Professor Pat Utomi is one Nigerian who has eminently contributed to all aspects of human endeavour. His roles in nation building spans, education, politics, activism, institutional building and many more. He contested the 2007 presidential election under the Action Democratic Congress (ADC) which he co founded and letter joined the Action Congress of Nigeria that metamorphosed as All Progressive Congress as founding member. He as declared his intention to contest the 2019, gubernatorial election in his home state Delta State. In this interview, he spoke with Kalu Okoronkwo and Obianuju Uzukwu in his office about so many issues bothering on his ambition and political parties in Nigeria. Excerpts.
Prof. you are known to have contested the presidency at a time, and now you aspire for governorship position, why the sudden change in ambition and aspiration.
There is no sudden change of aspiration and there is no ambition; in fact the word I detest the most is ambition. They ask what is your ambition. I don’t have any ambition; I am not looking for anything. We live in a society that has opted to have as a way of directing its path, what directly referred to as democracy. Democracy depends majorly on citizenship behavior and through effective citizenship behavior, generating participation in a process that produces those who navigates or lead or guide that society towards certain chosen goals. But participation is not the same thing as representation. In many ways Nigeria’s democracy is a farce because most times people’s interests are not captured in the government because we have participation without representation. The system is rigged. The people are not educated, they are poor. Political parties are weak; they don’t have a good system for picking the capable people to run for offices which is the most important role that political parties play or articulating a set of ideas, so whoever it is that comes through their system will own and use to drive society forward. So you find invariably that state capture is easy. A group of criminals can very easily control anybody or government in Nigeria if they want. And as an institutionalist, somebody who believes in intuition building, if you look at almost everything I have done in my life either as an academic, researching , writing and teaching, it’s about how an institutions help us build more effective society, economic advancement, etc. I committed myself at a point as a talking doing person rather than just an academic who lives in the ivory tower of contemplation, to be active to help see institutions emerge. The second point is that my whole essence is built on providence, I always want to do the very best I can do and allow God’s will to determine what I do, bearing in mind that I have one primary objective, for my life to have impact, my live to influence other lives for good, whether as local government councilor, president, as whatever, one of the thing I have always been determined not to do in Nigeria is to go to the legislature whether as house member or senate, not because legislative process is not important but because I have seen it in its very worst form in Nigeria, where in the main it contributes nothing, and set some decent people to become blackmailers just extort from the system, so I am determined not to be a senator or member of the house, people can go there I am not saying they should not , but strictly in terms of my self-actualization . Outside of that, any role I can play. Now having said this as fundamental principles that have guided my engagements, back in nation building process, I have been active from the point of view of civil society as an activist, I have been active as a private sector player, I have been active as someone who have served in government at some point through the years. I got to a point where I found out that just being an activist or being a business person may be good but at the context of how we have allowed government to become so dominating in Nigeria, that a lot more good could be done by engaging in political life, this came to me particularly after we as the so called activist literally chased the military out and chose not to participate at the beginning of the democratic process, because we thought that politicians should move into the space, and then we were so terribly disappointed within two three years into the democracy , that we began to ask ourselves if we didn’t make a major mistake in 1999. It is that reconsideration that led to what became the run of 2007, by my group of friends who were originally concerned professionals quote an unquote revolt against the military following the June 12 election annulment. One of the lessons from that effort which came through by my having to run for the presidency was that in many ways there is not enough sincerity in Nigeria about whether we want to save this country. People will come and disturb you, harass you, if you don’t come out bla bla bla, and you feel disturbed enough and come out, all they do is sit in their houses and they are looking at you . But the line you set yourself is important for history to note that you did your best. That is how we ran for president, 27 agenda to take Nigeria away from where it was going. By two years ago, I was actually determined to begin a quiet exit from public life completely, whether it is activism, politics, and that was based on a very simple deduction because my 60th birthday was coming, my logic was if I were in civil service that was retirement, why should I be hanging around discussing when at that age in civil service I will be retiring. True there is still plenty of energy left in the body; I also thought it is unfair to the next generation if people were still running around at 60. But my decision was, well I have made my effort, I think is time to go quietly, I can continue to make contribution through initiatives that affect people’s life, touch them for good but not necessarily public life initiatives, quietly building enterprises that help people, building social enterprises that touch lives, indeed I begin to realize that I needed some imprimatur legacies. Of course one can say that God help has allowed us to do a number of things one can consider legacy sources, if it is in terms of private education in this country, God has provided us the privilege to be part of something that one can be remembered for called legacy, in terms of organizing social enterprise and civil society, I think there are plenty that one can be pointed to as contributing to as legacy, in terms of private enterprises perhaps there is a smattering of what has come from business NGOs that has produced a number of enterprises. But I thought maybe it is a chance to go and build one or two enterprises that would be around a hundred years from now, that was what I was going to concentrate my energy until some people showed up in my office sitting on this very table, a delegation trying to persuade me, you are talking about legacy you are talking about that, we need you to take this initiative to your state and history would be kind to you, I said in my mind, this people have come againooo, I know what I have suffered with this kind of thing before, what have I done to you, I know if I should mention this to my wife now, my wife would say, what is this business, what are you talking. I tried to give them 1,000 reasons why we should be doing different things, but these things persisted. I know politicians usually say my people asked me, these is not even about my people, the people that asked me are not even all my people, there are people I thought were well meaning people, who were concerned and very worried, so I say to them, let me first see your effort, if I see your effort and it is serious, then I will engage. To be fair to them, one or two of them found some people and asked them to begin to work, so that is how all these things started.
Prof. But Why APC and Not African Democratic Party( ADC) the initial party that provided the platform you contested before, What has happened to that party.
Is a very simple story, talk about institution building, my fundamental objective, was to build the intuition of political opposition in Nigeria, you know Nigerians, everybody has a story, why this why not that, we started ADC, everybody is like why go to a small party, you are not able to stand with the big people, this, that , this , etc. people talk so much nonsense in this country and they don’t know they talk, they judge everybody , people just keep judging you and they have not done anything themselves. I said okay, the idea was to use the party that we founded to establish traditions we wanted to develop. Let’s bring together other parties together, to build one formidable opposition, so we began to meet, as different parties after the elections 2007, if anybody still remembers anything, election was so shamelessly rigged. Foreign observers, everybody admitted there was no election 2007 in Nigeria. After the elections, the presidential candidates, I was the one who always spoke for them, if anybody recalled those press conferences; Atiku was always sitting on my right, Gen. Buhari on my left. So the idea I then started pushing to these gentlemen was, how can we work together, how can we lead one formidable opposition, of course that had its stories, its ups, its downs, some people love their parties so much, they don’t want to come into a bigger group, I got tired of trying to persuade some people, then I said okay, Nigerians are not serious about building a strong opposition, just as I was about to give up on the whole business of trying to build a strong opposition made up of all those parties, I got a call from Chief Anthony Enahoro, and I went to see him in Ikeja, and he outlined the idea of Social Democratic Mega Movement as a way of doing what I was trying to achieve, I say okay sir let’s see how it works, we were moving, everybody was attending, Buhari, Atiku, you name it, then one day, we heard there was another one called National Democratic Initiative, I said, aah this people we are coming to do meeting with has formed another one, chai, Nigeria. They said, oh you see because the major people who started the other one are from the South, our people will think we are sold out to the south, so we can start another one so that both can merge, I said, okay, that is the okay we were until in the end we couldn’t get it right in 2011, that was the point, I began to say, what are we going to do about this country. Then I said, if we all cant dissolve our small parties and come into big one, I will join the biggest opposition party and work from inside that biggest opposition to this small oppositions, that is how I became part of Action Congress of Nigeria, which metamorphosed into APC. So that is it, there is a logic to what has happened, and I continued trying to persuade my friends who were in the other small parties to come but you can’t force anybody to get to drink water when you get them to the pond.
You once had a spat with the former administration of Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, and in one of his response, he said you should go and run for governorship and administer the state to your taste, don’t you think people will link your aspiration to that issue.
In fact the apparent comment came from something that I said about the finances of states, any idiot can see that the debt over hang in states are huge, most especially states with huge revenues, like Delta state. Why should they have so much debt? I made a general comment when I went to visit some people, I thought some people gave him wrong advice to attack me, so once he did that, I thought it was important to set some records straight and I did that, the politics is not a politics of name calling, it’s not the politics of personalities, it is a politics of most intelligent brains to advance human good. So yes, the comment doesn’t have anything to do with my given a thought to the position.
One question people regularly ask prof is, apart from being the adviser to the Alhaji Shehu Shagari administration, you are not known to have held any other political position or office what experience are you now bringing to the government if elected.
Those people who govern in Nigeria have no experience in governance at all; indeed Delta is a mess because those people who have run Delta have never managed anything in their lives. Donald Trump is the President of the United States he has never held political office. The capacity to run things is not a function of being in a government position; in fact it can be a detriment to being able to run things. The point is very simply, that is when people don’t have anything to say they talk nonsense, just ignore them and do what you want to do. See there are many people who claim they have thirty year experience in Nigeria what it is it, they have one year experience repeated thirty times. One of my biggest issues with government is that we should prevent people from being in government for more than twelve years without returning to private work, those people are social parasite anybody who is not a civil servant and has drawn his income for twelve straight years from government whether as an appointee or as an elected person needs to go out and work for himself, feed his family from his sweat for two or three years before he can come back to public life. Many of the people who are in public life are completely disconnected from the people, they don’t even know what the people feel because for the last thirty years they have been going from rigging election to being appointed and they are going recycling and booking appointment and they have not learnt anything about life, about how to run anything except just being named something in the government. if the government of Nigeria is anywhere to learn why is the country in complete mess if we should show running Nigeria as experience then they should all be in jail because that is the only thing they qualify for, the country has been ran down totally.
Most people say you are very close to Chief Ortega Omero , APC Chieftain in Delta State, can we at this point ask if you already has his endorsement sir.
Every person who has a leadership position has to look at what is in front of them and at the right time make a choice, I am Patrick Utomi not Ortega Omero so Ortega Omero will be the right person to ask the question.
There was this issue of trying to bring silicon value to Delta State which was also resisted by previous government in the state. If you are elected as governor of the state, will there be any possibility of bringing that value down to the state?
That was actually during Ibori’s administration. It wasn’t resistance; it was just sabotaged by elements in the government, for ethic reasons because of those promoting it but that is behind us. There are many initiatives, bear in mind that everything in development is a window of opportunity. some windows open and close, at a time we were talking about this thing we are talking about the year 2000, if that window had been primed open in 2000 there have been basis for fundamental revolution moving forward eighteen years, twenty years the world may have changed some but one thing we must continue to open ourselves to is creativity in bringing initiatives that can change people’s life in a dramatic way that can lead you to leap frogging, that can enable us make a quantum leap. There are still many leap frogging that can be engaged and used to transform.
What are your plans to challenge the Ibori dynasty, all lookers see you as Lagos boy you grew up here, some of them also think you are not on ground so how do you intend to challenge Ibori’s structure
You know one of the things I teach is strategy. Strategy sometimes is seen as weak if you focus on the other person’ strategy and look at how you can defeat their strategy instead of focusing on your own competitive strength and asking how you can outperform yourself within a scope that you have found the niche. That is really what I am focusing on not worrying about somebody’s dynasty. I am not up against any dynasty for or against any, I just have some ideas of what we can do to change the life of many people who are living in abject poverty. we will tell them what we want to do if they see and like it fine, if they say my friend your english is too much I am very happy doing what I am doing now no quarrel , nobody has said I am unhappy doing what I am doing.
Finally Prof, you position in society is said to be larger than that of a state and therefore, people want to know your opinion on the ruling APC government and whatever Buhari has given Nigerians so far.
I think the easiest way to answer the question is that , I was not only a member or founding member of the party, I was deeply involve in writing the road map. You don’t always get exactly what you have, such is life, I can’t jump up and say wow we have done everything I propose we should do. But you settle for somethings in life. If I did not suggest the idea of school feeding, conditional cash transfer, the ideas I took out from Brazil, one of the countries I have studied over the years, we will not talk about this young people benefiting from it, so I have to be thankful for what God has enable me to contribute. There is no point in playing the game of you did wonderful you did badly, these are Nigerian things, I look more sophisticated than that.
Thank you Professor, but how would you want to end this interview, I know you also have a message on your own, what is that thing you want to tell Nigerians?
I think that young people need to change the narrative of their anger, young people in this country are very angry and they should be angry but they are going about it the wrong way, they are going about it in from an entitlement perspective, look you idiots get out of the way, it is not your turn , you have been disturbing us, you have not allowed us come up when you people were in your thirties you were running the country now you are eighty something, you are still running the country that’s absolutely correct and there are entitled to their anger. Unfortunately you shouldn’t be doing this, you guys are misaligned with where the world is, this is how smart we are this is how we understand our world, these are our values that can sustain our providing leadership for us from globally competitive and so we need to take our country in that direction and you guys are not fit up for that role, I think that is the most important message rather than it’s our turn. Nigeria needs ideas; policies and passionate leadership that can enable it drip a democratic dividend from the huge youth bulge. Fortunately right now we are moving towards anarchy from not being able to invest appropriately in our young people.
ラブドール 私はいつもこのトピックに興味を持っていましたが、投稿してくれてありがとう。