The 2007 presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress and Chief Convener of the Big Tent Coalition Shadow Government, Pat Utomi, speaks with ISMAEEL UTHMAN on the controversies trailing the formation of his coalition and other national issues

The Department of State Services has filed a suit against you on the formation of your shadow government? How will you react to that?

There is nothing to react to. It is not funny that citizens are getting together to organise ourselves on how to hold governments accountable and provide alternative ideas on how to do things, and they decided that it is a matter for the DSS. It shows that there is a dearth of freedom.

Have you responded to the suit?

I have not received anything from them. How would I respond to something I have not received?

Do you feel threatened by the DSS’s move?

Why would I be threatened? If we die, we die.

Apart from the DSS, the Federal Government and the APC have argued that the shadow government has no legal or constitutional backing in Nigeria’s federal system. How do you respond to those concerns?

They ought to go back and read the 1999 Constitution. They are playing with semantics, not with the reality of what is being proposed. The name, “shadow” was used for the coalition. There is also the freedom of people in a democracy to associate and call themselves whatever they want. By the way, recall that when Goodluck Jonathan was President, this same group of people in power today threatened to form a parallel government. We are not threatening to form a parallel government. We are simply saying that the political party system is failing Nigeria; it’s almost a total collapse. People are jumping from one party to another. Once they have committed enough sins, they join the ruling party so that their sins can be forgiven or their elections can be guaranteed from rigging.

Because that system is collapsing, citizens are making moves to ensure that the functions of government do not suffer. So, they try to get together and call themselves a shadow team, but the government begins to say it is not in the constitution. Which constitution is against the people getting together to say, “We will brainstorm on how we are being governed?” People are telling the government that there is a different way to do things and make them better. The government’s reaction shows that they have something they are scared of. They are scared of the Nigerian people. We have reached the point where the government is not scared of the political structure, because they know they can buy everybody.

I thought the government would welcome our idea, because that was the most intelligent thing to do. But I began to hear all this panic, and the boys who yesterday spoke differently in my presence went on television and spoke without character against me. My heart breaks for Nigeria and for the future of our country.

We are not threatening to form a parallel government like the APC threatened when they were in opposition. We are citizens who want to associate because political parties are failing us, and there is the need to speak up for ourselves instead of waiting for the political parties to do so. So, when did that begin to get into the constitution?

What specific strategies will the shadow government adopt to hold the current administration accountable?

We have somebody attached to every major government function that we want to focus on. For instance, we have our shadow defence person, a Nigerian who was a colonel in the US Army. We have somebody to shadow the Independent National Electoral Commission and election reforms. Nigeria has failed disastrously in power, and this country has been set back more than 30 years because of the failure to deal with the power problem, which is driven mainly by corruption. Our power shadow person will present better and achievable ways to handle the country’s power problem. Our plan is to put before the Nigerian people a very credible initiative, which, in less than a decade, will generate five times as much power as Nigeria has generated with billions of naira spent. We will show Nigerians how we can do that. So, if the government wants to borrow it and can effectively implement it, they are welcome. I told my people not to worry about whether they steal our ideas or not; we will make the ideas public. That is all we are going to be doing: bringing out the ideas that can move Nigeria forward.


Do you think offering advice or critiquing the government is enough to bring about the needed good governance, particularly when the government has rejected your coalition?

If Nigerians know that there is an alternative (and not just know or talk, we will show blueprint by blueprint, how we can implement it), then the government is going to be under pressure to show that our idea doesn’t work. If they show that it doesn’t work, then maybe they will learn how to make it work. That is our duty as citizens. That is what we are going to do. We have a different initiative that is intervening directly.

Apart from this shadow team, there is a New Tribe that we created last year. For example, in the New Tribe healthcare area, we brought together Nigerian doctors from around the world. They are developing programmes to implement in Nigeria, without any request to the government or anything. Some of them will be free, while some will come with minimal charges. But they will give you the quality of healthcare you get in America, here in Nigeria.

Nigeria has a multi-party system, but in practice, it seems like a two-party state. Do you believe in the need for a coalition to form a third force ahead of the 2027 general elections?

I have a rich history in political participation. The APC exists today because of my idea. Opposition politics was running very poorly under the PDP. The PDP was threatening to be in power for 60 years. I knew the PDP government was not doing the right things, and I thought of what to do. I began to discuss the situation in things I was writing. At the annual lecture of Leadership Newspaper in 2012, I was invited to give a lecture on political parties in Abuja. On the high table were almost all the people who became leaders of the APC today, from Tinubu to Buhari and Baba Akande, among others. That was where the conversations that became the APC started. People think I started the shadow government because of Tinubu, whereas I first proposed this idea 18 years ago.

The whole process of developing the Nigerian political system, with us being in the progressive movement, led to meetings that first began to bring people like Buhari and Chief Olu Falae together. Chief Falae would say to me: “You know Buhari has an emotional following in the far north. We have to work with him. We must work with him, even if the only thing he can offer is to get rid of corruption.” I was running between Tinubu and Falae for two years, trying to bring everybody together. And I found that it was not working. I have been involved in the whole business of organising the opposition for decades.

Is your shadow government willing to work with former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and Mallam Nasir El-Rufai’s coalition?

I am willing to work with anybody that can make Nigeria better, because of the pain and the shame I feel that Nigeria is where it is compared to its potential. After many years in graduate school, I was coming from a conference in France, and I ran into one of my classmates. His first statement was, “Pat, what happened to Nigeria?” I don’t know what to say whenever I get to that kind of point. Do I start saying that a bunch of criminal politicians took over my country? How do I explain to the world that Nigeria is the poverty capital of the world, when we could very easily have been at a GDP per capita of $18,000 at least today? Look at what the President of the African Development Bank said the other day — that Nigeria’s current position is worse than that of 1960. GDP per capita in Nigeria has dropped to $824, and our politicians still have swag. I don’t know how we lost shame, and when you mention these facts, they get very aggressive and defensive. The truth is that we are just struggling out of pride and nationalism not to admit the fact. But Nigeria is a failed state. That is the naked truth. This was caused by a few politicians who cannot see beyond their desire for power. So, when I face those kinds of things, I am ready and willing to work with anybody who can change the conditions.

However, my real problem is that Nigerian politicians are obsessed with elections and power. They don’t think enough about governance and governing Nigeria. This is why we are permanently in an election cycle and do everything to get elected. Some people who did not get elected will move into another party. We have reached a stage where the pressure must be on politicians to govern and not to run for the next election. Everything is about the next election right now. By the time we finish this election, we will start talking about the next election. Between these two elections, what have you done? Nothing!

Many key figures in the opposition have been defecting to APC and adopting President Bola Tinubu for a second term. What do you think is responsible for this gale of defections?

Politicians have stylishly covered the constitutional intent, which says that people cannot cross-carpet. If you cross-carpet, you lose the position. The Governor of Delta State should have automatically stopped being the governor of the state the day he announced his defection to the APC. But they have papered over the constitution. When it comes to where they can play personal games, they won’t talk about the constitution. But where things don’t even concern the constitution, like citizens getting together to ask how the government is performing, they say it is against the constitution. Adams Oshiomhole had said, “Just join us in APC and all your sins are forgiven.” That is enough for them to defect.

What are the biggest challenges facing Nigeria’s political culture today, and how do you think they can be addressed?

The fundamental thing is that people find politics profitable. We must find a way of making politics materially inconvenient and unprofitable. If you get to power, you can abuse public resources as you like, whether you call it a security vote or giving contracts or whatever. Politics is attractive to all kinds of criminals. In societies where holding office means sacrifice, rich people look at politics and say, “I don’t want to go and waste my time there and lose my wealth.” But in Nigeria, they go into politics to make money, and because of that, they will do anything, including killing, to get there. Most of our politicians are richer than the businessmen. If we really want to stop all of this, we have to make public life materially unattractive.

A professor of medicine should earn more than the President of Nigeria. But we all know that the personal assistant to a local government chairman earns more than a professor of Medicine in Nigeria today, which is why the system has collapsed. We have turned the incentive structure of Nigerian society upside down, and the country is not making progress because of it.


Also, the biggest tragedy of Nigeria is that people don’t know how to speak truth to power anymore. They begin to believe their own lies. The incentive structures do not lead to progress. They only lead to a scramble for power and the sharing of the limited booty left through oil. The day that there isn’t even that small one, Nigeria will be worse than Somalia. That is my big fear. If we don’t do something dramatic now, Nigeria will be worse than Somalia in the next few years. You can see the indicators, all these kidnappings, banditry, and terrorism. I had predicted the cause of all this violence in Nigeria. It was easily predictable 15, 20 years ago. This country has gone through so many wrong things.

Many prominent Nigerians have been raising concerns about a one-party system. Do you think Nigeria will ever be a single-party state?

The present arrangement is designed to go that way, but it is just a path to disaster. They can all get into one party if they want, then they will begin to struggle over how to share the booty within that one party, and the implosion will be extraordinary. Those calculating for the next election feel that if they bring the so-called juggernauts, it will be easy for them to win the elections.

Many politicians have said it would be unfair not to allow Tinubu/the South to complete the eight-year term. How do you see this argument?

All I want is to make Nigeria work. Let’s stop focusing on elections and concentrate on serving the people. The people are poor and hungry. Who among the Nigerian youths will not jump on the next plane if they have the opportunity? How can you build a country like that and still walk around with a swag?

What is the point of eight years if the people have no benefit from it? Let’s have one year and get impact. Why eight years? Eight years of people’s lives to destroy? It is part of the ‘my turn’ mentality that has dominated Nigerian politics.

Many Nigerians believe that governance at all levels has become transactional and devoid of public service ethos. What’s your view on this?

Citizens should wake up. When I proposed the idea (through the New Tribe) of a Freedom Converge, which is about getting citizens from all over the country to converge on Abuja with a target of 7.2 million people, I was doing it to make a statement—that unless politicians realise that the citizens are human beings, they will continue doing what they’re doing. It is only citizens, the people’s power, that can wake the political class—the Nigerian elite who have gone rogue.

During one of my trips to the Philippines, I went to Mass on a Sunday, and the priest who said the Mass was thundering against the then-incumbent president, Estrada. By the time I arrived in Japan a few days later, Estrada had fallen from power, literally driven out by homilies said in church. I think that the mosques and churches failed the Nigerian people in many ways. We cannot mobilise the people, teach them properly, and make them know that they have power. That is why the Freedom Converge we are planning for December involves a combination of three converges. The first was Martin Luther King’s march on Washington in 1964, the second was the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the third was Gandhi’s walks in India. If we can take elements from Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Orange Revolution, with Nigerians coming out in their millions over green-white-green banners, maybe our politicians will know that people are not so stupid anymore, and we can have a new Nigeria.

Do you think Nigeria’s current federal structure enables or hinders effective governance and development?

I am not worried about the fact that the President of Nigeria is powerful, but he is far too powerful. However, the power leads to execution dysfunctions because he’s not able to effectively do things in the country. Nigeria made progress in the 50s and 60s when we had a federal structure. But when soldiers got into power, they did not know how to manage federalism, so they centralised the government, and the regions stopped being productive.

Most of the growth that took place in Nigeria in the First Republic came from the sub-national governments. By 1956, when people started clamouring for self-government, or started getting self-government implemented, there were no manufacturing companies. There were, I think, only two factories. But between 1957 and 1960, manufacturing went to 20% of GDP in Nigeria. How did that massive transformation take place? Because politicians were serious individuals focused on serving the people. The politicians who achieved that were running around on their bicycles. Onyeka Onwenu’s father was a principal of a school in Port Harcourt when he was in the federal parliament. He was running around on his bicycle. That was a federal legislator that lived in a time when manufacturing GDP went from next to zero to 20% of GDP. Look at the current federal legislators and what they give to themselves when everything is going backwards. You will then understand why Nigeria is where it is.

You mentioned that the major reason why the APC wanted Buhari was the impression that he would fight corruption. What is your assessment of the current administration’s fight against corruption?

All the news I get is bad—very bad. Starting from Buhari, it turned out to be a disaster as far as fighting corruption is concerned. That was the ultimate failure. I had thought at least he would succeed in the fight against corruption. But it was worse, and I think it has sunk lower in the current arrangement.

Somebody inside the government told me in a private conversation that ‘it is as if there is a scramble before the country collapses to take as much as you can out of it. It is as if they feel Nigeria is about to end and they are just trying to get whatever they can.’