A professor of political economy and entrepreneurship at the Lagos Business School, Prof. Pat Utomi has taken a swipe at Nigerian bankers for contributing to the culture of corruption that is destroying the country. In an extensive interview with SaharaTV over the weekend on the state of the Nigerian economy, Prof. Utomi accused bankers of being averse to telling the truth.
“Bankers are the worst people in this,” Utomi said. “They won’t speak the truth. They say we escaped it this time. But they get caught the next time around.”
Defending himself on the role he played as the star witness for accused banker Mr. Atuche who is accused of defrauding Bank PH B of N27 billion, Utomi said that system was unfair.
“The system set up a prosecutorial lynch mob,” Utomi told SaharaTV’s Rudolf Okonkwo. “Things are thrown on some people. Sometimes really framed. Sometimes partially true. And everybody goes on lynch mood. And there is an obfuscation of truth and reality. And we all get this high, yes, lock up those people. It is the reason we are not making progress.”
He repeated the charge he made during the trial that there was a calculated effort by the Yar’ Adua administration to go after Bank PH B.
“Umaru Yar’Adua said and did things in my presence that I knew he deliberately pushed the system to go after bank PH B because his family had a small share in what part became bank PH B,” Utomi charged. “And I thought that the truth must come to be told if not we go through this game again and again and our country will not grow because we allow people who have power not to have checks.”
The former presidential candidate under the African Democratic Congress party of Nigeria repeated his suggestion that two or three major international investigative consultancies should be brought in to review the banking reform in place. “Review all the banks,” he demanded. “Do a forensic. If they were to prove that the banks they went after were worse than, really and objectively, than the ones around, I will spend the rest of my life in jail.”
The founder of the Center for Value and Leadership at the Lagos State Business School identified greed as a major problem in our society. “Few people have overcome this problem,” Prof Utomi said. “System works well not because people are good guys. Systems work well because you have strong institutions. It’s the nature of the institutions that lead to boundaries to conducts. And those boundaries to conduct are what make investments possible.”
Nigeria has been plagued by a 7% jobless growth economy that has left so many of its citizens poorer. With borrowing escalating under the guise of infrastructural development and income dropping due to a $5 billion a year oil theft, Utomi suggested that the slug of figures being thrown around by the managers of the economy were aimed at taking the attention of ordinary Nigerians away from the rot that is actually going on in the economy. With crude oil selling at over $100 a barrel when Nigeria pegged crude oil price in the 2013 budget at $79 a barrel, Utomi lamented that the Nigerian economy was being abused. He questioned the jump in the so-called oil subsidy in just a year and blamed it on cronies of political office holders who were allowed to cart away lots of money for the purposes of funding the electoral interest of those in power. As a result, he said, the government had to cover the leakage by making Nigerians pay more.
On the findings of a presidential committee on public service reform that discovered that top government officials in Nigeria take home N1.126 trillion a year in salaries and allowances – out of a national budget of N4.9 trillion, Utomi reiterated his call for a part-time citizenship legislature. When asked to explain why there was no outrage in the country Prof. Utomi blamed it on the failure of citizen involvement.
“There is a dearth of leadership in civic society,” he said. “There is a failure of citizens that anybody will get away with murder in Nigeria. Nigeria is very sadly one of the most unjust societies on earth. And it is so because people don’t stand up for their rights. People don’t fight for what they should fight for. Every time you stand up to do something because you think that is just and the way it should be everybody who knows you gets on the phone – why are you complaining? Why you? How to get to waking civic society up must be the biggest challenge for us as a country.”
The erstwhile Managing Director of Volkswagen Nigeria and a former student union activist wondered why the next generation of Nigerians does not agitate for things especially when they are the ones with a lot to lose. “Most of what is going on in Nigeria is really an abuse of the next generation by a generation that had their turn a long time ago, ran Nigeria as twenty something year olds and continue to run Nigeria as eighty something year olds, abused their own opportunities, abused the opportunities of their children and are now abusing the opportunities of their grandchildren and yet these grand children don’t feel a sense of outrage,” he said. “In our time we were on the streets before the inks were dry on anything that upset us.”
As President Jonathan argues that his so-called transformational agenda was truncated by difficulties, SaharaTV asked Utomi if the president knows that history does not accept such excuses. “The kinds of people who reach the top of public life in Nigeria,” Utomi said “do not have the preparation to understand the meaning of history.”
sahara reporters
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