I Don’t Know What Buhari Should Do, I’ve Stopped Advising People –pat Utomi

I Don’t Know What Buhari Should Do, I’ve Stopped Advising People –pat Utomi by HomelandRealty: 8:15am
Professor of Political Economy and Management expert, Pat Utomi, shares his thoughts on the state of the country’s economy, politics and other issues in this interview with JESUSEGUN ALAGBE.
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There were speculations that you were going to be a Minister or at least be on the economic team of President Muhammadu Buhari. Were you not reached out to or you were simply uninterested?
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First of all, I think there is too much emphasis on form rather than content in our context as a people. I think what is always important is our ability to work together as a people to change the society.
There are different roles we can play as a people and it doesn’t matter when other people tend to criticise you as long as the right things are done. I was very uncomfortable with the whole rush of speculations leading up to that whole thing. What we wanted to do was change the direction of our country. We saw our country going in a set of wrong direction. Many of us said, ‘No, we can’t continue like this. This has great consequences.’ So we made our time, energy and every other thing available for the push. However, the only thing I can say is that the party (All Progressives Congress) did a terrible job at transition. They didn’t manage it well. Now we don’t see where the country is going; this is very obvious to me. But it is not a matter of who is where or not; that is not important.

Now, with the current situation of things, several Nigerians have been bashing this administration for not having a tight economic team. Do you share a similar view?
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I think what matters is do we have a set of cohesive ideas that are implemented by people who are very passionate about what they are doing, people who are trusted by those they are trying to lead? That is very important for any turnaround, because why you need a turnaround is because of loss of faith in the system. To get the system to run in a particular way, you need to have people who people have faith in. You could even have geniuses in the system who people don’t have faith in. They won’t get you anywhere. In that sense, therefore, I think we could have done a better job of trying to find passionate people who people have faith in and who also have clear faith in something.
Perhaps because the communication programme is also very poor, we don’t get a sense of where things are supposed to be heading, which may be there, but somehow it’s poorly communicated. So in that sense, there is a general loss of confidence in whether we as a party know where we are going or where the party is leading Nigeria to. Anybody who is sincere will tell you that. This feeling is pervasive to the extent that people like us who put everything on the line talking about change and all of that have been at the receiving end. People now ask us, ‘Where is that your change?’ I deal with this question every day. I can’t pretend that the change is there.
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So there’s no change anywhere…
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Well, there are some important things being done. There is a tendency to be a bit bashful about things in our context. Unless you have made a deep effort to understand why Nigeria’s circumstances are flawed, you won’t realise how terrible corruption is. In this country, aren’t you shocked when you hear all these revelations every day? I think no country should survive this level of graft. That this aspect is being focussed on is an important achievement on its own and nobody should take it away. I don’t even think we have gone as far as we should go. The style should be different. I have been singing this song of how corruption has crippled Nigeria for decades. Suddenly, Nigerians are beginning to ask, ‘Is it that bad?’ Yes, it’s that bad; it’s even worse than has been revealed. It’s much worse because there is a total lack of how much corruption has plagued the system. I mean some people are so bifurcated of their dispositions that they don’t realise what they are doing and the consequences for everybody.