The Nation Over A Gallon: A Citizens Odyssey

By Pat Utomi…The price of Petrol goes up and gloves go off. When gloves go off name calling and the mudslinging on motives become fair game. But in Nigeria we do not have truth-o-meters or a media with the resources to reconstruct a history of character, so the narrative for the common good is often at the mercy of those who can shout the most or are the angriest. What history tells me is the most profitable outcome is not the most likely sum of such public conversation. I have the tragedy of Venezuela to point to as example. How do we then encourage Thought leadership that may help provide fruitful direction to engaging on matter of strategic significance for our children. But as I am in the US watching efforts to measure who lies more, uses near truths, between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump I think it fit to begin an investigation of motives with an excursion of an autobiographical nature.

 

I have on occasions spoken about a visit to Nigeria from my Graduate School days in the US 36 years ago. The Iranian revolution which toppled Shah Mohammed Rheza Pahlavi had pushed up Oil prices to then fantastically high rates of 40 dollars a barrel. At JFK Airport in New York I went into a Newsstand and saw something most unusual. Both Newsweek and Time magazine had the same words on their cover. It was so rare it attracted commentary. The words were: The world over a Barrel. Today in Nigeria it is over a gallon or liter of Petrol for an apparent beneficiary of a world over a barrel. But as Fareed Zakari in his GPS commentary on Venezuela pointed out, and a World Bank study of nearly 25 years ago show, that blessing can become a curse that leaves Venezuela on Essenco queues to buy basic essentials like milk, as we did in the early 80s in Nigeria,. Then there is their power supply, a curse of darkness even though they are atop one of the biggest Oil reserves in the world. Venezuela has been there several times even with their great crude endowments.

 

In 1980 I took a position when I arrived Nigeria and saw the foolish behavior encouraged by high Oil prices.

 

It would be many years before a World Bank study, dubbed the Resource Curse study made popular the position I formed in 1980 about natural resources and how to live with them. That study which showed that Resource Poor developing countries were doing much better than the ones with the resources to run away with progress left me with a deep sense of shame about elites that cannot do the needful and make sacrifice to build a nation their children can live in and celebrate the memory of their forbears. In three decades of active citizenship there has been hardly a shift in the essence, substance or even style in how the Nigerian experience has affected me.

 

Every time I have faced the fantastic poverty of the land, the fantastic corruption, and even more fantastic mocking of Nigeria by those who sowed the seeds of Nigeria’s failings and continue to profit from it as receivers of stolen goods, I simply see my 1980 views, expressed repeatedly and acted out in the opportunities of my life’s journey. Those views which drove me to the streets in 2012 still define how I see the troubles of now, all of which I genuinely believe are self-inflicted. We cannot forever blame the British who fantastically sowed discord in the world and hypocritically blame the victim. How did others get away from that state. They tried to dress Mahathir Mohammed in robes of corruption but he brought all into the house so they can be pissing out, rather than stay out and piss in. Today it’s hard to mock Malaysia.

 

My disposition to holding self-accountable, instead of blaming others, and preference for facing the future rather than looking back have not endeared my views to die in the wool partisans who fail to see the big picture. As we once again fail to see the promise of Nigeria being eaten away by bringing yesterday’s quarrels as prisms through which we view existential issues of the moment I remind myself that the truth must be spoken as a citizen and not retreat from the public space as many do to avoid mud, and imputation of motives from being hauled at them by people who have not given deep enough thought to the issues.

 

So, to return to the crisis of the boom of 1979/80 when foolish choice became the norm in Nigeria’s policy arena, it led me to a passionate desire to come home and be a citizen. This was why I left to come home the very day I submitted my PhD thesis in 1982. But the roots of Karthasis moment in 1980 was from the year before.

 

In 1979 I was enrolled in an International Business Class in Bloomington. The Professor, Richard Farmer had a scenario on the Oil crisis. One of the scenarios saw US Marine cease Nigeria’s Oilfields, pump the stuff and deposit the money in the country’s account, if the Arabs were to cut off supplies and threaten America’s strategic needs. I was determined from that day to get Nigeria to diversify away from Oil. Critical to that was Good Governance producing what is now known as a developmental state. Transparency and low level corruption, entrepreneurship and active citizenship were in my view, as a 23 year old idealist back then, the way to the goal.

 

It was typical, in those days that if you were young, idealistic, and educated, especially in the social sciences, you had to be a socialist. I was outside the norm. Thanks to peculiar influence of American Catholic priests in Gusau, in the Northwest of Nigeria as young as I was, the social Doctrine of the Catholic Church was more an influence on me than Karl Marx.

 

It is no surprise that the first set of antagonists I faced on return in 1982 were Marxist academics who used to refer to me as a Bourgeoise Apologist. Their tactics would strengthen me and prepare me for shouting matches called public conversation.

 

The first challenge to my idea of citizenship was the typical ’what is he looking for’. That was how I found out that what I believed and still believe about the duty of all citizens to engage in the village square is not shared by all. A few months after I returned I was casually informed that President Shagari had approved for me to replace Prof. Odenigwe. I was quite stunned and asked why. Two of the primary actors who also conveyed the message, then VP Dr Alex Ekwueme, and Mrs Omobola Olajide are around to corroborate.

 

I knew two people who were actively seeking the position. But after the coup I was determined that certain conditions would mark any involvement in public life again. But I would never give up on citizenship duty. Nigeria needed to have low corruption, if any; entrepreneurship had to be encouraged and diversification needed to be pursued. Any review of my life will show that the benefit of grace for contentment has enabled faithfulness to the pursuit of those ideals of what society should be.

 

This citizenship path was tested many times in the 1980s but it was on return to civil rule that commitment to citizenship reminded me of why progress has been slow in Nigeria and why Nigeria remains worth fighting for, and, if necessary, dying for.

 

I had been invited by Candidate Olusegun Obasanjo to lead a policy advisory team that met with him over many weeks. Before the 1999 elections. Just after the elections the Government was perceived as sub optimizing. As citizen I did my bit to add my view on the direction we should travel. I was approached by at least three people who said the President was being brought gossip that I was a member of AD and unfriendly to the policy thrust of the President. One friend, the late Waziri Mohammed urged that I let the president who had been told my friendship with the Lagos state Governor was compelled to explain a few things to Waiziri. I assured him I was not a member of AD and that as a citizen I respond to an invitation by the Governor -elect in Lagos to be part of working groups for the transition and was honored to contribute to development effort in Lagos. I then told him I had no interest in explaining myself to General Obasanjo as I owed him nothing. I told him of how I used my private resources to travel to world capitals, at the urging of Alhaji Ahmed Joda to reach contacts to make a case for the release of General Obasanjo from Abacha prison… I had done that as a citizen and in weeks of meeting with General Obasanjo to work on policy positions for the elections I did not even mention the efforts on his behalf. I had done that and spent much much valuable time and resources going up to Ota to provide briefing and work on policy as duty so I owed the President nothing. My debt and loyalty were to history.

 

The same Citizenship obligation put me on collisiocoursen with my Lagos and other client state national government with my calling for savings at a time of income boom. Evidently those gossiping to Obasanjo did not tell him that. But the spectacular decline of economic performance because we failed to save as Dr Okonjo Iweala acknowledges today vindicate that view offered as citizen whether it pleased the incumbent or not. To be fair when criticism of economic management rose in 1999 President Obansajo invited me to Dinner with his core team including the VP, Finance Minister SGF, and others to raise the issues. Improvements that followed shielded us from the 2008 global financial crisis. So it is never late to pull back and only speaking truth to power can make that happen. Interestingly the same principle guided the friendship that the gossips tried to warm into the then President with.

 

As citizen leading cabinet retreats I never sent an invoice to the Lagos state government. I would lead a retreat for the cabinet this weekend and the following week earn 12 Million Naira for similar service from a corporate client. My liaison in Lagos state, Yemi Cardoso, who was commissioner for Budget and Planning had been Executive Director at a Bank that was one such client..

 

As General Obasajo was never asked a four by me I also never asked one of the Lagos State Governor.

 

Then come the big challenge of making our democracy work along the lines of the issues that captured me in 1980. Clear goals were to help build an opposition that could defeat an incumbent, diversify the base of the economy, build elite consensus on the way forward across partisan orientation so we could erect a developmental state and develop values that are share which define the Nigerian and drive progress.. In actual work as a business Angel and in Thought leadership I strove, with passion to give sacrificially of myself to walk down that path. Chief Olu Falae, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, and the incumbent President are witnesses to the effort.

 

I moved away from images of General Buhari from 1984 to embrace him as a partner on that journey of building a formidable opposition from stimuli rooted in faraway Indonesia. Former Indonesia Oil Minister, Professor Mohammed Sadli, who had been my host on a research visit to Jarkata in 1997 impressed me with his modest ways. This man who was part of the so called Berkeley Mafia that Suharto used to rescue Indonesia lives on a Hilltop bungalow. He talked ethics with sincerity. Then he also talked about the Young Colonel from Nigeria who was his counterpart. That was when I formed the view that General Buhari would be a good rallying point to deal corruption a sucker punch in Nigeria… On one of my visits to his Kaduna home to advance opposition development strategy we were chatting that night when a call came through informing him of the death of President Yaradua.

 

Whenever I raised the Bahai possibility and got pushback on some dimensions, I used the metaphor of the Reagan Presidency. It was therefore natural that the magical play of fortunes in 2015 we should hope for bold leadership play that would unite the country and align passions for forging new pathways for solving problems like Fuel subsidy and diversification of the base of the economy. My fear that if great leadership did not emerge and deliver we could slip into a Robert Kaplan predicted Coming Anarchy.

 

My worry now is we cannot afford the bloodletting in the polity and the land. Today is not too late to begin again. The Cameron gaffe while bearing irritating and ethnocentric truths should be a wakeup call to the elite of Nigeria that what is at stake is much bigger than the petty games for personal power, material gains or ethnic triumphalism. What is at stake is the dignity of a race and the regard for a continent. I said as much one Friday afternoon when President Umaru Yaradua tried to persuade me to join his cabinet.

 

My view was clear. I was a Patriot that was ready to provide my perspective 24/7 but could join a cabinet only if at least 7 passionate dedicated persons that saw a bigger picture than self-had his assurance a certain track will be followed.

 

A phrase; medieval mindset has entered the lexicon of these conversation but many of those who spot it do not know how it crept in. In my reflections on how the economy can grow and accommodate the wellbeing of all and not just a few I had come to a framework in which several sets of variable emerged as critical. That framework which I called the Growth Drivers Framework and was anchor concept for my book, Why Nations are Poor locates Leadership as central to affecting culture, which shapes human progress; building institutions, which is critical to sustaining progress and how policy choices are made, human capital built and deployed and entrepreneurship encouraged..

 

Talking to President Yaradua who asked me what I thought the problem of Nigeria was, I had turned to the leadership question and said, rather a Kemal Ataturk than Suleman the Magnificent.

 

Even though I admired the great Kaiifa from Istanbul whose conquests reached the gates of Vienna I would rather a Mustafa Kemal, the reforming Ataturk who birthed modern Turkey from the crumbling Ottoman Empire. So when early in the year a prominent statesman from the North said to me,your APC Villa seems to be retreating into a medieval court alarm bells went off. Better a Kemal Ataturk than Suleman the Magnificent. But better still, better a Nigeria drawing from leadership example of Mahathir Mohammed, Lee Kuan Yew and Abraham Lincoln in the quest for modernity that can save a race from being recolonized into a thousand years of servitude.

 

Ripples Nigeria…without borders, without fears

Join the conversation

Opinions

Support Ripples Nigeria, hold up solutions journalism

Balanced, fearless journalism driven by data comes at huge financial costs.

As a media platform, we hold leadership accountable and will not trade the right to press freedom and free speech for a piece of cake.

If you like what we do, and are ready to uphold solutions journalism, kindly donate to the Ripples Nigeria cause.

Your support would help to ensure that citizens and institutions continue to have free access to credible and reliable information for societal development.

Donate Now