Professor Pat Utomi is a political economist. He is one of the few professionals, who made a foray into the murky waters of the Nigerian political space as a governorship aspirant in Delta State on the platform of the All Progressives Congress, APC. In this interview with Emeka Okoroanyanwu and Lekan Adeniran, he spoke on his experience during the primaries. He also spoke on why Nigeria can’t make progress with the current party structure.
Do we have the right concept of party politics, looking at the composition of APC, PDP and others?
Some things went wrong first of all with the conception of the idea of a political party. We didn’t get it right. It is as if I anticipated this in many ways, because some six years ago, at the Leadership newspapers annual lecture in Abuja on political parties, which they gave me to speak on, in many ways, it was the rallying point for the beginning of what became APC because that day, almost every major opposition politician in the country was in that hall at Sheraton in Abuja.
I remember sitting very close to the podium from where I gave the lecture was the Publisher of Vanguard, Sam Amuka, who was amazed at the depth of the interrogation of the issues. Paul Unongo, as I finished, ran to me and said everybody that listened to what I had said, must decide now that we must come together to save Nigeria.
But since then, everything has not been quite as hopeful because political parties have not managed to build the depth of defining their values and universalising their ideas. Because your ideas have to be universal, just like this mess that we call primaries. One party like my party says in some places we use indirect, in some other places we use direct. Party is about universal value. You use all direct, you use all indirect; it is what people agree is the best way. But, obviously, it is an eclectic thing.
One thing to know about political parties is that they are very valuable but very dangerous institutions in the sense that the most profound writing on political parties is a book titled, “Political Parties”, published in 1911 by Roberto Michels. It was out of it that came the famous saying ‘he who says organisation says oligarchy’, the so-called Iron Law of Oligarchy. Political parties have the tendency to move to becoming oligarchic cliques.
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That is why it is the duty of any political party to create institutional arrangements to prevent that kind of unclaving. Unfortunately, we have not managed to do that. So, the consequence of that is that people think that all they need to do is beg, cheat and buy their way into the hierarchy of the political apparatchik, become chairman of the party and somehow they have been ordained God, and they begin to extort money from people, they begin to blackmail people. That’s the major reason our political parties have not done well.
So, we have to really re-examine the nature of our political party if we are going to make progress because our current political parties are not working. They are fundamentally dysfunctional. We cannot build the country with the kind of things we call political parties. It is not possible.
You complained bitterly about the process, the procedures that led to your party’s primaries. What was your experience like in Delta?
It wasn’t about me. It is about the system that must be right if we are going to build a country. It must be recalled that there were no primaries. The process was totally fraudulent, deliberately structured to be fraudulent from the party headquarters. And it was successfully executed as deliberately structured. People who are given trust, if they don’t fear God, they should fear that they could ridicule the country before the eyes of the world.
The laws have been made that INEC is supposed to pay attention to. In many ways, even INEC doesn’t seem serious to me because they’ve watched in all these violations; they’ve not done anything about them. The political parties even violated court orders with impunity; INEC does not even try to respond.
There was a court order in Delta that INEC should not accept any list from any of the so-called factions. But they went ahead and accepted a list from a faction. They should jail both the person who sent the list and the INEC person that accepted it. The central area of my work in the last 30 years or so has been institutions and economic performance, institutions and nation building.
Has this experience in any way discouraged you from the country’s political system?
I don’t know what discourages me. I am not a professional politician; I don’t live on politics. I just went in because people harassed me and I wanted to show example. But I couldn’t care one way or another. The next day after the joke of a primary, I got on a plane and flew to a major meeting in South Africa and I have hardly spent three days at a time in the country since the primaries. I am busy all over the world.
When Oshiomhole became the chairman of APC, there were high hopes that being a former labour leader and governor, he would bring some stability and fairness to the party…
You never know people until you give them power and we saw this in action.
What’s your reaction to moves by some House of Representatives members to bring Nigeria back to parliamentary system of government?
It is a very interesting conversation to have. We have shut ourselves out from having serious conversation on the Modus Vivendi of our country for a long time. I am one of those in favour of parliamentary system of government because it provides collective responsibility.
Secondly, it allows smaller groups to pick their very best. And these groups then pick the best among them as leaders. But here, you go round the country before you see one incompetent man and you endure him for four years. So, I don’t know how much traction that would get, but I think it’s a very good thing that we have that conversation going.
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But are they doing it the right way?
Well, what has gone the right way in this country in recent history? Nothing. That’s the tragedy of it. We have a political system that has no sense of history; no sense of responsibility to generations.
Who is the best choice for Nigeria in 2019?
It’s not a question that is fair for me to address at this point. Let’s watch and see what everybody articulates and we will take it from there. I know both men (Buhari and Atiku) personally. So, anything I might say now may be a function of that. I also belong to one of the two parties. So, it is also not fair to ask for my opinion in that sense. I know what I think of each of them as people I know as friends. But those are different things.
