Renowned economist and chieftain of the Labour Party, Prof Pat Utomi, says there is mass agitation by the Nigerian youth for a new political order ahead of the 2023 general elections. In this interview on African Independent Television (AIT) breakfast show ‘Kakaaki’, which was monitored by Linus Aleke, the professor of political economy and management expert also talks on matters of security threats, among other sundry issues.

How did you receive the US travel advisory that caused a lot of panic in Abuja?

Quite frankly, I think that we are missing lots of things. Every government that knows what it is doing, has to provide information for its citizens on how they should conduct themselves anywhere they are in the world. I think that what the American has tried to do is to take from what intelligence they have gathered to try and alert American citizens in Nigeria. As it is tradition, they share whatever intelligence that they have with a friendly country, so that they can act accordingly too. I do not see anything particular or untoward about that that is a regular process of nations that are alive to their responsibilities.

Do you agree with the Federal Government’s position that the US Embassy’s decision to evacuate non-essential staff after the terror alert was an overkill aimed at causing panic among Nigerians?

I am not privy to intelligence, it is those who gather and who have the intelligence who make appropriate decisions. Assuming that the intelligence that they have suggested that there is a grave present danger and they ignore it because they don’t want the federal government to feel unhappy and something happens to their citizens or happen to any human being, by the way, not just their citizens, because we have a duty of solidarity in the humanity that we are part of. We have a duty of solidarity with others. It is not even just that they have that duty to their citizens but they have that duty of human solidarity to prevent others from falling into that trap. If I had enough intelligence myself, I could give you a different answer that you are looking for but I don’t have the intelligence to know what they know. So, it is only those who have that intelligence who can decide whether what they did was appropriate or inappropriate.

What do you think Nigerians should be doing based on this terror alert?

Well, I think leviathan, the government responsible for our safety should be doing a lot more than it has done. I think that whenever you look into the challenge of security in Nigeria, it invariably circles back to the fact that those tasks with security had not done needful in the last couple of years. I think that everybody should really recognize where the culpability lies and act appropriately in the interest of citizens. Talking of our country, for quite some time, the government has not acted in the interest of the people. The government is seen as a zone of capture, if you can capture the government, if you can take state power, you use it for self-aggrandisement, use it for your political positioning, use it to ensure quest for power, rather than service to the people. That is what has made this disconnect between the security of the Nigerian people. The primary obligation of the leviathan to the people is that the government has not quite acted in the best interest of the people over several years now. You meet senior security people, and they will tell you, look, we are not stupid, the police are not stupid, the military is not stupid but we are not getting enough protection. They say it repeatedly, privately, and even sometimes publicly. Let those who have to protect the Nigerian people, do the needful and protect the people.

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You are one of the proponents of the third force in Nigerian politics, is the Labour Party (LP), the third force?

Labour Party (LP), is called the third force, this is a process. It started many years ago with the recognition that Nigeria was in grave danger of completely falling apart as a country. In all indicators of performance, our country was in the very back seat of things, infant mortality, maternal mortality, security, and just about any indicator you want to measure. Looking at the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Nigeria was falling farther and farther behind. Robert Kaplan’s prediction of the coming anarchy, we becoming a Somalia was coming closer and closer every day. It was clear to anyone who has analytical skills that it was a leadership failure in Nigeria. Many well-meaning people began to think, how do we change this? People who apply themselves began to come to recognize that the nature and structure of the dominant political parties, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC), which, really are one, two of them constitute one party. Different faces of the same party move from one to the other in the struggle for the acquisition of political power for state capture. These groups like their structure, not because they are good people or bad people but because the nature of their structure cannot and couldn’t provide Nigeria progress. If you compare us with our peers, take the Malaysian, take the Indonesian and take everybody that we use to outperform, we are now larger relative to them, and the question is why? And the answer is very simple, the nature and structure of those parties if you want to use a paradigm that I like to use in structural economics to analyse this, it is called a structure conduct performance paradigm. If you look at the structure, it determines how you conduct yourself and that conduct is reflected in the performance outcome. So, the nature and structure of those parties invariably and inevitably will lead Nigeria towards state failure because the conduct that flows from their structure, which is for me, myself and I, a narcissistic political class was crystallizing as a result of this my turn, my share, my this, and my that, very little in their thinking about how to serve the people. The manifesto always adjusts PR things, I had written some of them in those same parties, and I know that there is no commitment to service. It is just a vehicle to use to grab power. Then, people began to talk to themselves, what can we do? But first of all, it is also a bit arrogant to assume that it is only one man who can solve everybody’s problems. And one of the things we came to was that we needed a collegial approach, that if we could get a collegiate of leaders and these agglomerations of leaders work, driven, primarily and fundamental by the common good of all. That we could have a different type of political party structure that will be served the people. And that came to be known as this third force movement, they were different groups, RND, driven significantly by Dr Usman Bugaje, was focussing primarily on the subject of quality of leaders. What should be the minimum acceptable to be in any particular leadership position, I also remember that steering committee, we created the NCF, as a vehicle to bring these people together. In the end, we created what we called the big tent because this movement for change, of necessity, is more than a political party, it is about the whole of society. So, in this big tent, we had political parties, several of them, then social movements, it took the congress of Nigeria professionals, for example, to migrate the Nigeria project that they have. They have a network around the country, committed to how Nigeria can be lifted from the current mess, finding the political leaders who they can back to achieve it. We have been engaging all of these groups, including the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), for years, trying to come to some understanding and the labour movement has a lot of obligation to build the platform for creating a structure for an alternative political trust in Nigeria. All of these now come together, under the big tent, which is the third force. I don’t particularly like the language but anyway it has become the convention. It is this third force that is creating the dynamic which we believe would change the outcome of the 2023 election from the traditional way that we look at them.

Why then is controversy trailing the release of the LP manifesto to the public to a point that it is stalling its campaign activities?

That is a very incorrect assessment of what has happened. I am personally and directly involved in the development of that manifesto. A group of thinking people have spent months working on it. There are several drafts, there was to be an engagement with the candidate on it, before a final draft. Somewhere along the line, someone in haste put out one of the early drafts and the party hierarchy has to correct it. If there was a flaw in how that was done, that is part of the process of evolution of how things are executed but the manifesto is clear and firm. The last couple of speeches made by Mr Peter Obi have been drawn directly from that manifesto but it was important to have a formal launch of that manifesto and when it is then launched, it will capture the essence of what the campaign is trying to do. But more importantly, it has to be owned, it is not like the old era, like I said earlier, I had been involved in writing manifestos before for political parties that lead in Nigeria today and they didn’t use the manifesto. They are the people who even deny what is contained in their manifesto. They will say, I didn’t even read it, so we are not going to go back to that route. This manifesto will be owned by Peter Obi and Datti Baba Ahmed, and so they need to sit down and go through a drill. Their positions led to the drafting, but they have to go through a drill of the outcome and then own it. That is going to be a living thing that they will be held accountable for throughout their tenure. It is not a matter of saying, is that what the APC manifesto says, I don’t know, I didn’t read it, this is what our leaders had said in the past, and we want to change that.

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Is the leaked manifesto the authentic one, which has not been officially unveiled to the public?

It is not a final draft, like everything in evolution, things get added, and things get subtracted, after the final engagement with the candidates there will be a final draft of the manifesto which has things that many manifestos in Nigeria simply don’t consider. It is very detailed work and once the drill is done and the candidate owns every aspect of it, they will offer it to the Nigerian people and it will be a basis for holding them accountable.
After the flag-off of the campaign in Nasarawa State, the LP campaign seems to have slowed down instead of maintaining the momentum, is there something untoward slowing the campaign?

I don’t know why we would see it as a slow, as a strategy thing, campaigns are not about shouting at stadia, and I object to that approach to the campaign. But we just have to have a balance between those who want to gather in a stadium and shout and those who want to think and touch the grassroots and persuade them about certain ideas and therefore execute. There is a meeting of strategic orientation and what we are trying to do for example is, if you look at the structure of Peter Obi’s push, you will see that there is a movement and there is a labour party. There is a campaign council around the candidate, and now building a relationship between each of these is done around what I will like to describe as an organic bulb like the onions, as you peel off one layer another layer comes through. Now, one layer is the layer that will be doing the stadium shouting, there is going to be another layer that is going to be dealing with the grassroots. There is another layer that will be dealing with the youths of Nigeria because we are in a chequered moment in our history, where the youths who constitute the majority have rejected the old political order. They do not want to hear of APC, they don’t want to hear of PDP, they want a new order and there is a group of what we call the fire team that is designed to engage these young people and to create a new dynamic in which, they will own the process. They are the political party, they are the protectors of the vote, and they are the polling agents. An organic movement that will do what was done in Kenya, that will do what was done in Zambia, and that will do what was done in Malawi. As Africa joins the new pattern in which the young are rejecting the old order of selfish leaders who said that they have done so well but any time they have a headache they jump into the aircraft to go and get treatment in a country where 70 percent of black doctors are Nigerians, United States of America, or United Kingdom where, if you withdrew Nigerian nurses and doctors, the National Health Insurance Scheme will collapse literally. These people cannot continue to claim that they have anything to offer the Nigerian people. So, how to engage young Nigerians in the process of reclaiming and retaking back their country, is a matter of strategic thinking not shouting at stadia, not gathering people to who you give money to come and dance and after dancing, they quarrel over how they share the money. This is a different ballgame, this is the life of a nation, the crisis in Nigeria right now is an existential crisis, and it is make-or-break. Nigeria fails, and Nigeria goes down. It is in response to this existential crisis that strategy is moderated and it is treated differently at different levels. That therefore cannot be interpreted to mean that the campaign has stalled. It is a period of creating awareness through a forward chat, that period has come, it has made its impact, and it has created its momentum, what is required now is one on one engagement with real issues, not factors that divide the people. I heard you discussing one of these things earlier. It is not those things anymore, it is about the soul of the nation, how we can retrieve our country by capturing the soul of the people who realized that this is not about ethnicity, who realized that this is not about loyalties of old, who realized that what is at the centre of it all is the future of their children, what is at the centre of it all is the continued existence of the country called Nigeria. Who realised that the dignity of the black man the world over is being put at the stake literally, by Nigeria passing this litmus test we have to fall in line with the trends in Africa and create a new order in our world.

There has been an issue around money politics but we cannot divorce money from politics entirely, how is your party addressing the complaint from support groups over lack of funding from the party?

This brings to the fore a fundamental issue in Nigeria politics. First, I would like to give great praise and thanks to these support groups who have done things that are not the case in recent Nigerian political history. In recent Nigerian political history, politics is about a few warlords capturing or owning barges or creating this enterprise they called political party and then capturing the state and taking public resources to fund political parties, it is a criminal thing. I just think that God is not kind to Nigeria, if we were to implement the law, most of those who run these political parties should be in jail. They captured the state, use security votes and whatever is it that they take out of government, put it in their private enterprise called the political party, and use it to suppress and oppress the Nigerian people, making their living conditions unbearable. Now, what has happened to the Peter Obi movement is that Nigerians have said enough is enough, we have had this enough, we will bring out our resources, we would organize an organic movement and people were spending their money. Of course, at some point, you will begin to get into a near fatigue state in that kind of approach. But let us not forget that traditionally Nigerian politics were driven by the people. As a child growing up, I knew that market women pay their five shillings to be members of action groups or whatever other party it was back in the 60s and it was that money that was used to run the political parties. Part of where we are going with the initiative underway is that that will be the case going forward but bear in mind we have a very short period to begin to organise all these things and begin to put them in place. The good news is that many people are willing. We have several schemes that are in place to ensure that that does happen in a way that provides appropriate funding to support the things that need to be done not bribe people because that will be a criminal offence.