Political economist and chieftain of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, Professor Pat Utomi, has delivered a scathing assessment of the state of the nation, declaring that Nigeria is “in a complete mess” as a result of failed leadership, deepening corruption and collapsing public confidence in government institutions.

In this interview with Vanguard, Utomi accused political leaders of mismanaging opportunities, presiding over worsening hunger and insecurity, and weakening the legitimacy of the state. He argued that the country is currently “in a policy wilderness,” where governance is driven more by the pursuit of personal gain than by national development. The former presidential aspirant also criticised Nigeria’s power sector crisis, saying Nigerians ought to have held leaders accountable over the failure to deliver stable electricity despite earlier promises. He further alleged that nearly 40 per cent of public project funds end up in private pockets, warning that the legitimacy of government is rapidly eroding, and called for drastic reforms, including electoral reforms and accountability for political leaders.

When I called to fix the appointment for this interview, you said Nigeria is in a mess. What do you mean by that, Sir? How is Nigeria in a mess?

Nigeria is in a complete mess. Maybe a simple way to showcase the failure of leadership or the lack of leadership in Nigeria is to tell a small story about Egypt. I was at a conference in Cairo, which took place in the new Cairo. Egypt is building a new Cairo, a new city, out there in the desert. 14, 16-lane highways, probably it will be competing with Dubai very soon.

Outside the conference venue, a number of senior Nigerians were just standing, lamenting, as usual, the Nigerian story. And we started talking about power. We started from power. Power is, as you know, a complete mess in Nigeria even though the man in Aso Rock says that he should be judged on power, if he doesn’t fix power within one year, we should chase him out. So, I wonder why we have not chased him out yet. Why is he still there because power is a complete, total mess.

I live in Band A, as they call the territory. I don’t get power most of the time, and I still pay three times what a university professor’s salary is, for power that is less than half the need that I have. I have solar, diesel generators, all of them supplementary to Band A, which still takes three times what I should earn as a university professor, if I were in a regular university.

How does that make sense? We’re talking about power. And we’re talking about Siemens, and how Nigeria and Egypt both approved Siemens at about the same time. Nigeria wanted to increase its power supply to 10,000mw or whatever megawatts. Egypt’s strategy is to always have twice as much power as it needs at any point in time. So, as the need is increasing, they are adding. But we are at the point that we have crippled our industries because there is no power. So, industries are not competitive in Nigeria. SMEs that are dependent on generators for power supply are unable to give services because of the cost of petrol and diesel.

Egypt said to Siemens, look, we would like to provide some state guarantees. You go and raise money, build us power to give us this kind of output. Nigeria said, okay, we will pay you to do this and that. Our leaders calculated all the money for them, began to look for the money we don’t have, and began to pay them. Meanwhile, we could use more power than Egypt. And Siemens could better collect its own revenues in Nigeria than in Egypt. However, because the Nigerian leadership is about stealing, they want to collect the money for the project so they can put most of it in their own pocket. So they made us an unintelligent deal with the same Siemens compared to Egypt.

Then the war in Ukraine started, Siemens said, ‘we are in Ukraine, manufacturing equipment for Nigeria. So it means that it is not very likely that we are going to supply you with everything you have paid for’. Whereas, that of Egypt is fully in place, financed by Siemens finding the money from wherever.

So, as we were discussing, one of those telling the story was the president of the African Finance Corporation, AFC, a Nigerian. We started talking about the quality of leadership in Egypt, that’s achieving all these extraordinary things. And he said, let me tell you guys one story: there is a road project we were co-financing, that is AFC and Egypt and Egypt gave a timeline to the contractor: ‘Look, you deliver this project in 18 months, 10 days. If anything goes wrong, you don’t deliver on that day, you will pay.’

The company that was to do this particular road project discovered that there was a mountain on the way that would make them not to be able to deliver on time. So they came back and said, ‘sorry, we don’t think this timeline will work because we didn’t anticipate this obstacle on our way’.

So, the president said, let us all meet at the site where this mountain is in two weeks or something. Everybody got ready, financiers, contractors, and that day they showed up at the site. Everybody was looking at each other. What happened? There was no mountain. The man within those two weeks had blown the mountain off the face of the earth. Just literally detonated the entire thing. And he said, any problem with the deadline? Everybody was looking at each other. That’s the kind of seriousness of leadership that Nigeria has lacked. And this is why it is in a mess.

Hunger in the land

Now, if you proceed from this clear example and look at the hunger in the land and people in power are pretending with the attitude of ‘don’t worry, it will be better,’ but people are dying, there is real hunger in the land. Meanwhile, corruption is proceeding at maximum pace. Some figures I saw in the last two days project that nearly 40% of everything Nigeria is projecting enters into private pockets. People are obsessed with power and politics as if the lives of people don’t matter. That is a mess. No conscience. And then you top this up with a generation that seems to have lost hope.

When I sing my favorite song, ‘Nigeria will rise up again,’ some people say to me, ‘are you sure you are okay? This Nigeria is gone. There is nothing.’ And I say, no, Nigeria will rise up again. It will survive these guys. We are in policy wilderness right now. Sometimes the forces of international politics, the hand of God and all kinds of things create a spike that looks like relief. Then we mismanage it.

A classic example is this Middle East, Iran, Israel, America war where there is a little spike in oil prices. Tomorrow, they will announce to you that they have a budget for this and budget for that, because of that spike.

Even more dangerous, there is a danger that they will misapply the windfall in a way that will do more damage. Because they have been borrowing recklessly. And what are they doing with the reckless borrowing? New presidential jet. Yacht. Motor cars, etc.

There is a young lady on the internet, I don’t know her name, who has been showing comparisons of how much states are budgeting for SUVs. I think Nigerian governors should be in a mental asylum. If they are spending those kinds of money buying SUVs in states where people can’t even go to their farms, when there are no motorable roads in their states, no factories, and clusters that can employ the young people in their states, they belong in a mental asylum.

This is what the situation is in Nigeria. One former Chief of Army Staff, who I know very well said to me, people in the South should not be complaining. They should come to the North. What our governors do is spend billions on arranging weddings for people. The fellows don’t know what they are doing. And so, when things are this way you can call it a mess. Complete mess. We need a new beginning. We need a reset button. Things have gone way, way wrong in Nigeria. We cannot continue like this. It’s not sustainable. Something dramatic must happen.

Like what, Sir?

The easiest way is to have an election that removes every member of the National Assembly from that place. Replace the executive branch. That is one dramatic way to begin again. Of course, there are many other ways you can begin again, but this is one clear way to do it.

But these guys are so insensitive, so out of touch that they don’t think you have a right to determine how you are governed or who will govern you. So all they have been involved in is all kinds of schemes to enable them to rig elections. And so they go and they find one loophole. They come back and say, no real-time transmission by electronic means, and they find all kinds of excuses. And I say, these people are not wise at all because we’ve seen this kind of thing happen before in history and we know where people who acted like that all ended up.

So it’s not a problem that they are willing to act so recklessly as to end up where Samuel Doe and Co ended up. But it is just that they might drag all of us down with them because it could lead to the revenge of the poor, the anger of the people that will lead us into anarchy, and everybody will lose.

So, we need to find ways of prevailing on them. If they are kamikaze and want to die, there are some people who don’t want to die with them. They should leave the country.

I will go back to something that I said many years ago, partly as a joke, but partly seriously. Back in the 90s, I was interviewed by the Economist of London. And I said, if somehow we can find a way to buy an island, resettle all our major politicians and soldiers in the island, give them total and complete access to all of Nigeria’s oil revenue, on the grounds that they will never enter Nigeria again that Nigeria will be better off for it. And the Economist, in the cheeky way that they normally write, said, ‘fair comment.’

And that’s where we still are. If we could get all these characters who claim to be leaders, give them an island, and say, what you’re looking for is money, you want Nigeria’s money? Take it. Just don’t come to Nigeria. Don’t get involved in anything happening in Nigeria. Let us proceed without the oil, Nigeria will be better off.

Talking about removing those in power democratically, you need people to do so. And you need the opposition to do that. Do you think the opposition is ready? With the electoral act, and laws in place, do you think the opposition will put up any significant fight?

What do you define as ready? How do you define ready?

Being ready to contest, present candidates that will win elections for themWhy not? Okay. The party in power has done its maximum best to infiltrate the other parties. They have caused as much commotion, tried to derail Nigeria’s democracy in any way it can. But you see, the people are always able to save themselves.

In the last election, how long was it from when Peter Obi left the PDP to the elections? You know what happened? We know that in spite of all the nonsense that happened in many states like Rivers and all of that, states that Peter Obi won, they managed to change the figures. And that’s why people from INEC will still go to jail. Take my word for it. They will still go to jail. Under international law, the Nigerian judiciary is gone, dead, buried, forgotten, but they will go to jail still. So, if in less than six months that could happen, how much more? Of course, you have all kinds of miscreants that are joining the new parties of the coalition.

You have all kinds of commotions seemingly happening. It’s the way of the process. Eventually, the fact that Nigerian people are fed up enough will lead to a few good men taking charge of the process and delivering the Nigerian people. That’s what really matters.

Last week, leaders of the ADC – Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, David Mark, Rotimi Amaechi, Rauf Aregbesola and Buba Galadima of the NNPP and others said they would challenge the new electoral act in court. How far have you gone with that?

The process is still ongoing. Before they said that, I had tweeted and said that, that must be challenged, it must be stopped. It is criminal to do what has been done in the Senate. It is criminal. And I even went as far as suggesting that if the Attorney General was serious, we should prosecute leaders of the Senate. And I gave the example of a former U.S. Attorney General who I had the pleasure of getting to meet when he was a U.S. Senator. We had lunch with him in the Republican Club in Washington. He later then became Attorney General under Trump in his first term and resigned somewhere along the line. I recall the conversation I had with him the day that I met him about the nature of the role of institutions.

The role of an Attorney General, for example, the role of the Justice Department, is separate from partisan politics. And I believe that an Attorney General will do well to educate himself, even if our laws don’t spell it out as clearly as the American law does, that there are times when you act in the interest of the people.

Betrayal of Nigerian people

The Nigerian people are feeling so betrayed now by the political process. You can see from the elections in Abuja, 7% showed up. People have said, okay, since you guys are coup plotters in the name of elections, take, carry, go, do whatever you like. When we are good and ready, when God is ready, he will catch up with you. That’s what the Nigerian people are saying.

Collapsing state legitimacy

What that means is that legitimacy is collapsing. When the state lacks legitimacy, and believe me, I was trying to explain this to some TV audience the other day, even a military government requires legitimacy to function. And I went as far as putting on my political scientist gown and talking about the American political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who wrote The First New Nation and the concept of legitimacy, Fundamental for governance. Nigerian democracy is losing its legitimacy because of the actions of these fellows. If they are not careful, they will sacrifice democracy. And that’s the danger in their behavior.

But they are dreaming of this narcissism, this obsessive self-love that’s making them not really recognize what they are doing to Nigeria and to themselves. I pray that something or somebody wakes them up before they sell us all off.

Something happened last week. Your name was mentioned that you were at the meeting of South-South leaders of the ADC on February 27. One camp said that the leaders had endorsed Rotimi Amaechi as South-South consensus presidential candidate of ADC. And then another camp came and said no, nothing like that happened. Two questions. Were you at the meeting? And then what really happened at that meeting?

I was at the meeting from the beginning almost to the end. At least, Amaechi left before me. So nothing concerning the endorsement of Amaechi happened. At the meeting, a few people spoke. There were not many people who spoke. The host, Oyegun, Amaechi, and then myself. And then the former governor of Edo State, Professor Oserheimen Osunbo, and former governor of Cross River, Liyel Imoke

When Amaechi spoke, he said he had been meaning to call a meeting to say to his brothers from the South-South that he was interested in running for the presidency. There was no discussion of the subject after he said that, which is a normal thing.

In his closing remarks or remarks to the media or something, Chief Oyegun acknowledged that Amaechi said that he was interested. And that as a brotherly group we all get together and tend to support each other. That was all. In fact, when he said that, two people from Rivers came and touched me and said, should they tell him that they were not interested in his candidacy and that he cannot win his street in Port Harcourt? Yes, they came and called me from the meeting, they needed to tell Amaechi that he cannot win his street in Port Harcourt. I said to them, no problem, they should hold on, but they are free to say it. But no conversation or discussion was called for. So they didn’t get to say it, but they were ready to say it.

Coming from the opposition, it kind of made some observers feel somehow about the ADC, that the ADC is incapable of putting its house in order.

What is a house? You came to a meeting, somebody said, I want to contest, and they said, oh, thank you, we’ve heard you. What’s unusual about that? You see, the guys who are creating these silly narratives are trying to get an impression. But that is what happens in every political meeting, there was nothing unusual about it. Nothing at all. There was no quarrel.

Why is it unusual? You think there’s consensus in APC?

There are people who have been bamboozled and can’t talk because they’re hoping they can pick up some crumbs from sharing the loot. I know APC people, I was one of those who started the thing. There’s more unhappiness in the APC than anywhere.

Even though they had consensus in virtually all the congresses they just had?

Because democracy has been killed. People are just afraid to talk. APC is not a party, it’s a cult. And Nigeria is in grave danger.

Until you successfully challenge the electoral law, that is the law in place for the election. The APC has done its congresses, produced state chairmen. When I said ready, in my other question, that is what I mean. In the ADC now, you’ve not had any congress, and then INEC is giving you a deadline of May to do certain things. Will you meet that deadline?

People will make the effort and do what is needed. But we know INEC is being directed straight from the APC headquarters. And that is not the way an umpire operates. INEC should be dissolved.

A new way of appointing people who run INEC should be set up. It should not be something that one person does. That democracy, from my experience, is not going to work. You must have a situation where either all the major political parties nominate one person each and then the people then elect their chairperson, or something like that. This mess of INEC as a parastatal run from the Villa is making Nigeria look like a laughingstock in the world. And we need to change it.

Do you think this can be done before the elections?

Whatever, it has to be done. Instead let’s not have elections because there’s no point in going to elections if we’re going to have these shenanigans.

What is your take on insecurity? Recently, the US had to come in to bomb some places in Sokoto. What do you make of this and how can we get out of it?

The first responsibility of a sovereign of the Leviathan is assurance of peace and security. And the atmosphere to pursue lawful activities. So, if we are in a situation where most people can’t even go to their farms, two major dangers come in. You might pacify it for a brief moment by importing food, which itself is a big problem. Already some of the farmers have started forgetting how to farm. Many of them have not been to the farm for like six years. And apparently they will lose their crop seed.

So, you have set Nigeria up for being a food-dependent country. And food security is a fundamental thing in terms of strategic positioning of any country.

Yes. If food security is at the level that it is currently in Nigeria, the next thing which is happening, you can see it every day, is that people are selling off everything they have and leaving the country. Now, the Americans are trying to stop giving visas to Nigerians and all kinds of things.

But most Nigerians that you see on the streets who are still there, it’s because they’ve not got a way out yet. If they find a way out, they will leave. How do you want to build a nation with migrants on their exodus path? So, this is top priority.

Unfortunately, the signals were evident more than 30 years ago. In fact, 26, 27 years ago, an American called Robert Kaplan wrote a book titled: “The Coming Anarchy.”

He basically projected that we will see divisions, cleavages in West Africa that may lead to a descent of that region of the world into anarchy. He went as far as suggesting that a city in Nigeria called Jos could be the epicenter of West Africa’s descent into anarchy.

On my part as a citizen, after I read that book in 1999, I bought copies and sent them to many people in decision-making positions, including DG of DSS and the National Security Adviser. They read it and got back to me Two, three years later, the Jos crisis started, the Benue-Plateau problems began, and we’re still in it. How can the people be given notice? They said to be forewarned is to be forearmed. They were forewarned but they could not arm themselves. That’s a tragedy in Nigeria, isn’t it? So it is something that is a national emergency we must deal with now.

And part of the reason that the problems continue is that we don’t have consequences in Nigeria. As a professor of business, I can tell you that consequence management is one of the most critical parts of building a sustainable enterprise. If, because Nigeria seems to belong to no one, people get away with murder on a daily basis, eventually the chickens will come home to roost. That’s where we are in the security scenario.

What is your message to Nigerians, and the way forward for the country?

Nigerians must never lose sight of the fact that in spite of the political group that has lost the way, Nigeria can find the way. And that they must not give in to despair. Most Nigerians are despairing about Nigeria. They must not give in to despair. They must arise, take their country back because the potential is tremendous. I believe that Nigeria will rise up again (Vanguard)