• ‘Those who claimed to be democrats’re now suppressing opposition’

Pat Utomi is a professor of Political Economy. In this interview, he speaks on the controversy over amendment to the Electoral Act, and the danger of not allowing opposition to thrive

You reportedly said that at 70, there’s no way you will not join any protests in the country to press home the clamour for good governance. But having championed good governance for a long time, do you think that protests have actually produced any meaningful result in Nigeria?

You can imagine if there was no protest. If things are as bad as they are, if there was no public awareness, you can imagine how bad it would be. It would be much worse. I think protest is about raising awareness. It is a major tool in a democracy everywhere in the world because if you don’t raise awareness, then the rest of the people who don’t reflect enough will be in ignorance and that will enable people in power to ignore them more.

So, if there is a group of people who have a voice and who can use protest as a platform to raise their voice on behalf of all the people, then greater enlightenment will come to the broader population and such would further sensitise them to action. Stephen Covey, the great guru of personal effectiveness, wrote the famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And before he died, he said there was a very important habit left out, and he wrote a book, the Eight Habits.

And in that, he said the most important habit of the 21st century will be to help people find their voice. So, through activities like protests, you help people find their voices, people who think that they are voiceless. And that will lead to greater inclination or greater sensitivity by people who have power.

Politicians in Nigeria are playing with fire. I pray that the revenge of the poor does not catch up with them in the way that it ought to because it may not be palatable

If not, they will just rise roughshod over the people. It may not always seem as successful as we wish in Nigeria, but we have to keep fighting for it to be more successful. If there’s any tragedy in the Nigerian democratic journey, it is that even the military used to be more sensitive to public protest than the so-called civilians are today. The military was more reluctant to bring out troops to shoot people demonstrating than civilians today, who seem to be more fascist in their disposition, ready to bring out the guns, but it will backfire so badly on them because we are approaching what’s metaphorically where the English got with the Magna Carta, the charter of people’s rights.

While some people believe that the mass occupation of the National Assembly over the amendments to the Electoral Act produced a result, making them have emergency sitting, others believe the Red Chamber and indeed the entire National Assembly were clever by half by inserting a clause that there would be manual collation of results in places where network will be an issue. As the President has signed it into law, don’t you think it is a way of undermining the process and what are the takes of the civil societies on this?

Well, they know that technically they cannot claim that there’s no network anywhere because the thing does not depend on network. It has a code where once the thing is photo graphed, it is automatically saved. And whether there’s a network or no network, whenever you plug it in, what was saved would come up. It will automatically upload. So, that’s just soft refuge.

The Electoral Act Amendment having been signed into law by the President; don’t you think it is a sad commentary to efforts to sanitise the electoral system, meaning the 2027 elections would merely be a repetition of the 2023 elections where they alleged glitches?

Let us be very careful. I think there has been a collapse of culture in Nigeria, and one of the most prominent elements in this collapse of culture is a loss of a sense of shame, especially by the political class. Their desire to abuse the Nigerian people is so complete that they are willing to risk many things, quote and unquote. Politicians think Nigerians are stupid but they may be shocked because you know that history is replete with such thinking and the consequences. But they seem to be so short-sighted.

You know, George Santayana made the famous statement about those who ignore history are most likely to be consumed by it, or to repeat the mistakes, whichever way you choose to interpret it. And they may be overplaying their hands in assuming the stupidity of the Nigerian people. I just pray for all of us. We’ve seen countries reduced to what Sudan has become and what Somalia went through. But that’s what they are playing with.

I know Sudanese friends of mine who were saying these things to Jaffar al-Nameri and to Omar al-Bashir, who many people say is a Nigerian. They all carried on until they managed to reduce their country to rubble. And that’s what these guys are playing with. This is because when people cannot express themselves, when people feel that they are caged in, then they respond violently. They respond by walking away. And in the end, everybody loses.

In the face of all these and as someone who has been in the trenches before, don’t you think it is time Nigerians fully occupy the streets to demand that their wishes are granted, given that sovereignty should rightly resides with them because, as you rightly pointed out, the political class is taking Nigerians for granted, especially as we are heading for another election circle?

I hope that it happens. But the truth is whether or not you mobilise effectively for a protest, whether or not the politicians have enough of a sense of shame to realise that they’re presiding over the destruction of their own children’s future, and invariably history teaches us this, all of them will lose. I keep going back to the story of Pastor Wale Adeferasan’s 60th birthday, and the speakers included Yemi Oshibajo, before he became vice president, and myself.

I recall that we both told fairly similar stories. His own story was from Somalia, mine from Liberia. And people who were once full of swag as political leaders ended up in refugee camps and begging for rice. Politicians in Nigeria are playing with fire. I pray that the revenge of the poor does not catch up with them in the way that it ought to because it may not be palatable.

I want to recall your proposed shadow cabinet or Shadow Government. A lot of Nigerians seemed not to be abreast of what shadow government is all about and perhaps that was why it was not fully accepted. Many Nigerians misunderstood it. Can you explain what it was really and what it intended to achieve?

There’s nothing to explain. The concept of a shadow cabinet has been around for a long time. Is it practiced anywhere? Yes. If you’re talking about British, the shadow ministers in Britain get paid like ministers of government.

Most parliaments have a shadow cabinet. All it is is that certain designated individuals have the brief to watch particular portfolios in government and prepare alternative ideas about how to deal with the policies that the ones in government are dealing with and make those ideas public for public discussion and conversation.

In Britain, every major decision, even the government has to bring in their shadow members because the government can change any time and those shadow numbers become the ones who take over the portfolios. So, they need to be constantly briefed on even a security briefing and stuff like that. It’s easier where you have two straight dominant parties. I read the judgment of the person who ruled on it, which was full of ignorance. In Britain, it just evolved the way we were suggesting it.

People just started working around a concept where you have these designated opposition people who, you know, were the alternate policy people. And after a while, the British Parliament formally adopted it. And you now have Kemi Badenoch as the formal Shadow Prime Minister in Britain. She has her own ministers representing the exact opposite numbers in the Labour Party. And they are entitled to full briefing, even on security.

The people who are fighting it know the truth. They’ve seen it work around the world. But the biggest thing that is undemocratic, I don’t know, I call it failure that we have right now and it is visible is that those who yesterday preached one thing because they didn’t have power and see how easy it is to abuse power have turned to be something different.

Has there ever been a proposal for shadow cabinet in Nigeria before?

I first announced a shadow cabinet in this country in 2008. We even have a website. Dr. Leke Pitan, who was in Bola Tinubu’s cabinet as Health Commissioner in Lagos was a shadow health person in the shadow government we formed in 2008. Then nobody made noise, but Bola Tinubu now in power has gotten security to hound people on account of something that he knew about in 2008 and 2009.

It’s a tragedy for Nigeria that all those who claimed to be democrats yesterday, although I feared they were, are the ones suppressing voices, which do not align with theirs. And I wrote in a book in 2018, really fascists in the making.

President Tinubu was in the trenches like some of you to fight for good governance. What do you think has changed in the way the President reacts to protests and dissenting voices through his silence when they are attacked and arrested?

You see, not everybody who says Lord, Lord will enter heaven. In the same way, not everybody who says democrat, democrat is really a democrat. Some people use it as cover to look for power and once they get power, the fascist in them comes out but that of Tinubu is too much. Well, everybody has their own call.

Has there been any way to remind the President that he was once in the trenches fighting for good governance?

Protest is the only way to keep government in its toes. Why do you need to remind him? He knows he was protesting himself all the time. The speeches he made when Goodluck Jonathan was president, if you make it now, you will be dead. Not just in prison, you will be dead. So, it just showed you who the democrats are and those who pretend to be democrats.

Recently, some bandits released a video, where they claimed that they had in their custody 176 kidnapped victims, thus contradicting earlier statements from the Kwara State government which said only 35 people were kidnapped. In the face of all these, do you think the government is doing enough to halt the escalating insecurity in the land because there seems to be so much propaganda?

The problem with Nigeria is what I like to call the triumph of politics. People in power are so focused on politics and the next election that anything that approaches the truth that will make them look bad is either misrepresented or described as antigovernment.

Unfortunately, I think journalists have not helped the matter because they created a narrative that is not in conformity with the reality. I said it the other day, and in fact a journalist has sent me a message that people have been calling him that I called him out.

I didn’t mean to call him out in any way. I was just trying to give an example of a mistake that journalists make in the way they use language. When you say for example “disgruntled elements have got together and they have formed the ADC,’ what does that mean? Disgruntled against who? Those in power encourage that narrative and journalists speak up on it without thinking clearly.

Still on electoral matters; do you think the Nigerian electoral system as it is presently can guarantee free and fair election in 2027?

Maybe, this is where the fight is. To me, it depends on the citizens. A good example is Kano State. For many years, Kano had one-term governors. They do one term and usually lose the next election because the citizens used to organise and prevent rigging, the whole of Nigeria can do the same thing.

How can the whole Nigeria do the same thing, and how can such protest like what you said about Kano be sustained?

The way it is, it’s just a protest. I’ve come back to what I said earlier. It’s a protest. You know, this business of sending the military is unfortunate. So, if they want to send the military, everybody stay at home. Let the whole country grind to a halt. The military will not kill you inside your house, so just stay in your house. Everybody says no more, we’re not going out. Let them run the country. Let them take it.

What do you think the media can do to make the polity better?

All I can say is that journalists can do much better. When we were young reporters ourselves, we used to think of what we called back in those days, nearly 50 years ago, developmental journalism and the duty of the reporter and social responsibility theory of the press.

Journalists recognised that they had a role and a duty to people beyond just plain reporting of the facts and opinions. So, if journalists recognise that duty and do what we did as 21-year-old reporters back in the 70s, this country won’t be like it is today.