Renowned economist, Prof Pat Utomi, has claimed that the nation is presently a failure, made worse by the lack of alternative thinking to turn things around.
According to Utomi, the lack of alternative thinking was
worsened by a total capture of the legislature and the judiciary, as he
described the present National Assembly as the worst thing that happened to the
country.
He argued that the National Assembly, which should be the
platform for robust debates to turn around the nation’s fortunes, had been
captured.
Speaking with The PUNCH, the economist said Nigeria was a
tragic failure because the political class and the elites, particularly the
legal elite, are self-centred rather than thinking of the common good of the
nation.
Utomi said it was baffling that the Nigerian political class
failed to recognise that the nation was presently at war, requiring a war
cabinet where almost everybody pulls together to fix the nation’s problems.
He stressed that there was a need for the leadership to
sincerely lead by example, particularly cutting down on its lavish lifestyle,
rather than calling on Nigerians to sacrifice.
“Nigeria is a failure right now; democracy is not working.
We all know that; anybody who does not know that is fooling himself. We have
total judicial capture; we have legislative capture, so there is no alternative
thinking in the country.
“For me, the worst thing that has happened to the country is
the National Assembly because that is where you should have the kind of debates
that will lead you to options, but you can’t because the whole place is
captured.
“These guys are just hustlers trying to get what they can
out of the system without asking what will make the country work.
“When you have that kind of problem, you come to the point
that James Robinson was making when he says a classic example is Nigeria which
knows what to do but cannot seem to do it. You need, in a time like this, a
certain kind of mindset.
“A local example is Olusegun Obasanjo in 1976/1977 when the
oil crisis began to slide. He decided that we would go to low-profile mode. As
head of state, his car was a Peugeot 504; he cut his travels.
“Anybody who watches
the way people in power spend public resources cannot take seriously any
statement that this is a time of sacrifice. So, the problem begins with them.
Intense political commitment is not there,” he said.
The economist added, “You cannot save an economy when the
political actors are on a binge and you will not have the kind of consequences
that you have today for the economy.
“It is an intensely political process to turn around the
economy. The Nigerian political class needs to recognise that we are in a moral
equivalence of a war. And when a country is at war, it pulls together. Nigerian
politicians still think they are on a binge.
“So, they are all running in different directions, and
nobody is sitting down to forge a national consensus on how to solve this
problem. When you have the moral equivalence of war, what you need is to set up
a war room, and war cabinet and bring everybody together to say, how do we fix
these problems.”
He stressed the need for intense political will to forge a
national consensus to solve the nation’s problems, as against politicians
stockpiling money to prosecute their next electioneering quest.
Asked if the adherence of Nigeria to policies of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank was a bane of Nigeria’s economic
challenges, Utomi said the world bodies would usually provide templates, but it
was up to nations to analyse such templates in line with their local
peculiarities.
He said the challenge was whether Nigeria deployed the
requisite local, intellectual knowledge to evaluate IMF templates in the
interest of the common good.
“IMF can have a template, but what is responsible for the
outcome is not their template; it is how local actors politically live their
way through doing the right things for growth and development for their
country. IMF and World Bank have got it wrong many times; it does not mean that
their intention is not right.
“It means that they just have formulas and it is not an
exact science. So what is desperately needed is for there to be a local,
intellectual capacity to evaluate those templates and act in the interest and
good of the local environment.
“This is where Nigeria has been a tragic failure because the
political class and its elites, particularly the legal elite, have not acted as
patriots either because they are ignorant or because they are too pathologically
self-centred to think of the common good.”
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