PROF Pat Utomi is one man that is difficult to define because of his pedigree and versatility in any subject. Like a bolt out of the blue, the icon dared the murky waters of Nigerian politics in last year’s general election and became the presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC). In this interview, he x-rays political developments in Nigeria since the return of democracy in 1999.

On Yar’Adua’s victory at the presidential election petition tribunal
Interestingly, my reaction came before the verdict. I anticipated the verdict but more than that, I generally prefer to deal with issues of principle.

I saw a fundamental problem of principle that was going to plague the whole process. I had started speaking about it and in one or two public events, I said, we think that we are jeopardizing a lot in Nigeria by politicians abdicating legal solutions to a political problem hoping that the judiciary will bail them out. That is a basic problem of Nigeria’s development. It has stalled our development. Yes, we had a democracy that was quite viable. It was working in the 50s and 60s.

This democracy was plagued by some extremities that democratic processes sometimes generate in terms of nature of competition between her regional blocs or ethnicities, what the American political scientists, Robert Nelson and Howard Whoopee called competitive communalism in Nigeria, competing ethnic communities.

All we knew was that it was bringing progress to Nigeria but it was making the environment untidy. Nigerians were looking for a messiah, the messiah that we thought we found was the military which ended up damaging Nigeria further and damaging the military as an institution. Now, we have much more problem with our democracy. In fact, we have a non – democracy that we have pretended is a democracy.
The last eight years are among the most undemocratic years in Nigeria’s history. In fact, I think that a good part of the military regimes were more democratic than the last eight years.

It was characterized by brigandage, by the dominance of a non-party. The PDP has become a political party perceived as the biggest in Africa but it is not a political party. I think Rueben Abati’s characterization of the PDP in his column is classic. It is a collection of opportunists, they have one common purpose which is how to get the most out of Nigeria’s common wealth. So, we had this kind of arrangement dominate the last eight years of our lives.

Everybody who knows the character of the PDP knew that it was not preparing to have elections in 2007. Its leadership was not preparing to have elections. I have been as much as told by an insider, somebody close to the president and ministers when I was going to run for the presidency, he said sorry, because he didn’t know whether to tell me not to run because there were not going to be any elections. If not, the abuse was so unbelievably transparent. It was a transparent abuse. Let me give you a classic example, at least two or three that I know of.

Foreigners and that is why it was remarkable. The least they would do is you would think that when they see foreigners, they would at least pretend. Some foreign journalists in front of a police station in Jigawa and Katsina saw officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) thumb printing ballot papers and they were shocked.

They asked ‘what are you people doing? and they said ‘are you people not seeing us.’ The officials just ignored them and continued thumb printing. After a while, they asked again, ‘what are you people doing?’ and they said they should go to the INEC office and report. The journalists actually drove to the INEC office and reported and the officials told them to make a proper note of what they have seen and send it to the Election Petition Tribunal when the time comes. That was the level of contempt for what anybody thought about what they were doing.

So, the judgment was not a surprise to me. The only thing that was surprising was that I thought the judiciary would do it with more savvy, that they will do it with a little more dignity even though they knew there were no elections. What they did, am not sure they were conscious of what they were doing. What they did was to actually leave the impression that the elections were okay. But it will forever put a question mark over those who did not realize they were doing that level of damage to their country.

And that was my real worry that we may end up destroying our judiciary. Several editorial commentaries since that judgement, re-echo my fears long before that judgement, not as a criticism of our judiciary alone but our general system and a prayer to prevent the judiciary from suffering what the Army suffered. But they walked eyes open into it. I hope right now and my prayer also is that the Nigerian judiciary, one of the few institutions that is still accepted in Nigeria does not get demolished. This is because in the estimation of most Nigerians, the court of Appeal lost any dignity that it had before, with that judgement.
Again, it’s not very fair because the burden put on men in black by this level of abuse is not a fair one. We do not need to pontificate, but they should not have let them down as badly as they did.

What of the upturning of several elections?
That is exactly why I said that it is dangerous to go that way. I was telling my friends who were celebrating the upturning of the elections. Some were saying, judiciary, judiciary, judiciary and I said, you are not being fair to these men. They were the same people who were calling them names after the Appeal court judgement and I said you are not being fair to these men.

I have not said they were good or bad. I have just said the burden is not a fair one. If you look at all the judgements, they found some technicalities to do one thing or the other but in the main, they have all been critical judgments whether we like it or not. Create a loophole and build a decision that will either be popular or convenient.
We must assist them, politicians must be able to get together like the Kenyans did even if 1000 lives are lost to tackle the problem.

It appears only the PDP is in existence, where are other parties?
I hope the people understand the contraption they call the PDP and the political party process in Nigeria. Many people who could be politicians and the people who could contest public space with ideas long since gave up on the possibility of being any real value in Nigeria. What was left was a collection of charlatans, power grabbers, entrepreneurs of political enterprise. The people who could have been opposition politicians either completely withdrew from the process or even left the country. So, those who want gratification from the system organized the nature of the distribution sharing game and literally all ended up in the PDP. Few of the other groups that have personal problems with certain individuals and played out of the PDP came out to become opposition parties. Some others said, okay, let me have this am holding unto that I call a political party.

In most of the parties, there is really the attitude to do much, we decided that it was imperative for people who believed in something to begin to join issues in Nigerian politics. This is because really, the domain of politics in Nigeria is largely occupied by those who do not believe in anything except their self interest. I had a personal dilemma – do you join the PDP, obviously everything you believe in will disappear. I had a very interesting argument with some friends of mine on this subject. If I had joined the PDP, there would not have been any way I would have participated in any serious primaries.

You saw the way their primaries went, I then thought that it was better to collect people who believe in something but provide a platform to get the message across to the Nigerian people. I felt that it was the best way to go even though given the nature of the structure of Nigeria, winning election is obviously going to be a major challenge. Ideally, l should have been an independent candidate but our system does not allow much for an independent candidate.

So, I had to find a fresh platform to get my voice across. In my calculation and it should have happened if the INEC process was not as corrupted as it was and if the PDP was not as severe as to earn the opprobrium of the whole world the way it did would have been that the election actually would have been deadlocked. Nobody would have won last year’s election on first ballot. If you weigh the strength of the candidates, Atiku Abubakar would have taken some portions of the county, Buhari, the dominant part of the northern votes, Yar’Adua would take some areas of PDP manipulation, domination, structure here and there and people like me would take the independent votes, the educated elite votes, young people votes and stuff like that and what some people would like to call the Obama phenomenon, whatever that means.
It would have ended up with nobody emerging as a clear winner.

That was when l was hoping that the real politics would begin. My goal was to be able to bring these men together to say these guys have messed this country up, can we believe ourselves now and have a clear vision of where we are going and taking this country. But unfortunately, they prevented the election from taking place. So, to think that those kinds of parties would therefore become a vibrant opposition is not a natural expectation.

What I have been working on and this is work in progress and the full dimensioning would soon be obvious is to collect many of those people who believe in something especially in this process and create a shadow cabinet. We have not started as expected but I think in the next couple of weeks, you would then see what I mean.

There would be two or three retreats between now and the end of April. Then you will see an onslaught of initiatives of where Nigeria should be going. Even if it is for those who have usurped power to use those ideas at personal level, that is good enough for me. Let the people have some measures for holding those who have grabbed power accountable.

what is the situation in your party, the African Democratic Congress (ADC) right now.
The situation is quite well and good. Recently, I was with the leaders of the party in Adamawa State where it has quite a decent network and still contesting the senate seat with Jibril Aminu of the PDP. For me personally, the bottom line is that the next election, there will be either sort of mergers or strategic alliances where we will not be functioning alone. The ADC will be part of a broader network.

Assessment of yar’Adua’s government.
This is really an unfair question because if you ask me to assess something, you have to give me something to assess. What am saying is that nothing has happened. You cannot assess nothing. As far as am concerned, nothing has happened. The country has stagnated. There is a momentum in parts of the economy that is running on its own in spite of government. But nothing has happened in Nigeria because of government in the last one year

Then, what is the way forward
We need to have a vision of where we are going and we have to have people who are passionately committed to getting there for something to happen. One of the first things that must happen is that politicians have to get together and accept that Nigeria is in trouble because of their conduct. That is trying to develop some kind of collective vision of where Nigeria should be going no matter who is there. We need to make some sacrifices for nation building rather than be obsessed with individual quest for power, who is doing what as a person rather than who and who have something to offer the people.
Until we do that, Nigeria will be a regressive economy, one step forward, two backwards. What we have been seeing are reversals of policies in the last one year.

That is what we have been saying, reversing all the policies made by the government before them. Even though the last one was a terrible government but they did one or two things right, but some of them have been reversed. We need a complete re-orientation and we need a few people who believe in something, who will provide the orientation and passion. We need people who have the burning, the zeal to do things for Nigeria. What are the things that will help us deal with the infrastructure problems, job creation challenges and so on.

What are those that we can administratively do to having back those skills of Nigerians in Diaspora? Nigeria doesn’t have skills. We keep pretending to ourselves that Nigeria is this and that but we do not have skills in Nigeria today. If we have to go any where, we have to bring back Nigerians abroad. Am embarrassed to admit to you that most of our graduates can do nothing. They do not have the skills and the skills are not just whether they know that two plus two equals to four, am talking of skills on values, ethics and ways of doing things.

A typical Nigerian who graduates from a Nigerian university cannot connect with his input and reward. What we have is an entitlement mentality, now that am a graduate, am entitled to this and that whether I produce anything. That is the real problem. So, to get Nigeria going, we need to get back Nigerians who worked in places where it is not about a degree but what you can do or produce. This is so that they can begin to help and culture Nigerians who are here, to create a new understanding of what to work means.

On the Electoral Reform Committee set up by Yar’ Adua.

It is easy to set up a committee and for the committee to make recommendations but another thing to implement the decisions. Do you have the capacity to make the recommendations work? We have all been complaining about the constitution but it is not our real problems. We need a complete re-orientation of our minds and that of the political class.

Projection into the future of Nigeria.
Remarkably, am optimistic about Nigeria’s future even though there are things to make you feel is this optimism justifiable. Three years ago, I attended a programme which a professor in France was talking about Nigeria as one of the most frightening examples of a country that can not get far. He said that everything that can be done wrong, Nigeria manages to do it wrong. But he said that what puzzles him was that as he traveled around the world, some of the most brilliant people he met were Nigerians.

He said he could not understand why a country that has some of the most brilliant people would continue to load machine guns every day and continue to shoot themselves in their foot. But he made a profound statement that Nigeria will keep falling, falling and falling until it has fallen so far and people there will look one another in the face and say there is no place to fall further, what the hell is wrong with us. He said that when that happens, people will be amazed with what would happen in Nigeria.

But the worry is where the bottom is. We keep hoping, oh, now we have reached the bottom. Nigeria amazes you by being willing to fall further down and for me the real problem is the oil money. So long as there is oil money, those gang of thieves who think that they own Nigeria would feel comfortable enough to keep making Nigeria continue to fall further down.