Patitos Post

I wrote this article several months ago to warn those currently in power of the need to be proactive and act on the past reports of the previous probes on the Jos and other ethnic/religious crises. The reason we have these issues is not because we do not know the problem, rather it is because we have not had the political will to fix the known problems. Below is a reproduction of my appeal to the authorities which I reproduced again after the January killings. I am now forced to reproduce them again after yesterday’s killings in Jos.

PU.

It has been said that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. This is particularly true of the Nigerian situation. We as a people have been so caught up in the rat race of survival that we have failed to take any notice of the regular recurrence of ethnic and religious crises in the country. Some have even become used to these clashes and have accepted it as a way of life. But the truth is that most if not all of these clashes are avoidable if we will only learn the lessons from the last one. But alas, our attitude is to heave a sigh of relief as soon as the crisis is contained and make some noise in the media, then forget about it after blaming it on one or two scapegoat individuals and proceed to move on with our lives as if nothing happened. Until the next crisis.

However, if we had only taken some time to reflect on the last crisis, we would have learnt lessons that would affect our behaviour and prevent the next crisis. But time and again, our leadership has shown that it has not the consistency to sustain the the process of resolving the remote and not so remote causes of these crises.

Now for instance, it would be recalled that that there was a religious/Ethnic crisis in Kaduna in 2000, and that as a result of that crisis the government set up a commission of inquiry to determine the causes of that crisis and prevent a re occurrence. However if you recall, little or nothing was done to implement that report of this commission and most importantly those behind the crisis were never unmasked nor punished and I vividly recall one of the members of that commission stating that if the previous report of the commission of inquiry that looked into the Zangon Kataf crisis in the 80s had been implemented, it would have likely prevented the Kaduna crisis. You would expect that this type of talk would lead to some proactive action, but then we had the Jos crisis soon after.

Now Jos used to be a city known for its serene atmosphere and everyone was caught off guard by the crisis that enveloped Jos in 2001. However, when the crisis re occurred with greater casualties in 2004, the government should have had some inbuilt mechanism geared towards containing the crisis. Well the government did not and so set up another commission of inquiry to again look into the causes of that crisis. Now what steps did the government take to avoid a re occurrence of that crisis? The commission’s recommendations were again swept under the carpet and then it happened again!

This time in 2008 the orgy of violence was even worse. More people died during this crisis than the two previous crisis put together, but the most painful thing is that again this crisis was foreseeable and preventable if the government had simply implemented the recommendations from previous panels of inquiry.

But what was even worse is the amount of politics engaged in by the Federal and state government after the Jos crisis, the dilly dallying and the parallel commissions set up. What we failed to understand is that some things should be beyond politics and as the elder brother the Federal Government has to show the way by leading by example and putting national interest before politics in matters such as these.

If we had done this, then perhaps the most recent crisis, the deadly ‘boko haram‘ crisis would not have happened. But happen it did and once again Nigeria was portrayed to the outside world as a nation in turmoil with potential foreign investors watching on TV the orgy of violence as human beings were beheaded, hacked to pieces in the most barbaric manner and thinking to themselves that this could be me if I go there to invest!

So now that we have contained this latest crisis, what happens? So now what? Again, so now what?

Do we heave a sigh of relief and carry on as before and say it was all Mohammed Yusuf’s fault? Or do we do the proper thing and carry out a proper post mortem of the crisis? I am not talking about another window dressing ‘panel of inquiry’ which would again be swept under the carpet like its predecessors. No! I am talking about a fact finding effort, geared towards a level headed and sober investigation into the causes of the crisis and most important to suggest ways that MUST be implemented so that we do not have a re occurrence.

Poverty is at the root of these crises. People are feeling the pressure and the rat race is taking its toll on the masses and on top of this resources are dwindling bringing out the worst in human nature. All these may perhaps be bearable, but what is unbearable is that in the midst of such grinding poverty, with people living in sqaulor, we have a political class that is so unashamedly engaged in squandermania and an opulent lifestyle as if taunting the masses and telling them that they are in some way sub human. Little effort is made at improving the standard of life of the masses. Health care, education and power are at an abysmally poor state, while our elite access health care overseas, school themselves and also school their kids abroad and escape from darkness with generators.

It is this type of environment that empowers a Mohammed Yusuf and provides him with the arsenal to mislead desperately poor people into following his movement and engaging in acts of violence as they did. It is easy to convince an illiterate that since we did not have this level of corruption when we were not so Westernized, it must be that Western education is at the root of the corruption, so we must do away with it via bloodshed.

And what is the solution? Is the solution to be found in unleashing soldiers and police to crush these folk? No! That is a reaction and it is acceptable as an emergency measure, but afterwards we need to ease the burdens of the masses and remove some of the pressures they face by a heavy and sustained investment in social services . When we do this, we will find that we are not so vulnerable to these crisis. If we invest in education and have schools that are always in session and not on strike and we implement a compulsory and comprehensive education nation wide, youths who are usually used in these crisis would have better things to occupy their minds. If we invest in power, we will see a dramatic, steady and sustained rise in small and medium scale enterprises and the economy will start to expand and when people are at work, they will have little time to take offense at miss world pageants, newspaper articles, settlers and such like.

But perhaps most importantly if we have a political elite that is more responive to the people. That is able to curb some of its opulence. That can be less thieving and more service oriented and that is headed by a true ’servant leader’ who models behaviour for the masses to emulate, we will have a public that is well behaved, investor friendly and at peace with themselves and their neighbours.

Politicians can not keep having 300 million naira weddings, multi-million naira wedding anniversary bashes, long convoys of cars that regularly get involved in fatal crashes killing hapless pedestrians and multiple guest houses maintained at public expense. We can not be having a multi billion FIFA fiesta when we have majority of our population living on less than a dollar a day. We can not spend 523 billion naira on a legislature that has produced only 523 laws that have had little impact in bringing the people out of poverty. We would have to remember that society is like a pyramid and the top flows down. Very important it is to remember that fish starts to get rotten from the head.

Also, we can not expect to take the lid of the pressure cooker that Nigerians are living in if we do not tackle the issue of free and fair elections. We need to allow people freely choose their own leaders. Leaders can not have genuine influence over their people if they are imposed on them. This is why we continue to see this disconnect between the leadership and the led were the led are suffering from crumbling social infrastructure and the leaders are accessing their social services (health care, education, banking, insurance) abroad. We need to implement the Justice Uwais Electoral Reform Committee’s recommendations chief of which is that the board and head of the INEC should not be appointed by the president but by the National Judicial Commission.

As it is with these crises, so it is with almost every aspect of our national life. In sports for instance, we perform woefully at a football, basket ball or volley ball tournament, or an Olympic games and the national mood is one of sadness. Everyone complains, but very soon, we forget about the let down and go about our normal activities and then the next tournament or Olympic games are around the corner and we start our usual ‘fire brigade’ preparations, always in crisis mode.

This is the same approach we took in the Niger Delta and now we have a full blown insurgency where we could have nipped this problem in the bud back in the 80s and 90s. We can not afford to have more Niger Delta crises around Nigeria.

Life is just like a farm, we can not plant a seed and refuse to water it, and go and play and make merry and just a few weeks to harvest time we come and start making hasty preparations, watering and manuring the crop at a time when it is too late to expect any yield from a farm that has been neglected for sooooooo long.

In closing I say to Nigeria’s current leaders that they have two choices. They can have a sober reflection on the ‘boko haram’ crisis and then do something tangible to address the causes of this incidence or they can bury their heads in the sand like the Ostrich ‘until the next crisis’.

Once again, God bless Nigeria.

PU

PS: This blog piece was published on my blog www.patitospost.com, two days before reports of the recent shiite protest/clashes in Kaduna resulted in deaths.

I just watched this http://www.youtube.com/afreports and I am very impressed with the depth of the analysis of Nigeria’s leadership prospects. I recommended this channel and will encourage Nigerian youths to take a deeper interest in becoming aware of the personalities, strengths and weakness of those who rule or desire to rule over them. PU

My reaction is at three levels.
At the very human level I am scandalized that friends and relations of any human can reduce his dignity as badly as they have handled the living body of this man. As one who has known him and met with him privately as recently as a few months ago my sense of human solidarity moves me to tears at what has been done to his right to some dignity when he is most vulnerable, Coming from those who profess to love him I can feel that in values they must belong to a different breed than I.
At the level of duty to country and to an oath of office I feel pain that it does not matter to some that the country they pledged to build has become the mother of all jokes from their actions. Nothing speaks more profoundly to the challenges of a patrimonial state than this experience. Pathetic though is the fact that the National Assembly does not move quickly enough with a strong resolution that removes this shame from us.
Finally i shudder that it matters little that some people are reducing the constitution to shreds and setting up an uneducated mass of the population to head down the road to Somalia. Civil society, fortunately, is geared to resist a dip into anarchy

PU

LAGOS—“WE are happy that Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua has become fit enough to travel, even if by air and land ambulances,” posits Professor Pat Utomi, “but, whether Yar’Adua is back or not, Acting President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan is still fully in charge as current leader of Nigeria and Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s armed forces!”

Professor Utomi’s assertion was part of a statement by the United Niger Delta Energy Development Security Strategy, UNDEDSS, the coalition of ethnic nationalities and civil society of the region, of which Utomi is its president.

The statement said that UNDEDSS felicitated with Alhaji Yar’Adua, his family and the nation on the visible step towards the full recovery of the missing Nigerian President, but noted that “the fact that his family still chooses to shroud everything concerning the President in secrecy, denying the Nigerian people free access to their ailing leader, strongly suggests that Yar’Adua is still incapacitated; and goes to further buttress the fact that Acting President Jonathan’s mandate is still fully in existence, and should not be trifled with by any persons or institutions.”

Script of opponents of democracy

UNDEDSS Secretary-General, Mr. Tony I. Uranta, in the statement further castigated Yar’Adua’s media aide, Segun Adeniyi, for “deliberately playing to the script of opponents of democracy and rule-of-law in Nigeria, by persistently and insultingly referring to Acting President Jonathan as ‘the Vice-President’ in his address to the media; where he claimed that Yar’Adua thanked the Acting President and National Assembly for holding fort for him whilst he was AWOL!

He said: “It is regrettable that a professional journalist of Adeniyi’s supposed standing should so soon lose the integrity and ethics he was putatively noted for, prior to his appointment to the Presidency.

Because not only does Dr. Jonathan enjoy the full confidence and mandate of the common people, the judiciary and the legislature of Nigeria, he has been further mandated, in the capacity of Acting President of Nigeria, to lead the sub-region of West Africa; and has been so duly recognized in both national and sub-regional capacities by the international comity of nations. Adeniyi and his fellow-travellers in obtuse denial should wake up and smell the coffee!”

UNDEDSS declared that “until, and unless, Acting President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan has the mandate bestowed upon him, to lead Nigeria, rescinded as stipulated for, by due process, he remains Nigeria’s leader; and any attempt to subvert his authority, whether overtly, covertly or by insidious means, must be seen, and treated, as what it is!”

Now that Vice President Goodluck Jonathan has assumed the presidency albeit in an acting capacity, it is now his responsibility to set the machinery of government moving again because we all are aware that government business almost ground to a halt since President Yar’adua departed the shores of Nigeria in November, 2009. This is not a piece in which I want to use too many words because there is a lot of work to be done. I would like to encourage the Acting President to without further ado implement the recommended reforms of the Justice Uwais Electoral reform Committee. If this is the only thing Jonathan can do, he would have written his name in stone because Nigerians are and have for a long time being alienated from their government because those in power have not been those they voted into office. And as I have said previously on this blog, so long as people in power do not owe their loyalties to those over whom they rule, they will never rule with them in mind. Rather they would be in government to serve the purposes of the godfathers and cabals that put them in office.

And Jonathan has stated what that cabal can do. He can not pretend to be unaware that the power cabal that has stagnated Nigeria’s progress was actually against his ascension and fought tooth and nail to prevent it. While this was going on, Jonathan knows how they treated him-with disdain and contempt. If he should bother to ask himself why they treated him thus, he would realize that the reason is because they do not owe their rise to power to the electorate or to constitutionality, but to conspiracies and imposition and therefore a constitutional ascension to power (as was demanded by the Nigerian masses) was a threat to them.

Now having been a victim, Acting President Jonathan now stands in a unique position to make sure that he is the last victim by initiating the process of full and complete electoral reform based on the doctrine of one man one vote and that every vote must count. Understandably, Goodluck is part of a team that came about via ‘do or die elections’ but he must have seen what the principal beneficiary of the ‘do or die’ election-president Umaru Yar’adua- did to the one who executed the ‘do or die elections’ in his favour-ex president Obasanjo-. This should show Jonathan that even the one who shepherds a do or die election is eventually consumed by it. It is simply not worth it to trample on the people’s will. Acting President Goodluck Jonathan has been blessed by God, through very little effort of his own he has risen from an assistant director in OMPADEC in 1998 to Deputy Governor, Governor, Vice President and now President. Perhaps God is trying to tell him something!

Goodluck should take a cue from the late President Harry S. Truman who saw his miraculous ascension to office in April, 1945 as an opportunity to right the wrongs of the world. It would be recalled that Harry S Truman presided over the end of World War 2, halted the spread of Communism via the ‘Truman Doctrine of Containment’ and rebuilt a devastated Europe via the unprecedented ‘Marshall Plan’. Acting President Goodluck may very well want to take a cue from such a man who rose to power under circumstances similar to his to halt the trend of impunity associated with theft of elections and institute the ‘Uwais Electoral Reforms”. He may also want to take a cue from Truman and implement a Marshall Plan for the Niger Delta to compensate them for the years of injustice and thus once and for all halt the militancy that has been in that region ever since Isaac Adaka Boro left Unilag to take up arms in the swamps of the Niger Delta. If Acting President Goodluck Jonathan can do these two things, he would have written his name in gold and would have justified the favour that God has given him by miraculously promoting him even without any effort of his own.

Furthermore, Jonathan can like Truman preside over the end of conflicts and wars in Nigeria by reducing tension in the country. He should work with the National Assembly’s constitution Amendment Committee to fast track the work of  amending our constitution to completely eradicate the citizen/settler dichotomy. Every Nigerian born and resident in any place in Nigeria should be able to lay claim to that place as his place of origin. It is ridiculous to expect an Hausa man born and raised in Lagos to go back to the North to contest elective office. He should be able to do so where he resides and vice versa for an Igbo man born in Kano. Nigeria has retrogressed in being our brother’s keeper since the unfortunate civil war of 1967-1970. People forget that in pre independence Nigeria, Nnamdi Azikiwe won election in Ibadan or that Malam Umaru Altine was the first elected Mayor of Enugu or that Felix Okonkwo was a member of the Northern House of chiefs. Jonathan is in a privilege position to push the National Assembly to end this dichotomy so that we NEVER see the type of bloodshed we experienced in Jos last month.

Finally, it will bring down tension in the country and foster national reconciliation if Acting President Goodluck Jonathan can discontinue all politically motivated trials. People like Nasir El Rufai and Nuhu Ribadu should not be facing the obviously trumped up charges against them while someone like James Ibori parades Nigeria as a godfather. It simply is not right. Their trials and any trials initiated for political purposes should be discontinued and they should be allowed to return to Nigeria to participate in Nation Building. If Jonathan can find the political will to do this, he will find that Nigerians will also find a place in their hearts for him as they did for heroes like Murtala Mohammed.

Once again, God Bless Nigeria.

PU.

ABSENCE OF PRESIDENT YAR’ADUA : Why Nigeria is an unserious nation, by Pat Utomi

Interview Feb 7, 2010

* Says the enlightened world has forgotten about Nigeria
*Insists a clique is just holding Nigeria down

Professor Pat Utomi is a rare individual and many would agree. But he is also a concerned Nigerian. His shot at the presidency in 2007 was considered a fool’s errand in some quarters – a wasted effort – but the man believes and, therefore, insists that it was one wonderful experience which has touched and continues to touch many lives. How?  It is about changing the mind set of the leaders of tomorrow, making them realize that Nigeria can not get anywhere with the present template on which it is governed.

But Utomi, in this interview says he attempted once, to rally a group of young Nigerians in different fields of endeavour, and got the shock of his life.  He had called a meeting of some successful professionals and business men, while not leaving out the politicians too. And hear him:  “Half way through the meeting I discovered that I was in a lot of trouble because one of the governors in attendance just chipped in – it was supposed to be a joke but it also showed how the mind was working: “see as we full here no babes”. And I just said “Oh! God, it can’t be this bad”. “In any case, another meeting was scheduled for Benin and I said to myself that I was not going to be part of this babe business. (laughs)

“I didn’t show up at Benin and it was at Benin that the name Under 50 came in. Aliko and Donald then called me and I told them what my reservations were and they said it would not be like that again and another meeting was scheduled for Jos, Governor Joshua Dariye at that time was supposed to host it. “I quickly set to work, for three weeks, on all kinds of subject matter, writing position papers and all that and all that, preparing for this important meeting. “So, I went to Jos and everybody showed up including governors in their sixties, whether you were 60 or 20 years old people just showed up in Jos.

“It was seen as a political movement and after Jos, I just forgot about everything.” How fast dreams die in Nigeria. But he says he’s not about to give up. He speaks on the controversy generated by the President’s long absence from home and confesses that “You know I found the matter to be a very simple one in the beginning; very simple.  But it also just tells us that the people who are running Nigeria are just running Nigeria for themselves and not for us the people.  It is about the inordinate manifestation of a patrimonial state.  Even a semblance of their not being in control of power says to them that their opportunity of not being in charge is about to be eroded or possible reduced.  Look, I’ve worked in so many places in my life and I’ve not even ever thought of it like this.  I take it for granted that when I’m going off for just even one day, my deputy continues the job”
Excerpts:

By Jide Ajani, Deputy Editor & Anthonia Onwuka

As part of the group which met in Lagos to respond to the present situation of a president in absentia, what informed the meeting?  You spoke on behalf of the group?
I’ve been meeting with quite a number of people long ago on various issues that raise the consciousness of Nigerians and how to make the society a better place.  I have children and I would want them to live in a country that is far better than what we have an unfortunate situation where the elite class is not so interested any more; just one that wants to make a little money, send the children abroad for education and if possible never to come back to this country.

My children go to school away from here because of the conditions in Nigerian universities.  My son who finished in May is back in the country doing youth service.  Another one who finished in January will be back in the country by tomorrow and would also serve here. I believe in Nigeria.  You know I don’t have a room, not a house, a room, outside of Nigeria.  I would even like Mrs. Waziri to investigate me.

Somebody who came to this Lagos Business School, LBS, the wife of a former managing director of the Nigeria Ports Authority, wanted to know and was wondering about Opus Dei, and the connection it has with the LBS and how it was founded by members of Opus Dei got together to form the LBS and the women expressed amazement and said ‘ha! I thought it was the money you made from Volkswagen that you have brought back to the country to open LBS’ and I just laughed.

You know, many years ago, just the week after I left Volkswagen, I couldn’t afford to buy a 17KVA generator, all the money I had I couldn’t afford it. But in Nigeria it is difficult for people to believe that when you’ve occupied such a position you wouldn’t have stashed away money.  Just after I left Volkswagen, I read in one of the soft sell magazines about Nigerians who must have stashed money abroad and I saw my name I laughed.  The truth then was that as at that time of the publication, all I had to my name anywhere in the world was just $2,800. In good conscience I am a committed Nigerian.  So my children deserve to live in a better society and that is why I fight so that we can create a better society.

Some people say you are a restless person?
Well, maybe.  I have this capacity to associate with the lowest of the lows and the mightiest of the mighty; and even the good, the bad and the ugly – it is just my nature. I belong to a number of groups and most of which I’ve founded and some I associate with fully.

Okay, back to this Yar’Adua business, how did you come about speaking for the group?
You know I found the matter to be a very simple one in the beginning; very simple. But it also just tells us that the people who are running Nigeria are running Nigeria for themselves and not for us the people.  It is about the inordinate manifestation of a patrimonial state.  Even a semblance of their not being in control of power says to them that their opportunity of not being in charge is about to be eroded or possibly reduced. Look, I’ve worked in so many places in my life and I’ve not even ever thought of it like this.  I take it for granted that when I’m going off for just even one day, my deputy continues the job.

So, when this thing started, I just didn’t think much of it as constituting any problem at all, I just thought it is a routine thing and I even said to some of my friends who were trying to organize things that this is nothing at all, until I really found out that these guys were just interested in holding on to power for as long as they wanted and nothing else really mattered to them any longer.

For them, it is just all about who would sign oil contracts, who would do this or that and it killed my spirit because this is a country that has failed to live up to something and now, this.  Instead of all of us being obsessed on how we can revive it, we are here messing up.

There was a time when the global survey began to write off Nigeria as a nation of consequence and at that time, things were not really this bad?
This global survey thing, when they said it some years ago that Nigeria was beginning to lose it and that Nigeria was on the path to being a failed state, instead, we started abusing the people.  The best thing we could have done or started doing to demonstrate that we were a serious people would have been to brace up, meet as a people and begin to find ways of getting out of that situation and avert it, but we just carried on as usual and abused them.

The next survey that they did, I was one of those invited to come and do the review in Sweden, to review the document, and by then they had discountenanced Nigeria as a country of any strategic influence or consequence.  They had already moved on and beyond the point of even thinking about Nigeria again.  They had adjusted to the fact that Nigeria was no more part of it, a country of no significance on the continent of Africa, they had adjusted to that and were moving on and yet, we are here where a few people are more concerned about who would sign oil contracts or who would approve this or that.  That is our own concern now.

That was then?
That was then; not now that we have this situation on our hands.

One of your engagements then was this ‘Under 50’ group that you attempted to midwife sometime ago.  Wouldn’t you, too, be accused of abandoning a project?  What became of it?
I started the whole bloody nonsense

Yes!  I know.  I think the first meeting took place in the residence of Alhaji Aliko Dangote?
Yes!  In Aliko Dangote’s house over there.

My question is, why did it fail and how does that failure fall into that paradigm of Nigerians not being serious enough to do any good, even for themselves?  I have an idea of what happened and my source told me, while preparing for this interview to get the real truth why it failed?
You know, that was for me the ultimate signal of our being unserious and the sign that we were in grave danger.

This was what happened some 10 years ago – at least things were not as terrible as they are now?
Yes!  This was then so you can imagine how bad things have become now. The idea wasn’t age as such because people tried to call it under 50. What happened was that I was attending a summit, it was called a Euro-Africa Summit; it was hosted in France by one of the country’s Prime Ministers (who is now late).  He showed personal concern for Africa so I was invited.

There were so many African heads of state there; I was actually seated next to Blaise Campaore then and those meetings are usually confidential, this was some 12 years ago. There was a remark made by the former Ugandan Foreign Minister, Olara Otunnu, who said all this noise and excitement about South Africa; that he doesn’t know what they’re talking about.  He said once we get Nigeria right, we’ll get Africa right.  He spoke so passionately about the state of affairs in Nigeria in achieving the African dream.

He got me thinking that if a foreigner could talk so passionately about Nigeria, then we Nigerians owe it to ourselves to get things right.

When I got back to Nigeria, I started talking to a lot of people, after writing a list of bright Nigerian guys from different endeavours – from business, the likes of Fola Adeola, human rights, Olisa Agbakoba and so on and even from the military.

The idea was to get at least 72 Nigerians who were young and who could begin to re-engineer the process of nation building from their different spheres.  Even identify a few people in politics without holding office, and even politicians who were office holders, like Donald Duke, the late Waziri Mohammed, in business, Aliko Dangote.

So, I began to share my vision and goal with them one by one and we’ll all go for a retreat and we’ll invite Olara Otunnu to give the kick off talk, so that people will know what burden history will place on us as a people and nation.

So, one day I was in a meeting in one of those committees I was serving on when Waziri called me and said there was a Southern Governors’ Forum meeting going on in Akodo, in Lagos.  He said we could take advantage of that and meet with the governors; that Aliko had agreed that we could hold it in his house. I moved straight from the meeting venue, I didn’t go to my hotel room, I just moved straight to the airport and I landed in Lagos. So, we met in Aliko’s house and some of the governors were there – James Ibori, Donald Duke, Orji Kalu and a number of them were around.

Half way through the meeting I discovered that I was in a lot of trouble because one of the governors in attendance just chipped in – it was supposed to be a joke but it also showed how the mind was working: “see as we full here no babes”.

And I just said “Oh! God, it can’t be this bad”. In any case, another meeting was scheduled for Benin and I said to myself that I was not going to be part of this babe business. (laughs) I didn’t show up at Benin and it was at Benin that the name Under 50 came in.

Aliko and Donald then called me and I told them what my reservations were and they said it would not be like that again and another meeting was scheduled for Jos, Governor Joshua Dariye at that time was supposed to host it. I quickly set to work, for three weeks, on all kinds of subject matter, writing position papers and all that and all that, preparing for this important meeting.

So, I went to Jos and everybody showed up including governors in their 60s, whether you were 60 or 20 years old people just showed up in Jos. It was seen as a political movement and after Jos, I just forgot about everything.

Some people look at you and wonder what you’ve been up to since the 2007 elections which you contested on the platform of the ADC?
Of all the people who ran for office in 2007 and who are not in office, I probably would be the most active of all and I set out to do certain things, specific goals were set.

Which type of goals did you go about setting for yourself?
The goal of institution building, the type of thing our country desperately needs at a time like this – the need to build institutions that would endure. Unfortunately for us in Nigeria, our institutions are very weak and this has had terrible impact and the Nigerian economy has been referred to as a recursive economy – two steps forward four steps backwards over the years.

The reason that happens is because the institutions of the market are very weak in Nigerian because when you start a reform and it looks like there is some progress, weak institutions lead you to begin to retrogress in no time.

In my view, although subconsciously, SAP was more or less sabotaged by weak institutions that did not allow then policy choices that were made to have long term sustainable fruitfulness. So, I committed myself to institution building in different ways.  At one of the dinners I held to try and mobilize young people, I said as we spoke that night, President Barrack Obama of the United States of America was airborne on his way to Ghana and not Nigeria and the reason is because our institutions are not strong enough and Nigeria believes in strong men over strong institution – it was an evidence of how our weak institutions have reduced Nigeria to nothing in the comity of nations.

The following morning in Ghana, Obama used almost exactly the same words I used in saying that Africa needs strong institutions and not strong men. And in the months immediately after the 2007 elections I started harping on this and doing specific things rather than just talk, I did specific things.  I tried to support the pro-democracy movement to strengthen its resolve but most importantly, part of my work that is often understated is the amount of time I spend with groups, youth groups all over the country, trying to fill them with words of inspiration on nation building and the need not to give up but on the need to transform this country – it is by the Grace of God and the gift of a particular kind of family that they have not been complaining loudly.  I’ve been all around from Kano to Yenegoa, continuously dealing with the issues of the day and the need to let them realize that what we have today can not get us anywhere at all.

As you move round and talk to this young people, there must be one common denominator you would have found?
Yes.  At times on the one hand you observe this sense of exhaustion in them, of frustration by the system, but there are a lot of them who do realize it too, that these people also know that the system as it is now can not get us anywhere.
One of the interesting feedbacks I’ve been getting is, for instance, from LEAP Africa, an NGO interested in building the young and building entrepreneurship; the NGO has been moving round the country too and when they get to some places and ask the youths who one of their role models is or what their idea of leadership mean, they mention my name and for me that gives me hope that gradually, we’re getting somewhere with what we’ve been trying to do.  Ndidi Onwuneli is the founder of LEAP Africa and she tells me that she wonders where such young people have come in contact with me.

I myself I’m not sure how that has happened but we must understand that public life is not about yourself or acquisition of wealth, it is about service to others.

For somebody like you, why has it been very difficult for you to find good space in the polity?  Even before you eventually got the presidential ticket of the African Democratic Party, ADC, you’d tried some other platforms but you could still not get good space.  Why is it that people like you don’t find that needed space to do good?
What has happened and I keep making this point to middle class people and professionals is that a lot of people have played the ostrich and we have all abandoned the need to do the right thing; we leave the space to the politicians and say let us go and mind our four wheel drives and mind our houses and let’s leave these funny characters who are in politics to keep doing their thing.

There’s a story of a friend I always like to tell, a Liberian with whom I was in school in the United States, a friend of mind who became Liberia’s ambassador at some point, his name is Seyranius Fore, Fy, as we call him, rushed back to Liberia in 1979 or 1980.

When he became ambassador to Nigeria, I had just returned after my PhD but by that time Liberia was almost gone.  He used to tell me that ‘you Nigerians amaze me, you’re spending a lot of money and losing a lot of lives trying to save our people but it appears as if you people are not learning anything from what we’re going through’. He said in those days, they would ignore and refuse to pay attention to what the politicians and the soldiers were doing, that they were more interested in protecting their individual comfort zones until it got to a point when someone would just stop them on the way and dispossess them of the car and they would start thanking God that at least ‘we’re not dead’.

Then even the house, it was taken away and they found themselves in refugee camps, struggling for food with beggars and yet, they would thank God that as bad as it is, they are still alive.  He said we ought to move out of our comfort zones and be part of the process.

Societies that make progress, it is the middle class that populate the polity and engage in politics.  Obama was a constitutional lawyer, same goes for Bill Clinton. Ambassador Joe Keshi, Nigeria’s Counsel General in Georgia gave a remarkable example of a man who sought the governorship of a state but lost and by the following week he was right back at his desk working in his law chambers, within one week.

But these fellows who have nothing else to do, they just populate the polity and look for what to grab.  To them that’s what makes them big men, so we have this type of polarized state.

So, for me, part of what I’ve been doing is to work my talk, and not just talking alone.  Except we get involved in this thing we may not get anywhere. I mean, look at Nigeria of today, we no longer have intelligent discussions on matters again.  You get gullible people who respond to any populist comment by somebody in power and the next day people are in their comfort zones or bedrooms complaining about what that gullible fellow said but the truth of the matter is that that gullible fellow, people had always known him to be gullible and people are also aware that he couldn’t have made any other better statement than that and that this was going to be the consequence.

We have petrol queues now and people are saying ‘ha! We have petrol queues’. But I said in August last year that by this time we were going to have petrol queues, at least judging from how government was being run then. Until we can manage to create think-tanks and people who know and who have evidence are ready to discuss and engage people and chart the way forward.

In the last 20 years, Nigeria has not grown at all – we have grown at 0.00% in the last 20 years and this is a consequence of the types of choices that our central bank has been making and I’m not just talking about yesterday or recently, I’m talking about 20 years back.

CBN sabotaged SAP, not because they meant to but because the institution was not strong enough to make the right choices for us as a people and as a nation.  So, until we build institutions and grow them, we may never get there; that is the truth of the matter.

ABSENCE OF PRESIDENT YAR’ADUA : Why Nigeria is an unserious nation, by Pat Utomi

Interview Feb 7, 2010

* Says the enlightened world has forgotten about Nigeria
*Insists a clique is just holding Nigeria down

Professor Pat Utomi is a rare individual and many would agree. But he is also a concerned Nigerian. His shot at the presidency in 2007 was considered a fool’s errand in some quarters – a wasted effort – but the man believes and, therefore, insists that it was one wonderful experience which has touched and continues to touch many lives. How?  It is about changing the mind set of the leaders of tomorrow, making them realize that Nigeria can not get anywhere with the present template on which it is governed.

But Utomi, in this interview says he attempted once, to rally a group of young Nigerians in different fields of endeavour, and got the shock of his life.  He had called a meeting of some successful professionals and business men, while not leaving out the politicians too. And hear him:  “Half way through the meeting I discovered that I was in a lot of trouble because one of the governors in attendance just chipped in – it was supposed to be a joke but it also showed how the mind was working: “see as we full here no babes”. And I just said “Oh! God, it can’t be this bad”. “In any case, another meeting was scheduled for Benin and I said to myself that I was not going to be part of this babe business. (laughs)

“I didn’t show up at Benin and it was at Benin that the name Under 50 came in. Aliko and Donald then called me and I told them what my reservations were and they said it would not be like that again and another meeting was scheduled for Jos, Governor Joshua Dariye at that time was supposed to host it. “I quickly set to work, for three weeks, on all kinds of subject matter, writing position papers and all that and all that, preparing for this important meeting. “So, I went to Jos and everybody showed up including governors in their sixties, whether you were 60 or 20 years old people just showed up in Jos.

“It was seen as a political movement and after Jos, I just forgot about everything.” How fast dreams die in Nigeria. But he says he’s not about to give up. He speaks on the controversy generated by the President’s long absence from home and confesses that “You know I found the matter to be a very simple one in the beginning; very simple.  But it also just tells us that the people who are running Nigeria are just running Nigeria for themselves and not for us the people.  It is about the inordinate manifestation of a patrimonial state.  Even a semblance of their not being in control of power says to them that their opportunity of not being in charge is about to be eroded or possible reduced.  Look, I’ve worked in so many places in my life and I’ve not even ever thought of it like this.  I take it for granted that when I’m going off for just even one day, my deputy continues the job”
Excerpts:

By Jide Ajani, Deputy Editor & Anthonia Onwuka

As part of the group which met in Lagos to respond to the present situation of a president in absentia, what informed the meeting?  You spoke on behalf of the group?
I’ve been meeting with quite a number of people long ago on various issues that raise the consciousness of Nigerians and how to make the society a better place.  I have children and I would want them to live in a country that is far better than what we have an unfortunate situation where the elite class is not so interested any more; just one that wants to make a little money, send the children abroad for education and if possible never to come back to this country.

My children go to school away from here because of the conditions in Nigerian universities.  My son who finished in May is back in the country doing youth service.  Another one who finished in January will be back in the country by tomorrow and would also serve here. I believe in Nigeria.  You know I don’t have a room, not a house, a room, outside of Nigeria.  I would even like Mrs. Waziri to investigate me.

Somebody who came to this Lagos Business School, LBS, the wife of a former managing director of the Nigeria Ports Authority, wanted to know and was wondering about Opus Dei, and the connection it has with the LBS and how it was founded by members of Opus Dei got together to form the LBS and the women expressed amazement and said ‘ha! I thought it was the money you made from Volkswagen that you have brought back to the country to open LBS’ and I just laughed.

You know, many years ago, just the week after I left Volkswagen, I couldn’t afford to buy a 17KVA generator, all the money I had I couldn’t afford it. But in Nigeria it is difficult for people to believe that when you’ve occupied such a position you wouldn’t have stashed away money.  Just after I left Volkswagen, I read in one of the soft sell magazines about Nigerians who must have stashed money abroad and I saw my name I laughed.  The truth then was that as at that time of the publication, all I had to my name anywhere in the world was just $2,800. In good conscience I am a committed Nigerian.  So my children deserve to live in a better society and that is why I fight so that we can create a better society.

Some people say you are a restless person?
Well, maybe.  I have this capacity to associate with the lowest of the lows and the mightiest of the mighty; and even the good, the bad and the ugly – it is just my nature. I belong to a number of groups and most of which I’ve founded and some I associate with fully.

Okay, back to this Yar’Adua business, how did you come about speaking for the group?
You know I found the matter to be a very simple one in the beginning; very simple. But it also just tells us that the people who are running Nigeria are running Nigeria for themselves and not for us the people.  It is about the inordinate manifestation of a patrimonial state.  Even a semblance of their not being in control of power says to them that their opportunity of not being in charge is about to be eroded or possibly reduced. Look, I’ve worked in so many places in my life and I’ve not even ever thought of it like this.  I take it for granted that when I’m going off for just even one day, my deputy continues the job.

So, when this thing started, I just didn’t think much of it as constituting any problem at all, I just thought it is a routine thing and I even said to some of my friends who were trying to organize things that this is nothing at all, until I really found out that these guys were just interested in holding on to power for as long as they wanted and nothing else really mattered to them any longer.

For them, it is just all about who would sign oil contracts, who would do this or that and it killed my spirit because this is a country that has failed to live up to something and now, this.  Instead of all of us being obsessed on how we can revive it, we are here messing up.

There was a time when the global survey began to write off Nigeria as a nation of consequence and at that time, things were not really this bad?
This global survey thing, when they said it some years ago that Nigeria was beginning to lose it and that Nigeria was on the path to being a failed state, instead, we started abusing the people.  The best thing we could have done or started doing to demonstrate that we were a serious people would have been to brace up, meet as a people and begin to find ways of getting out of that situation and avert it, but we just carried on as usual and abused them.

The next survey that they did, I was one of those invited to come and do the review in Sweden, to review the document, and by then they had discountenanced Nigeria as a country of any strategic influence or consequence.  They had already moved on and beyond the point of even thinking about Nigeria again.  They had adjusted to the fact that Nigeria was no more part of it, a country of no significance on the continent of Africa, they had adjusted to that and were moving on and yet, we are here where a few people are more concerned about who would sign oil contracts or who would approve this or that.  That is our own concern now.

That was then?
That was then; not now that we have this situation on our hands.

One of your engagements then was this ‘Under 50’ group that you attempted to midwife sometime ago.  Wouldn’t you, too, be accused of abandoning a project?  What became of it?
I started the whole bloody nonsense

Yes!  I know.  I think the first meeting took place in the residence of Alhaji Aliko Dangote?
Yes!  In Aliko Dangote’s house over there.

My question is, why did it fail and how does that failure fall into that paradigm of Nigerians not being serious enough to do any good, even for themselves?  I have an idea of what happened and my source told me, while preparing for this interview to get the real truth why it failed?
You know, that was for me the ultimate signal of our being unserious and the sign that we were in grave danger.

This was what happened some 10 years ago – at least things were not as terrible as they are now?
Yes!  This was then so you can imagine how bad things have become now. The idea wasn’t age as such because people tried to call it under 50. What happened was that I was attending a summit, it was called a Euro-Africa Summit; it was hosted in France by one of the country’s Prime Ministers (who is now late).  He showed personal concern for Africa so I was invited.

There were so many African heads of state there; I was actually seated next to Blaise Campaore then and those meetings are usually confidential, this was some 12 years ago. There was a remark made by the former Ugandan Foreign Minister, Olara Otunnu, who said all this noise and excitement about South Africa; that he doesn’t know what they’re talking about.  He said once we get Nigeria right, we’ll get Africa right.  He spoke so passionately about the state of affairs in Nigeria in achieving the African dream.

He got me thinking that if a foreigner could talk so passionately about Nigeria, then we Nigerians owe it to ourselves to get things right.

When I got back to Nigeria, I started talking to a lot of people, after writing a list of bright Nigerian guys from different endeavours – from business, the likes of Fola Adeola, human rights, Olisa Agbakoba and so on and even from the military.

The idea was to get at least 72 Nigerians who were young and who could begin to re-engineer the process of nation building from their different spheres.  Even identify a few people in politics without holding office, and even politicians who were office holders, like Donald Duke, the late Waziri Mohammed, in business, Aliko Dangote.

So, I began to share my vision and goal with them one by one and we’ll all go for a retreat and we’ll invite Olara Otunnu to give the kick off talk, so that people will know what burden history will place on us as a people and nation.

So, one day I was in a meeting in one of those committees I was serving on when Waziri called me and said there was a Southern Governors’ Forum meeting going on in Akodo, in Lagos.  He said we could take advantage of that and meet with the governors; that Aliko had agreed that we could hold it in his house. I moved straight from the meeting venue, I didn’t go to my hotel room, I just moved straight to the airport and I landed in Lagos. So, we met in Aliko’s house and some of the governors were there – James Ibori, Donald Duke, Orji Kalu and a number of them were around.

Half way through the meeting I discovered that I was in a lot of trouble because one of the governors in attendance just chipped in – it was supposed to be a joke but it also showed how the mind was working: “see as we full here no babes”.

And I just said “Oh! God, it can’t be this bad”. In any case, another meeting was scheduled for Benin and I said to myself that I was not going to be part of this babe business. (laughs) I didn’t show up at Benin and it was at Benin that the name Under 50 came in.

Aliko and Donald then called me and I told them what my reservations were and they said it would not be like that again and another meeting was scheduled for Jos, Governor Joshua Dariye at that time was supposed to host it. I quickly set to work, for three weeks, on all kinds of subject matter, writing position papers and all that and all that, preparing for this important meeting.

So, I went to Jos and everybody showed up including governors in their 60s, whether you were 60 or 20 years old people just showed up in Jos. It was seen as a political movement and after Jos, I just forgot about everything.

Some people look at you and wonder what you’ve been up to since the 2007 elections which you contested on the platform of the ADC?
Of all the people who ran for office in 2007 and who are not in office, I probably would be the most active of all and I set out to do certain things, specific goals were set.

Which type of goals did you go about setting for yourself?
The goal of institution building, the type of thing our country desperately needs at a time like this – the need to build institutions that would endure. Unfortunately for us in Nigeria, our institutions are very weak and this has had terrible impact and the Nigerian economy has been referred to as a recursive economy – two steps forward four steps backwards over the years.

The reason that happens is because the institutions of the market are very weak in Nigerian because when you start a reform and it looks like there is some progress, weak institutions lead you to begin to retrogress in no time.

In my view, although subconsciously, SAP was more or less sabotaged by weak institutions that did not allow then policy choices that were made to have long term sustainable fruitfulness. So, I committed myself to institution building in different ways.  At one of the dinners I held to try and mobilize young people, I said as we spoke that night, President Barrack Obama of the United States of America was airborne on his way to Ghana and not Nigeria and the reason is because our institutions are not strong enough and Nigeria believes in strong men over strong institution – it was an evidence of how our weak institutions have reduced Nigeria to nothing in the comity of nations.

The following morning in Ghana, Obama used almost exactly the same words I used in saying that Africa needs strong institutions and not strong men. And in the months immediately after the 2007 elections I started harping on this and doing specific things rather than just talk, I did specific things.  I tried to support the pro-democracy movement to strengthen its resolve but most importantly, part of my work that is often understated is the amount of time I spend with groups, youth groups all over the country, trying to fill them with words of inspiration on nation building and the need not to give up but on the need to transform this country – it is by the Grace of God and the gift of a particular kind of family that they have not been complaining loudly.  I’ve been all around from Kano to Yenegoa, continuously dealing with the issues of the day and the need to let them realize that what we have today can not get us anywhere at all.

As you move round and talk to this young people, there must be one common denominator you would have found?
Yes.  At times on the one hand you observe this sense of exhaustion in them, of frustration by the system, but there are a lot of them who do realize it too, that these people also know that the system as it is now can not get us anywhere.
One of the interesting feedbacks I’ve been getting is, for instance, from LEAP Africa, an NGO interested in building the young and building entrepreneurship; the NGO has been moving round the country too and when they get to some places and ask the youths who one of their role models is or what their idea of leadership mean, they mention my name and for me that gives me hope that gradually, we’re getting somewhere with what we’ve been trying to do.  Ndidi Onwuneli is the founder of LEAP Africa and she tells me that she wonders where such young people have come in contact with me.

I myself I’m not sure how that has happened but we must understand that public life is not about yourself or acquisition of wealth, it is about service to others.

For somebody like you, why has it been very difficult for you to find good space in the polity?  Even before you eventually got the presidential ticket of the African Democratic Party, ADC, you’d tried some other platforms but you could still not get good space.  Why is it that people like you don’t find that needed space to do good?
What has happened and I keep making this point to middle class people and professionals is that a lot of people have played the ostrich and we have all abandoned the need to do the right thing; we leave the space to the politicians and say let us go and mind our four wheel drives and mind our houses and let’s leave these funny characters who are in politics to keep doing their thing.

There’s a story of a friend I always like to tell, a Liberian with whom I was in school in the United States, a friend of mind who became Liberia’s ambassador at some point, his name is Seyranius Fore, Fy, as we call him, rushed back to Liberia in 1979 or 1980.

When he became ambassador to Nigeria, I had just returned after my PhD but by that time Liberia was almost gone.  He used to tell me that ‘you Nigerians amaze me, you’re spending a lot of money and losing a lot of lives trying to save our people but it appears as if you people are not learning anything from what we’re going through’. He said in those days, they would ignore and refuse to pay attention to what the politicians and the soldiers were doing, that they were more interested in protecting their individual comfort zones until it got to a point when someone would just stop them on the way and dispossess them of the car and they would start thanking God that at least ‘we’re not dead’.

Then even the house, it was taken away and they found themselves in refugee camps, struggling for food with beggars and yet, they would thank God that as bad as it is, they are still alive.  He said we ought to move out of our comfort zones and be part of the process.

Societies that make progress, it is the middle class that populate the polity and engage in politics.  Obama was a constitutional lawyer, same goes for Bill Clinton. Ambassador Joe Keshi, Nigeria’s Counsel General in Georgia gave a remarkable example of a man who sought the governorship of a state but lost and by the following week he was right back at his desk working in his law chambers, within one week.

But these fellows who have nothing else to do, they just populate the polity and look for what to grab.  To them that’s what makes them big men, so we have this type of polarized state.

So, for me, part of what I’ve been doing is to work my talk, and not just talking alone.  Except we get involved in this thing we may not get anywhere. I mean, look at Nigeria of today, we no longer have intelligent discussions on matters again.  You get gullible people who respond to any populist comment by somebody in power and the next day people are in their comfort zones or bedrooms complaining about what that gullible fellow said but the truth of the matter is that that gullible fellow, people had always known him to be gullible and people are also aware that he couldn’t have made any other better statement than that and that this was going to be the consequence.

We have petrol queues now and people are saying ‘ha! We have petrol queues’. But I said in August last year that by this time we were going to have petrol queues, at least judging from how government was being run then. Until we can manage to create think-tanks and people who know and who have evidence are ready to discuss and engage people and chart the way forward.

In the last 20 years, Nigeria has not grown at all – we have grown at 0.00% in the last 20 years and this is a consequence of the types of choices that our central bank has been making and I’m not just talking about yesterday or recently, I’m talking about 20 years back.

CBN sabotaged SAP, not because they meant to but because the institution was not strong enough to make the right choices for us as a people and as a nation.  So, until we build institutions and grow them, we may never get there; that is the truth of the matter.

Do you see hope in this country?
Yes!  If there’s no hope then you’re dead