how Buhari governs Nigeria.”[/i]

Nigeria celebrated her 61st independence anniversary on October 1. Would you say the country has met your expectations?[i]

I guess that is a rhetorical question but I am almost confident there is no Nigerian you ask that question who will answer in the affirmative. But the degree obviously will differ in terms of how or how not it has met their expectations.

To be fair, I have been one of those very passionate about the Nigerian project all of my adult life. Nigeria is the one thing that animates me. And I don’t have apologies for being passionate about Nigeria. I was born into it, so to speak.

I was a very young person when Nigeria became independent. I had goose bumps even as a child being involved in Independence Day activities.

As a young student activist, I have been drawn into Nigerian issues because there is the famous issue of my 18th birthday. I didn’t realise it was my birthday until about 8.30 pm because we had been demonstrating around the country. All the universities except University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) had actually been closed at the time because of protests at the anniversary of the Kunle Adepeju killing at the University of Ibadan and of course, at Nsukka, there was certain reluctance because of the civil war and many people had lost years and so many mature students just wanted to graduate, didn’t want to bother with what was going on elsewhere when ABU, Ife, Ibadan had all been shut down because of students’ protests.

So, we founded a group called the Students Democratic Society (SDS). They protested against the students union at UNN at the time. And so, while we were protesting on February 6, 1974, the Vice Chancellor granted us alternative platform, just rally so that the students can come together and discuss the issues.

So, at the Margaret Ekpo Hall where the entire student body had, literally, gathered that night, there is this gentleman, we used to call him Chairman P, who got up to speak and he said, “Today, February 6, 1974, will be remembered as the day when people who were physically demobilised after this civil war were finally mentally demobilised ….”

And February 6 is my birthday. That day was actually my 18th birthday and I was just remembering at 8.30 p.m.

So, that speaks to the nature of the passion through which we have come. And we were very involved students. We wanted to be part of national policy. And my personal contribution as a student leader was forcing a discussion of Nigeria’s foreign policy by challenging the Foreign Affairs Minister Joseph Nanven Garba and his responding to my challenge and coming to Nsukka to debate us.

Joe Garba and I in a very dramatic turn engaged on the question of Nigeria’s role in Angola in 1975. He had agreed on a date for the debate but three days before the day the debate was supposed to take place, the Head of State, Murtala Muhammed, was killed in a coup on February 13, 1976. Nobody expected Garba to come, I was despondent, people who said I was just making mouth on campus said now I had excuse.

I didn’t know what to do. I went to Enugu, to Governor Atom Kpera’s office and everybody was just looking at me. All the telephone lines in the country had been cut off and the Garrison Commander in Enugu said to me, “Why don’t you go to the airport. If he has to come, it must be through the airport, it won’t be by road.”

So, I had no choice than to go to the airport. And a Nigerian Police jet just landed and there he was and we started heading to Nsukka. And the whole campus just went totally crazy.

So, that was the kind of commitment we had as young people. When we talk about Nigeria as great, as giant of Africa, we actually believed it and we wanted to see it happen and we worked towards it.

So, it should be understandable that many of us feel disappointed the way Nigeria has turned out.


With the picture you just painted, what do you make of today’s National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS)?[/i]

I have actually discussed this subject severally in the past and interesting enough, part of how that conversation has gone in my recent engagement with it is from when young people began to protest and say look at Europe, a 39-year-old had just become President of France, that is Emmanuel Macron at the time, look at the young men popping up in Italy, Austria; the young ladies popping up in the Scandinavia but back home, Nigerian elders have refused to give us a chance.

But for a completely different reason, I went to see General Alani Akinrinade and he raised the issue and said, “You know, young Nigerians are complaining that young people are taking over in Europe,” but he said, “You know, most of those young people taking over in Europe were formed for leadership in the students unions. They started as student leaders. Unfortunately for us in Nigeria, our young people did not have the opportunity of developing those leadership skills as students because we the military and the politicians that followed us destroyed the students’ union movement in Nigeria.” These were General Akinrinade’s words.

And so, the youths have lost the opportunity of the grooming that the students union movement should ordinarily give them. Now the characters who run around, calling themselves student leaders are neither students nor leaders.

General Akinrinnade can be an extraordinary guy when you meet him. He is very profound in his thinking. Sometimes, you just say waoh! And I share in the sentiments he expressed.

It is very sad that after our time, students’ union movement in Nigeria was destroyed by soldiers and politicians and that has denied our country the possibility of grooming leaders who are truly leaders in understanding that leadership is selfless, it involves selfless giving of oneself for the advance of the common good of all. If you are in it because you want to get a Prado Jeep, as many of them seem to be doing these days, you are not a leader.

If you cannot become passionate about your shared humanity, and are driven only by more narrow interests, you are not likely to be able to change the world because young people are in a very good stage of idealism. You know what is said about young people, when you are 18, if you are not a Marxist, something is wrong with your heart. But if you are 40 and still a Marxist, something is wrong with your head.

How did we get it wrong? Some people point at the January 15, 1966 coup, but Nigeria is not the only country to have experienced coup. Others have since moved on. Where did the rain start beating us?[i]

It is not a one-cause thing. Several things happened but that coup was a critical part of the problem, not necessarily the event of the coup but in the military entering the political arena in Nigeria.

How do you mean?[/i]

The reason lies in what I will call the dangerous alchemy of soldiers and oil. Why is it a dangerous alchemy? You see, Nigeria was a very carefully crafted federation. In that federal arrangement, there were checks and balances of sorts from the conventions of engagement. When the military intervened, we can argue about the motives of the young officers from here till tomorrow, people playing it any way it is convenient for their own positions, but nobody who really knew those officers will doubt that they were driving some ideal, misguided or not.

The consequence was that the military entered political life and came to the realisation that, it should have been obvious but it wasn’t to the people who were intervening at the time, the nature of military rule with the hierarchy of the army was such that it was a centralising structure.

So, people can accuse Aguiyi Ironsi, for example, of moving from a federal structure to a unitary structure, but when he was shoved aside, it still continued in that direction because it was a very simple logic. The General is at the top, Colonels at the middle and the Privates are at the base and in the hierarchy of the army, a General says jump and a Colonel says, how high sir and so on down the line.

And so, the General at the centre appoints a Colonel a military governor and the Colonel is not going to question what the General asked him to do.

So, why is it a dangerous alchemy of soldiers and oil?[i]

It was about that same time in our nation’s life that oil became a more significant revenue source. So, not only did the General at the top have all the powers to do virtually all he wanted to do and not be questioned by the Colonel who is running the state, there was now revenue coming into the state coffers that the General or the Colonel had no need to recourse to the people to pay taxes because the control the people exert on government comes from the fact that they pay taxes.

In those days in the 1960s, one of the most dramatic scenes everywhere across Nigeria was of tax collectors chasing citizens and they will be running. So, the government stopped bothering people with taxes. And the gift of oil and the hierarchy of the military distorted the way things could flow especially because there was a weak intellectual content later down the line.

Under the first phase of military rule – Gowon, the civil war and all of that – you also had another factor, the brilliant permanent secretaries of that era were significantly products of the London School of Economics – the Philip Asiodus, Allison Ayidas, etc., and the London School of Economics with Professor Harold Laski as the main driver of the ideology of governance that flowed out of LSC, and remembering the history of LSC, which came out of Fabian Socialism, members of the Fabian Society under the LSC founded the Labour Party.

So, with their mindset, there tended to be this dirigiste inclination of state control. Compound this dirigisme with the fact that oil revenue were now aplenty and the government merely driven by the ideologies of these permanent secretaries argued for government occupying the commanding height of the economy – the language of the time.

And so, the General who needed to occupy the commanding height of the economy simply altered the revenue allocation formula and nobody questioned him, he could do anything he wanted. And we went from the regions collecting say revenue like oil and sending 50 per cent to the centre to the Federal Government collecting 100 per cent and sending an increasingly diminishing amount to the sub-nationals and at a point in time, even the oil producing states were getting less than 0.05 per cent of actual revenues from oil because Kalu Idika Kalu, who was Minister of Finance at a point in time, while speaking at one Concerned Professionals event, broke it down and by the time you took out the special funds for Ajaokuta, Aladja, Alscon, Abuja – the so-called Four As – and you share what is left, what actually was getting to oil producing states was less than 0.05 per cent of revenues from crude oil at a point in time.

And there is another consequence that mindset creates. It creates a mindset of obsession with revenues. Everything in Nigeria became about revenues and how to share these revenues. Every quarrel was about who was getting more of these revenues.

Now, what the ideology of the time failed to recognise and this is the biggest bane of Nigeria’s development, is that revenues do not make you rich. What makes you rich is production. And so, the more we battled and shared, and the more revenues we got, the poorer we became.

A typical example is the argument made about who is producing, who is getting more, all the fight over should derivation be 25 per cent, 13 per cent, this or that.

Now, I will give you an illustration. In the 1960s, only two levels of government were involved in fiscal transfers – the national government and the sub-nationals – that is the regions or states as they became later. Local governments were not involved. They were the convenience of whoever wanted to create them. So, for convenience, the governments in the South ended up having about twice as many local governments as governments in the North. It was not a problem. It didn’t affect fiscal distribution. It was just for administrative purposes.

But by 1976, when the Dasuki Commission under the Obasanjo military government, borrowing from the traditions somewhere in Eastern Europe and Brazil, local governments became part of fiscal transfer system and the local governments, the third tier of government, were entitled to about 20.9 per cent of distributable funds – the so-called FAAC account. That is a huge amount of revenues.

And who were the powerful people around? They were the young Colonels in the army and each of them wanted his village to be a local government. And of course, the majority of the powerful young officers were from the North and we ended up with 774 local governments and now nearly 500 of that are in the old north

So, that is a huge revenue shift but the North has become poorer and people are wondering, what is going on? Nobody is remembering that they are getting a lot more revenue. So, why are they getting poorer and poorer? It is because we didn’t think through the logic of wealth. When the North produced in the early 60s, the quality of life was much better than when they started waiting for revenues to be allocated.

They abandoned production and became poorer and you can show it in simple terms in everyday life.

Why is it so? Why will people get poorer even when they are getting more revenue? Isn’t that a paradox?[/i]

It is called the lottery effect. Find me any poor person who won a lottery and ten years later, I will show you he is poorer than he was when he won the lottery. There is a current Nigerian case in the UK. I heard the story somewhere.

A Nigerian lady that was living in Peckham London, who won a couple of million pounds in a lottery. And the first thing, her pastor shows up and collects tithe and all the members of her church who had problems showed up also and then she went and bought a house in the St. Johns Wood and moved. But four years later, she sold the house and moved back to Peckham.

And this is not a new thing. If you go and read the economic history of the world, you will see it. Spain is a classic example. At the height of its economic glory, the elite of Spain were spending like drunkards, enjoying the good life that accrued from gold being shipped back to Spain. But the small countries around them, the Netherlands of this world, Switzerland of this world, were busy investing in their youths to be more productive.

A couple of generations down the line, these countries are far wealthier than Spain. So there is no magic. Everything that happens, if you know enough, you will know that this is where we are headed. I could tell you 30 years ago that Nigeria will be where it is today. It is not that I could tell you, I wrote it down. Go and read what I wrote 25 years ago, all this mess in Nigeria, I said it will happen, almost like a prophet, I went close to saying how it will happen, not because I am intelligent. Other people who were smarter than me thought it out and I just basically came to that understanding.

Robert Kaplan wrote the “Coming Anarchy” around the time of return to civil rule in Nigeria and I read it and said, this is what is coming. I bought copies and sent to my friend who was the DG of SSS, General Babangida got a copy, and General Aliyu Gusau got a copy. Everything Kaplan predicted has happened.

I used to host this monthly breakfast meeting at the Lagos Business School and in one of the early ones like about 20 years ago, we had among those in the house a chap called Brown with the IMF Country Office in Nigeria.

And I was making remarks about revenue allocation in Nigeria and I said look at how Botswana has cleverly saved revenues from Diamond exports into a future fund. In my view, what should make sense, because revenues from crude oil are meant for Nigerians of all times. God put it in the ground not for this generation alone but Nigerians forever. If we spend it all now, our children will curse us. Can we take a portion of this revenue, put it in our budget process, probably not more than $25 from each barrel and then everything above the $25, we put in a stabilization fund.

If oil prices were to crash to $8 as it were under Sani Abacha, the difference between that $8 and the standard level we are normally committing to the budget, we will take from the stabilisation fund and ensure that it doesn’t matter that the price of crude oil is now $8, the funding of the budget will still be the same constant $25 a barrel. So everything above $50 goes into the Sovereign Wealth Fund, the so-called future fund.

After I finished, this IMF guy came to me and said, “Why is your country a mess with people like you?”

So, these ideas have been around like forever. There is no rocket science about them. We have expressed them in the past and that is what is haunting us today.

So, why is it that when people who profess these ideas go into government, they do entirely the opposite? Is there anything in government that makes people forget what works?[i]

I don’t think we have had enough of people who know go into government. Let us be fair and frank. We have not. And I will tell you how I raised that issue once.

I was giving a talk at a Lagos Business School programme focusing on higher education in Nigeria and I was talking about the fact that in the early 1960s, there was a commission on higher education in Nigeria set up by Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa and chaired by a British educator from Oxford called Sir Erick Ashby and Sir Ashby made the point that the quality of higher education in Nigeria that time was as good as the very best in the world. He said it was actually harder to get into University of Ibadan than it was to get into Harvard University in 1961.

One young lady in the class, one of these millennial, could have none of that. She said, “You people have come again. It was always good before in Nigeria. It is now bad. If it was so good, how come those of you who got that education have made such a mess of the country?” She thought she has scored a home run and it seemed like it.

I said to her, you are right actually that that quality of higher education should have made a difference but truly, those who got that education, have they ever run Nigeria? The truth is no. At a point in time, they got so frustrated and most of them left Nigeria. Once in a while, you get one tired one amongst them who has taken enough humiliation from the system and they say, come and be minister of this or that and all the guy is praying is to recoup enough to go into nice retirement. He forgets all his ideas, he doesn’t care. He just wants to survive in the system.

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