I Could Make More Money As a Politician if Money Becomes My Motivation

I could make more money as a politician if money becomes my motivation

Prof. Pat Okedinachi Utomi, Political-Economist, author and teacher was in 2007 the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Party, ADC. That contest was what could be called the real baptism of fire for the renowned intellectual. Since then, he has soldiered on, building alliances with opposition political forces in the country, from the likes of Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, Bola Ahmed Tinubu to Chief Olu Falae. Utomi, the current presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Mega Party is totally pissed off with the situation of things in Nigeria, particularly, the high unemployment rate and the seeming rudderlessness of the country in the commity of nations. He strongly believes that unless something drastic is done politically, to rescue Nigeria from this drift to failure, it may soon become a failed state. When GEOFFREY EKENNA met him in Ikoyi, Lagos, last Sunday, Utomi, was his usual self: slowly speaking, careful with words but combative in his dissection of the problems of Nigeria. He also outlined his vision for the country.

Let us start by asking you, what is your interest in Nigerian politics? With your academic background and deep knowledge of the economy, you could do better being a top player in the corporate world. Why politics?

I could make more money as a politician if money becomes my motivation. But my motivation is that I feel ashamed that the one country that has the capability of redeeming the failing image of a black man is frittering it away. You know, this Sudanese businessman, Mo Ibrahim was in town recently and in one of the meetings, somebody said, “look, is the option of Sudan not probably the best thing for us?”. That was giving by the way Nigeria has turned out. Sadly, the person who said that was a commissioner, a highly placed and outstanding gentleman. He said is that not a better way of getting Nigeria out of our mess?

That is dividing Nigeria, north and south?

Yes, whichever way but north and south is the easy way of looking at it. I am pained when I hear things like that, largely because, Nigeria is the biggest black nation in the world. If ever the image of the black man is to be redeemed, it is this country that can do that. Our people of intellect do not realise how important it is to prevent Nigeria from becoming a failed state and to make Nigeria a thriving, truly prosperous nation in which people are harmoniously co-existing. If you look at my history, I have always been involved. Public office as it is, doesn’t hold an attraction to me. There are people who are after power, money and all those things. Those things came very early in life for me. I have a bigger vision, maybe a big vision but small, because of what the current culture in Nigeria holds as important. That vision was to be a citizen in such a manner that other people, if they were responsible citizens, we will live together and make our country a place of enormous pride for any black man. Unfortunately, my reality has been moving in the other direction for quite a while. You will recall that early in my career, I got a shot at public life very, very early. I was just coming from graduate school, just 27 years old. You see, people don’t understand all these things; they judge you from their world view, what they normally do. They think your motivation is like theirs. When I came home from the United States, okay, 26 year old, PHD- what was Nigeria going to offer me? All of a sudden, in an attempt to be a citizen, out of nowhere, no godfather, nothing, I was just thrown into a political position.

How did that happen?

The story is one of those stories that show how different Nigeria is from those days. The particular issue that brought me into government was taxation, tax policy. I was particularly worried about Nigeria’s tax structure- issues of horizontal and vertical equity in taxation, the fact that we are not even developing a tax system that will make people interested in holding government to be accountable, because if you don’t pay taxes, you don’t hold government to account. I wrote about it in the Sunday Times then. It was Ray Ekpu that was editing the paper then. I was discussing with him and he said can you write about it. I did one or two pages in the Sunday Times. Dr. Alex Ekwueme was the Vice-President then. He had a support group called Friends of Alex Committee, FACOM, which was chaired by Chief Bayo Kuku. That group was already looking out for a kind of signals of the kind of people it could attract into a whole, that will ultimately drive an Ekwueme presidency, four years ahead. So, after I did the article, espousing all my idea, the FACOM people said how can we get that gentleman to come and do us some position papers on the issue of public policy . The secretary of FACOM then happened to be somebody I went to school with. He is called Obi Ume-Ezeoke. And Obi said, I know him and he got in touch with me. I was then brought to Dr. Ekwueme, who wanted me to do some papers on policy issues for him. I said, fine, I am a consultant. I have just come back from school and worked for a public policy consulting firm that was not usual in those days. I went and did the position papers and they were sent to Dr. Ekwueme and then, one Saturday Morning, Mrs. Omobola Onajide, who was a Special Assistant to Dr. Ekwueme, who was the liason to FACOM called me and said Dr. Ekwueme wanted to see me; that I should come and let’s go to his house. I went to Onajide’s house and we went to the vice-president’s house. When we got to the house, we were discussing the issues I have raised, what I have done for him and in the course of the conversation, very casually, he said, by the way President Shagari yesterday approved for you to replace Prof. Odenigwe as his adviser on Political Affairs. I stalked for a second because the issue had never been discussed. That was the second time I was meeting Dr. Ekwueme in my life and to say that the issue had been approved by the president without a discussion was shocking. So, I said, why. He turned to me and said look at these young boys, you said that we don’t know what we are doing and we tell you to come and do it and you are saying why. So, I said, let me go and think about it and he said okay. I was living at Bode Thomas as that time. A good friend of mine, Tony Nnacheta lived three doors away from me and as I was getting home, I saw him parking his car and I told him that I was just coming from Ikoyi Crescent and that I had a strange request to come and work for the government. He said, eh, what did you tell them. I said I told them I would think about it. He said, well, get into my car and let’s go and tell them that you have finished thinking about it. Of course I didn’t do that but that was how I went into government. No plans, no thinking of it. Of course, it was very short lived because the military struck just three months after. Now, since then, there have been several attempts to bring me into government. There are people who say that those who are reluctant to bring me into government are those who know I have said no many times. It is not absolutely correct but I have indeed said no. not no to the government, but no to the manner of being in government. Because there must be a purpose in being in government. How can we serve the people in such a manner as to improve the Nigerian condition? It is not about going to get a title. I don’t need to be called a minister because thank God, for his generosity. I don’t think there is any minister in Nigeria that will show up in North America and Europe and I show up and they will look at them before they will look at me. Being a minister will not add anything to me. If it is being a minister so that one can steal money, I know that I will never be able to steal money. My composition makes it impossible. I can’t. I have been in a position where I can make money and I didn’t because there is a higher other value driving me. So, if you want me to come into government, it must be in a manner that will make us have a meaningful impact on the lives of Nigerians. Their last attempt to make me come into government was just two years ago. President Umaru Yar’Adua, sometime in April, just before the appointment of Prof. Akunyili and co. I was invited to come to see him. I went there and he said, look, it’s a Friday, why don’t we meet in the residence, while he goes to the Mosque to pray and return there after close of the day. I went to his residence and he finished from the mosque and came there. The three last people who left him were the other Yar’Adua, who was the NNPC Managing Director then; My friend, Aliyu Moddibo, who was the Minister for the FCT and Micheal Aonoakaa, who was the last person to leave. When Aondoakaa left, it was just myself and the president there. He asked me what was the trouble with Nigeria. I gave him a tour de force of what we have done wrong, why the Asian countries are moving ahead, why Brazil is turning around and all those things. After I finished all, he asked me, with all the insight you have why don’t you come into the government and help make it work?

Why then did you reject it?

My instinctive reaction was to say I am not looking for a job. Why did I say that? Again, we all have to be careful. In the post colonial Africa, there has emerged what political economists now refer to as the Corporatist state. The Corporatist state tries to endure by incorporating adversarial elements. The kind of people that give you trouble, you bring them in to squelch them, so that they will not be disturbing government. Remember at a point in time during the Babangida adminstration, the President of the NBA was almost like an automatic ticket to being the next Attorney General of the Federation. Ah, the Nigerian Medical Association is giving the government so much trouble, you make the president of the NMA, the Health Minister. You remember the case of Emmanuel Nsah. It was one of the tragic ones. He was made Minister of Health and was used to destroy the NMA. I am not sure Emmanuel Nsah ever recovered from that. I would rather never be in government than be incorporated in that manner without being able to achieve something transformational for the people, for the ordinary people of this country. I do it not because I am such an altruistic person, I do it because I am ambitious for a place in history. The only way I can get a place in history, is to do the best to serve the interest of the people, besides that it fits into my moral being- personal conscience, personal faith. Most importantly, that is what will make Nigeria, attain that place that will make every black man proud.

We have gone about this issue of transformational economy in Nigeria as if it is rocket science, while other countries are moving ahead in terms of development. From your standpoint, both as an economist and a politician, what did it take other countries to develop that we are not doing . Why are we behind in every aspect of development?

The annoying thing is that it is so simple that it looks almost stupid. All it takes is elite discipline. I once said to Bola Tinubu, in the early days of his administration in Lagos as the governor-while I was working with him and his commissioners, building their retreats and all of that- that you must read Lee Kwan Yu’s Singapore story. The reason that you must read it is because I would like you to tell me, anything that he did that was extraordinary. In fact, almost everything he did, we also did. The difference is that in all cases, we failed extraordinarily in all of those things. Those things took Singapore in one generation from a third world country to a first world country. The starting point for economic development is elite discipline and leadership is at the heart of all these thing. A leader must lead by great personal example. It is not a matter of what you preached, but by great personal example. The Lee Kwan Yu we are talking about, as a Prime Minister, lived in a town house, on a row with any other citizen. Harry Kissinger say of Lee Kwan Yu that he was the wisest man in the West; bear in mind that Singapore is in the East. You need to reflect on that statement. If you go to Malaysia for example or any of these countries, even the transformation of Brazil under Fernando Enrique Cardoso, which was the most spectacular for me, because as a graduate student, nothing excited me more than the theories of Cardoso, the dependistas, even though as a graduate student, I said it was elegant theories that had no place in workability. For me, there are six variables that have to do with this growth and economy business. First, you have to make the right policy choices. But what has happened in Africa, following Structural Adjustment Programmes is that those right choices have failed to deliver the required results. The question is why? In 2000, there was the World Economic Forum of the African Economic Summit in Durban, South Africa at which the best African Opportunity worth was presented. I have worked on that African Opportunity with some teams and the President of Mozambique was raising all sorts of questions that we have done all these ones and that ones and there has been no foreign investors. He said the investors wanted track record and we have shown them, yet no investment is coming .Then I said to myself that African leaders need to understand that economic policy are not necessarily the only condition for economic advancement. Many did a great job, including Nigeria of reforming policies and the whole adjustment programmes was about those reforms but what happened in most cases,e specially in Nigeria, is that we reform those policies, have a little upward surge, then we backtrack. That is why Nigeria’s economy has been referred to as a recursive economy- two steps forward, four steps backward. There are a lot of things we get in this variables that we don’t pay attention to.

The second variable after policy choice are your instaitutions. If your institutions are weak, policies cannot mean anything. You move forward and the institutional fragility will push you back. Let me give you an example with what is going on now. The ultimate institution as I call it is the judiciary. Any serious investor that wants to do business with Nigeria, when the Chief Justice of Nigeria is figting with the President of the Court of Appeal will not find Nigeria attractive. Indeed, I can tell you that many of the potential investors who came to Nigeria between 1990s and the first decade of this century, more than often, ended up talking with me at the Lagos Business School about the environment. At the end, most of them decided not to invest in Nigeria. Almost invariably in most cases, the reason they gave was that if they had a trade dispute in Nigeria, they couldn’t be sure of justice. So, the risk of investing in Nigeria was far too high for them. They’d rather go to Malaysia. Yet, people don’t realise how important our judiciary is; how important our security is. These are functions of the roles that institutions play, stock markets, markets in general. Look at all the stories in the newspapers about our stock exchange and all these and that. When some of us complained about the way in the banking reforms were going on, we were not saying that there are angels in banking or that, but what we were saying was that look if you go about it this way, you will do more damage to institutional arrangements. There are so many other ways of going to find what is wrong and excise them without wrecking the institutional arrangements. In fact, American banks have worst problems in terms of the individual practice of the bankers than our own bankers but nobody came out and said American Bankers were all criminals. But we have presented our banks to the world as a den of thieves. So, institutions matter. I always tell people to forget what I am saying and read serious books that dwell on some of these things. There is a 1990 book, written by Douglas Knott, who won a Noble Prize in economics, “Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance”. It will tell you about how important institutions are in economic development. There is so much 419 in Nigeria that I cannot trust that the investment move that I make will not be subject to 419. I will either not make investment in Nigeria, or when I will make one, I will make it in such a way that the cost would be so much high. This cost in economics is called transaction cost. The Nigerian economy is uncompetitive because of the transaction cost. You talk about corruption. All these are all problems that affect institutions. Again, there is a book on corruption and development in Africa. There is a volume edited by Allwell... Chukulo. The first paragraph of that book says that corruption runs very deep in Africa, from very rare in Botswana to widespread in Ghana to systemic in Nigeria. If you are an MBA student in Europe and America. You lay a hand on that book and read the first page. If you want to invest in Africa, where are you going to invest? Definitely Botswana, not Nigeria. But those who lead Nigeria will only say it doesn’t matter. Rather we bow for money here. The institutions that check things like corruption need to be stronger. People are neither naturally corrupt or whatever. If you bring America to Nigeria here, they will be as corrupt as we are. Because the institutions are weak and you can get away with anything, then there is the incentive to do it. In America, the reason they are not corrupt is because if you are corrupt, you are likely to end up in jail. They then create boundaries within which you can function and build uncertainty.

The third variable is human capital. Without human capital in this modern age, you cannot cope. If you have all the knowledge in the world and you are about to die of AIDS or Malaria, that knowledge is pointless . If you look at Nigeria and look at the investment in the social sector, education and health care, it nothing. Why are you talking of a system that is not working? It is because we produce graduates are working certificated illiterates and we are talking about more universities. The ones that are there are producing illiterates and you are setting up more illiterate producing centres. This is a country where in 1961-62, a commission was set up to look at higher education, headed by Sir Henry Harshby. It is the Harshby Commission; which said the higher education in Nigeria is as high as the best in the world. Within just one generation, higher education in Nigeria crumbled. You saw the Registrar of WAEC the other day on radio. He was so exasperated that with all the cheating that is going on, we can’t even get 25 per cent pass both English and Mathematics. We have become so bad that we cannot even cheat well.

The fourth variable is entrepreneurship. What we try to do in this country is venture, we knock you down. Who are the rich men in Nigeria? They are rent-seekers mainly. Show me what they produce to be rich. Okay, Dangote now produces some things. But what do others produce? That’s why Abuja is such a dangerous place. Exotic cars everywhere in a city that produces nothing? Just taking and sharing. We need this spirit of enterprise to grow our economy. South Korea, which was at this stage with us at one time, left us far behind. It is the14th biggest economy in the world and all of that. What is their secret? Investment in education and encouragement of the spirit of enterprise.

The fifth variable is culture. Values shape human progress. Look at the values in our country today. Who really believes in hard work. Everybody wants a short cut to wealth without work. That is the kind of value system that the whole country has taken up. In other parts of the world they tell you hard work doe not kill. You must work, work and work. But here, what we is entitlement mentality. I am entitled to this or that, it doesn’t matter what input I make. If you set up a business in Nigeria, you can’t go to sleep. If you don’t manage it yourself, you are dead because the culture is how can we cheat you? That is not the culture of progress.

Finally, at the epicentre of all these is leadership. You must treat others as you would want to be treated. So, when people like us are engaged, it is in the hope that somehow, God will use us to show example of a sacrificial giving. The culture has become so bad that people don’t believe that somebody could be interested in public service for reasons other than stealing money.

Why Nigerian economy is prostrate.

The reason the Nigerian economy is lying prostrate at this time, even when economists have rethought or re-invented development. It used to be said that oh, your population, you are too much, you have too many people in the country and you need to have population control and all the rest of it. Now, economists have discovered what they call demographic dividends. The most populous countries have a better chance of making it if they can invest enough into the education of those people. If you take demographic dividends, Nigeria is the only seriously populous country that is lying economically prostrate. All the others, Indonesia, India, China, Brazil, everybody is picking up, only Nigeria is behind. When you speak up passionately about it, people ask what is his problem? Somebody told me today in Abuja that our problem is that we have too many comfort zones, where people escape into. Unfortunately, it is all going to unravel very soon. I was giving a talk in London last week. After the talk, a young lady just walked up to me, with a CV. I thought this lady wanted to return to Nigeria. But she told me, my brother is the person I want you to help. He graduated 10years ago without any job. And somebody in Tunisia set himself up on fire because of no job. The day Nigeria will light up with the unemployed, torches everywhere, maybe the problem of power failure will be solved with human beings incinerating themselves.

With all these things you have highlighted, one wonders now that you are running for the presidency, what is your vision for Nigeria? What would you do with the country of you win?

All the problems that we have ultimately come down to economic failure- Niger Delta, Boko Haram, Kidnapping, anarchy in Jos- they are all because the self-worth of the people are disappearing. Those involved have nothing to lose. We must create jobs, jobs and jobs. My strategy for prosperity in Nigeria is to take some of our factor endowments. If the country is split into six zones of development, which will be contiguous to the so-called six geo-political zones, with any zone focusing on one or two capital endowments. We can create a global value chain from those endowments, invest to make the human beings able to drive their value chain and you will create millions of jobs around the country. In each of those zones, each processing capability can be lumped into an industrial enclave called an industrial park, where you process those things.

Let us make examples. In the north west, assuming that what you can find there is Gum-Arabic. From Gum-Arabic, you can set up a factory that will derive from that value chain. You go to the North-Central, if it is Sesame seeds. Every Hamburger you eat in every MacDonald has Sesame seed in it. You can then grow the Sesame seed and make deal with MacDonalds and others doing Hamburgers all over the world and become the major source of supply. You will find out that from Northwest and Central, you will earn more money than the south-south is earning from oil just by applying the brain. In the south-south, instead of this crude oil, you have a whole industrial park, stretching from Rivers to Akwa Ibom, where you can now have the oil and gas value chain. In all these cities, there will be growing cities between them, which will not be like Abuja, where you take oil money to develop, but they will grow organically, based on the growth of the industries. I called it the six-Dubai strategy. We can have six Dubai in Nigeria, which at the end of the day, the whole world will be visiting the country, seeing Dubai in Sokoto, Port Harcourt, Ogun State and you build cities so prosperous that nobody remembers his neighbours speak a different language. But to get to this medium term goals, we need to provide jobs to the people. How do we do that? The president announces the Federal Government is releasing N50b to create jobs. How do you create jobs with that? Money does not create jobs. One thing that worries me is that this people have advisers. It is not money that creates jobs, but what you do with the money. Didn’t Obasanjo try to create jobs? The money was shared amongst some PDP people and that was the end of it. One quick way to create jobs is through private-public sector partnership to build huge infrastructure. Part of the advice I gave to Obasanjo that led to our quarrel was to do a standard gunge railway, from Lagos to Calabar, Lagos to Abuja, Kano and a coastal highway from Lagos running all the way down. You just open up these millions of miles of beaches. It will boost tourism. But as you are doing this, you are getting rid of those characters at the international airports, building real airports and training immigration and custom officers to become Public Relation officers rather than tool gates. You will see people coming to Nigeria to spend money. The most important reason for even doing this is that you employ a lot of Nigerians who will earn N50,000 per month, cutting these jungles, not Federal government has awarded this contract. In the past 12 years, can you show me one road that the government has constructed? The dualisation of Lokoja-Abuja road has been on for 10 years now and not completed. What government does is to award contracts, nothing is done. Do you know how many Nigerians that were killed on that Lokoja-Abuja road? I told Chukwuma Soludo when he was the Central Bank Governor. I was on a flight one day with him when I asked him this cash you people are pilling $50b, congratulations. But don’t you think you would do Nigerians a world of good if you take $20b, put it into any bank, like Fortis and say that anybody that wants to do infrastructure in Nigeria will be approved within two weeks- this road, railways and put time lines to them. If you build these roads and something happens and the government decides to cancel the rules or change it, that money will be a guarantee or penalty for terminating it. I was in Kuala Lumpur, the day the metroline in that city was commissioned and I wrote a piece then that day must be Gbolahan Mudashiru’s (Then Military administrator of Lagos) saddest day if he knows that this project, same design that was commissioned later than that of Lagos which he canceled has come to fruition in Malaysia. So, I told Soludo that money will be a guarantee against anything. You would not need to spend that money because the moment one or two contracts goes through, people will not remember that money. He asked me, how long would that go considering the length of roads in Nigeria?. I told him the collateral will be irrelevant if people see two, three of the project going through.

How do you see the preparedness of INEC for the elections. It is less than six weeks now?

That’s a big one. You don’t even need a fortune teller or any visionary capabilities to know that INEC is seriously challenged. We have a way of muddling through things and people are hoping that we will be able to muddle through this one again. But that muddling through things is the reason we are where we are today. When we say things are getting progressively worse from 1999, the question is, is there any evidence that 2011 will reverse the trend? I have not seen the evidence.

But why has the opposition failed to come together, despite all the noise against the PDP. Why is so difficult?

Well, I think that the desire of the ordinary Nigerian to see the opposition come together to rescue them from the PDP is a legitimate desire. I believe that history will judge all of us on that matter. On a couple of occasions, I have written letters to leading opposition figures, among them, Gen. Mohammadu Buhari, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, Chief Olu Falae and others. I received replies from some from one or two of them about the issues I have raised on doing the needful. I don’t think that the process is over. I must admit that it has been a torturous process for somebody like me who entered politics with the primary goal of making that happen. In early 2006, if you told me I would be running for office here by now, I would say it is a joke. I though I would continue to face my business. Along the line, I was persuaded by some elder statesmen that it is not enough being an activist. That if you want to make change happen, you become a politician. That’s why I became involved again. In the five years or so that I have been in politics, I have dedicated 80 per cent of my time towards making sure that this comes to pass. I have spent so much time on it that I can tell you certain global events that happened while I was in Bola Tinubu’s flat in London, trying to persuade him about certain things or how I was talking with Gen. Buhari in his house in Kaduna, when news came that President Yar’Adua has died and on and on. Nigeria is a complex country and there are many thing driving different people but I can say that I can say that I gave it all I have. I have said it several times that in this process, my desire is to sell the vision of the type of Nigeria I want. I want to sell my vision of a Nigeria that is just, rapid economic-oriented to people with a social democratic culture because that is what I think is progressive democrats. That is people who are committed to welfare of the others. People who want economic growth and progress. Having committed all this time into the project, if it does not happen, if we don’t get a form of coalescing among the progressive forces, I will just take my bow and leave. I entered 2011 not thinking actually of being a candidate this year. My wife can tell you because I told her that it is clear this people are not serious. I have been virtually unemployed in the past five years that I have been doing this. I will take my exit from this whole problem. First of all I need to go and find somewhere to write myself a damn good book. There is a lot I know of Nigeria now to write my Magnus Opus.