On February 25, Nigerians will elect a new president and anxiety is palpable. But Prof Pat Utomi, a man of ideas who uses his prodigious intellect to x-ray the Nigerian situation in a way only few people are capable, is hopeful. An engaged intellectual not dwelling in the Aso Rock of his contemplation, Utomi, a professor of political economy, clinically analyses the issues around the 2023 elections. In this exclusive interview with IKECHUKWU AMAECHI, Pat Utomi insists that for accepting to be running mate to a Northerner, Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa is a moral cripple and posits that APC pushing an infirm presidential candidate – Tinubu – is a double moral tragedy.
The long-awaited 2023 is finally here. How does that make you feel – apprehensive or hopeful?
I am hopeful for a very clear and obvious reason. I am a person of faith. The other track is to despair. And despair is sin against the Holy Spirit. If you are a person of faith, the one terrible thing that you can do is to behave in a way that suggests that God is not able to intervene in the affairs of men. So, I am very, very hopeful and I think that so many things suggest that the hand of God is in what has brought us to where we are today in Nigeria. It is such that we have ended up with a ‘TINA’ situation. TINA means ‘there is no alternative.’
How did we get to this situation where despite the glut of talents in Nigeria, we are where we are right now?
Well, giving some background to this, you know, when Nigeria was entering the Structural Adjustment Programme after failures that led to structural logjams, the very first Nigerian Economic Summit that was organised when Chief Ernest Shonekan was in the saddle got people from Shell. You know the Shell team from London is probably the leading team in scenario planning in the world. They had to project scenarios which way Nigeria could go.
The two scenarios that were generally challenging the world were the scenarios from where we were coming from – of closed borders and the open borders market. The conclusion was that there was no alternative to open borders in a globalising world. And so TINA became the theme song from that Economic Summit.In some ways, our present predicament has brought us to a TINA situation.
How?
Nigerian political parties missed the script. The essence of an emerging state like Nigeria is to be a developmental state that can enable you leapfrog the setback of colonial intervention, the setback of pervasive poverty, poor health in an age where the great escape had taken place for a significant part of humanity.
You know, the great escape is the catchphrase used by a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Angus Deaton, in his book, “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality.” You look at what has separated societies through human history – discoveries in healthcare – education has been the major divider.
So, the world has since been divided and some of us fell behind because of the nature of colonial intervention, colonial education which was challenged by the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, who wrote “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” and to say that the nature of colonial education did not train the colonised for his mind to be creative enough to go to mega problem solving. It just trains the mind to be able to take care of maintenance functions.
So, with all those disadvantages, the decolonised state, the independent state was of necessity to be a development state – massively focused on how it can enable its people to leapfrog from misery into a better quality of life.
You can see what happened in Nigeria in the very beginning in the competition between the politicians of the 1950s. Who would most bring progress to their people? If you look at the basis of their competition back in those days, it may have gotten a little too aggressive in terms of the conflicts that were generated, but everything was focused on development. Who would most develop faster than the other? The competition over industrial estates started with Awolowo in the Western Region, Michael Okpara responded to Ikeja with Aba and Port Harcourt. You can see the example of Pfizer relocating from Ikeja to Aba as an example of that competition.
You can see how Sardauna responded with his own focus on the natural endowment of cotton in the North, bringing in the Hong Kong Chinese to Kaduna to invest – first the factory that opened in 1960 exported its entire six months production.
So our industrialisation actually started with export-led initiative. Sometimes we confuse ourselves and say Asians were smart and went to export-led industrialisation but we started it before them. Manchester merchants bought the first six months production of UNTL out of Kaduna. The company itself broke even in six months.
And so, this natural competition between these leaders of the regions led to significant leap. Peter Obi talks about going from consumption to production. That was the first leap to production. Nigeria was producing massively in industrial output, in the cash crop economy that was the colonial mainstay. So the quality of life was expanding. Education was recognised as very important. In the 1957 budget of the Eastern region, 40 per cent went to education and it was not enough. And they created the phenomenon generally known as “ugwu anyi danda,” a collaboration – missions, community, government that enabled a leapfrog in education in the Eastern Region in response to the free primary education in the Western Region. These kinds of things brought massive development, made the state a developmental state.
So, what went wrong?
Unfortunately, two things happened to us – the convergence of soldiers and oil. Oil having grown as a factor after its discovery and then the army taking over power in response to the extremes of competitive communalism, which is what Robert Nelson and Harold Wolbe from Michigan State called that competition between the regions.
The army’s response to it and to ten per cent brought us to 80 per cent under the military where the essence of power was state capture and treasury looting, which sadly went a notch higher with the return to civil rule.
Now, with all of these problems staring at us, Nigerian political parties missed the script. The script is that a political party is a source of recruitment of the best available talents into groups that have competing ideas of how to order society. So, this idea, which is called ideology says that you can use state control to achieve a lot. And yes you can. It depends on how you manage that process.
Another group says you can use markets to achieve a lot. And yes you can. It depends on how you run the markets and the institutions that support the markets.
But the political parties that Nigerian politicians came with believe in nothing. It was just machine politics – the machine for capturing power, usually financed by a few people who are big men who take money mainly from the treasury of the state. And so, these parties came to be tools in their nature in terms of how they dominate the politics but they did not manage them to create a developmental notion of society.
Seeking power between them now became a series of transactions. Okay, I will give you Nigerian Ports Authority, you will get NIMASA, and you will get Airports Authority. They share everything as APC and PDP are doing now. They share government and the mind-set of those who are investing to get their share is to loot. So, the developmental nature of the state is lost.
They will make some pronouncements because they need legitimacy – oh, government will do this for the people but as you are seeing clearly, Nigeria has been moving progressively backwards. So, the nature and structure of these political parties basically got us to a point where it has become implausible, not impossible, that something coming out of the PDP or the APC could lead to Nigeria making a major leap forward.
And you can see it in the nature of how they choose their candidates, which is what brought us to the no alternative scenario that we have come to. Even though there are quite a number of good people that could have come out of the APC, the APC process necessarily had to end up where it ended. Even though there are quite a number of good people in the PDP, the PDP process had to end up where it ended.
Some of us who are students of this system and have been engaged, you know there are people, I think it was Dr Reuben Abati, who, while reviewing my autobiography some 27 years ago, talked about types of intellectuals. The intellectual who dwells in the Aso Rock of his contemplation versus the intellectual as an engaged man – the man of action.
I have had the good fortune of being the engaged man, not the theory intellectual in the Aso Rock of his contemplation. And the privilege of that enabled me to understand how the structure of political parties has meant that progress is impossible.
That is frightening. Isn’t it?
I am not joking. It is literally impossible for Nigeria to make progress with the APC and PDP. So, I began to think what is the alternative? How can we save Nigeria? Guess what? The youths of Nigeria, fed up enough about the structure and the nature of Nigeria, seeing it denying them opportunity began to respond first by leaving the country – the so-called Japa phenomenon. Those who could were leaving. Many were dying in the deserts, just looking for opportunity anywhere outside of Nigeria. And then, some decided that it was time to fight back. And their first form of organisation to fight back was against police brutality – ENDSARS. And the state met them with brutality.
And without their saying a lot, they then determined that they were going to go out and organise and use the political process to defeat those who were oppressing them, those who kept their knees on the necks of the generation next. So, out of nowhere sprang what has come to be known as the support groups. They somehow discovered Peter Obi from what he was saying and decided that he will be their vehicle. And that vehicle built its momentum. The momentum that that vehicle built was to say to the next generation there is hope; if you organise, you can stop agonising and get rid of these people who keep you down. At first, they thought the people were joking. One day they woke up and found out that it wasn’t a joke anymore and they got vicious. They got dangerous.
Look, we are in trouble because our democracy has suffered so much but we are compounding it. I will just give you two examples to show how this current cast has so lost it, the collapse of culture in Nigeria is now almost total. The meaninglessness of democracy for these guys is such that there is no decency left in their conduct.
We have been trying to organise rallies around the country. Governors will refuse to approve facilities owned by all – state facilities to use for our rallies. You want to meet traditional rulers and some governors will not enable that democratic process to take place.
When I ran for the presidency in 2007, we were doing campaigns in the Northeast, coming down from Biu to Maiduguru, Borno State in chartered cars and we were coming down to Yola. Everywhere we went to, we will make a courtesy call on the governor, traditional ruler of that town and when we got to Adamawa, Boni Haruna, who was governor then, as he was seeing us off, we came out and entered our cars, and he said, ‘you guys don’t know the kind of roads we have around here. You won’t get to Bauchi in these cars.’ He went back and ordered jeeps from his own fleet to take us. That is democracy, not the kind of things they are doing today, preventing you from getting a venue.
These are people who have abused public trust for eight years and they don’t even have the decency to allow a democratic engagement.
So, from these examples, you can see two major things that have happened to our country that are responsible for why we are crippled as a country.
There is collapse of culture. Values shape human progress. You can see how even small decent public things, they cannot do decently. In Lagos State, you cannot put up a poster. If you want to rent a house, for Labour Party, the landlord will say he doesn’t want APC people to come and burn down his house. You put up posters, they are torn within minutes. What kind of democracy is this? This is fascism that we are introducing into Nigeria. And I anticipated it. I wrote about it in a book that came out a couple of years ago – Why Not? It was about citizenship, state capture, creeping fascism and the criminal hijack of politics in Nigeria.
So, you get these kind of conditions that obviously are all targeted at stifling democracy and then you get the actors conducting themselves in manners where you see an erosion of the legitimacy of the process.
Until the Peter Obi phenomenon bust unto the scene, people were less and less interested in democracy in Nigeria. You can follow the afro barometer measures, longitudinal year on year. After 1999 when there was excitement for democracy, it has been down progressively. Fewer and fewer people were voting. But when the ENDSARS generation, young people decided that they were going to use democracy to change this horrid condition that we are living in, registration went up. In spite of the things that may or may not have happened in INEC, we got nearly 13 million new voters registered. That is a phenomenal leap from a declining process.
People want to use this democracy and now these people, the oppressors, seem committed to doing everything to preventing the people from having their will. So, 2023 is about how the will of the people can triumph, how a country whose population has as a median age 18 can have a small group of people in their 70s and 80s, less than three per cent of the population, hold their knees on the neck of the people.
Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) is your friend …
(Cuts in) As Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) also is …
Yes, almost all these political actors are your personal friends. So what makes you think that Peter Obi is a better choice for Nigerians over and above the 17 other candidates, including Tinubu, Atiku, Kwankwaso that you know too well?
This is a very, very important question because I am a person of institutions. I think in terms of institutions, not persons. I am a person of principles. I think in terms of what principles are fair and just, not in terms of this is my man and that is not my man. And I think by now, anybody who is of any consequence knows this about me. Friends of mine as they may be, they know that these are the principles I have lived by and I am ready to die.
2023 is a huge definer of the moral code of our nation. Let me start with the problem of the PDP. The PDP has clearly stated in its constitution that it will rotate power between the North and the South. Whether we agree with it or not, that is their choice and it has been going that way. Then suddenly, because there is a powerful individual who wants it, they break all their own principles. In my book, that doesn’t wash, that kind of moral code does not wash.
You even have Ifeanyi Okowa who hosts a meeting of Southern governors and from his home, they issued a terse declaration that nobody should accept a candidate coming from the North from any party. This same Ifeanyi Okowa goes and accepts to be running mate to someone from the North. That is a moral cripple. Values shape human progress. If moral degenerates take over a country, that country has no chance in hell of making progress.
Then, we go to the APC. This is a party that promised us redemption, end of corruption, end of this, end of that. And all of us were very happy. That is why some of us even participated to make that happen. APC got to power and there is now more nepotism than at any other time in Nigeria’s history. There is more corruption now than at any point in our country’s history and I have evidence of it. I think what APC should do, seriously if there are people of any moral standing in the party is to say, look, we are going to spend the next 12 years apologising to the Nigerian people. You have a rally of ‘mea culpa’ to say, ‘we are truly sorry that we disappointed you. If they do that for 12 years as APC, that will be the starting point.
APC challenged the Nigerian people, faced the Nigerian people, and played games with the Nigerian people over some character issues regarding their candidate in 2015. Did he have primary school education certificate or did he not have it? Was he well or was he not well? People chose to look away and the process went through. We know what that cost Nigeria that we have had an absentee president. Whether the stories of Jibrin from Sudan are true or not, those things are irrelevant for me. The point is, think about how long Buhari was away from this country treating himself, think about the cost to Nigeria, materially and emotionally of having that kind of president shortly after the YarÁdua experience.
In fact, the irony here is that I was sitting with General Buhari in his living room, just the two of us, talking about Nigeria when the phone call came to him that YarÁdua had died. I don’t forget that. In Kaduna, in his house. When he lowered the phone, he said to me, “Umaru has passed away.” You know, for people who witnessed this to continue to push an infirm candidate is a double moral tragedy.
READ ALSO: As long as “emi lokan” is your attitude to leadership, corruption is your bed mate – Dr Kolade
First, the party should be in the mode of apologising for eight failed years. Then they bring somebody whose circumstance may resemble the Buhari situation. Some of my best friends are pretending that there is nothing wrong with it, the only reason anybody can be in that position is because they think that if this person is in authority, we can get some things. That is the only justification that I can think of. So, even if he is dying or dead, even if he is strong, it will enable us get something.
APC returning to power will be the most terrible signal about democracy in human history, I mean in human history. Not only that it has been a totally failed government, it has polarised and divided Nigerians more than any government that I can think of in Nigeria’s history. It has not only made incompetence and nepotism the central objects of governing, it has also, in addition to those, really, brought Nigeria to the position of some unfortunate titles like the poverty capital of the world. Two recessions in six years. Nigeria never had one and brought the foreign exchange market to a collapse.
Now the country has a Central Bank Governor that we don’t know where he is and we don’t know what the issues are. These are huge moral questions that should make the APC not even to think of seeking public office.
So, it is these things that made me think that the forces of history have brought the Obi-Datti offering to a TINA point because really we don’t have any alternative. Yes, Rabiu Kwankwaso who is also a friend of mine, a good guy, is there, but in the scheme of how Nigeria is structured now, he is also facing the moral question and he failed there.
You say we are in a TINA position. Many Nigerians will agree with you. But barely two months to the election, are you comfortable with where Obi is right now?
You know, about 500 or so years ago Niccolo Machiavelli was writing The Prince, and he said, “Nothing is more difficult to bring about than a new order of things. And those who profit from the old order will do everything to prevent a new order from coming out and those who could profit from the new order – usually the majority – do not do enough to push for that new order because man is incredulous in his nature, not wanting to try new things until he has witnessed the experience of it.”
It is not surprising that many will worry out of the pressures of the old order about the new order. That is in the nature of man. In fact, what is even shocking, pleasantly so for me, is that in every real poll that has taking place, Peter Obi has come tops. I didn’t even believe that that will be possible. I thought that he will be struggling. But what that shows clearly is how determined Nigerians are that the old order was unacceptable and they could respond in a way that puts Peter Obi in a pole position. That is the amazing thing. So, I think where Peter Obi is sitting now is far beyond even reasoned expectation.
Is that pole position sustainable? That is, how do you hope to sustain the phenomenal development?
Here is an issue in how to sustain it. Because the process that threw Peter Obi up is organic, as one of the Obidients said to me, ‘I was Obidient before Peter Obi became Obidient.’ Peter Obi is essentially a vehicle. It is not about Peter Obi himself, it is about the fact that he was the available vehicle to use to upturn this social order. His availability obviously drove those young people to create all these support movements. As the traditional system made noise about structure, oh, they don’t have structure, Labour Party tried to create structure. Peter Obi tried to create more structures to bring these people together. And they rebelled. They began to feel more and more lukewarm. And this surprised those who were trying to create structure.
And I laughed. I said what kind of elementary political science do people study these days? This is an established dictum in political science. I don’t know what the campuses are like now but back in my days, 40 years ago in any Nigerian university campus, if you saw a group of people studying political science, what you would hear them saying is, ‘he who says organisation, says oligarchy.’ It was their new learnt mantra and they would be chanting it, because a political sociologist called Robert Michels had published a series of works, central of which was a 1911 book, Political Parties. In that book, he suggests essentially that the more you formalise, the more you create structure, and the more power begins to concentrate in a certain apparatchik and party people, the more you move towards oligarchs. And so, the famous statement that he who says organisation, says oligarchy.
Once the efforts to organise began, the support groups felt oligarchic pressures but they were free spirits and it affected them. So, what I have come in to say is that we must unleash these free spirits again and stop trying to corral them into a structure. And we have then created the ‘Big Tent’ which essentially is structured around the idea of an organic bulb like the onion which has so many layers that you can peel off. If you take another concept, generally prevalent in engineering, and even in policy sciences, that talks about complex redundancy.
What do you do in a complex redundancy? Let us take the Boeing jet as an example. It has about three fall backs. Statistically, in the life of any of those aircraft, it hardly ever goes to the first fall back, yet, there are two other fall backs and that is money spent on fall backs two and three. Now, try to pressure an engineer at Boeing not to do that, the training they have is for safety and redundancy is a philosophy that goes with safety. So, if there is one failure, there is a backup. If you go for political studies back when I was in grad studies in the US in the 1970s, there is a professor at the University of Southern California (USC) called Aaron Wildavsky who wrote a book on the politics of the budgetary process and he essentially uses the concept of complex redundancy to explain the budgetary process in the US and how policies are made in the US government where you take a bill to the Congress and the Congress reads and discusses it and sends it down to a committee and they discuss it and send it to a sub-committee and then there are public hearings and it goes all the way back.
He describes that process as complex redundancy. And that is what makes for the richness of policy. So, the organic bulbs of complex redundancy that we have used as the structure of the ‘Big Tent’ ensures that these support groups can be independent and have their free spirits and yet be coordinated like the organic bulb in a complex and redundant system.
So, as we now push back this last couple of weeks using that phenomenon, you are going to see a bust of new energy that will send a very clear message to this minority group of people who still want to dominate our country in a fascist move that the young of Nigeria – and I have to be very careful when I say the young of Nigeria because when I was leaving church the other day, I was accosted by a group of retired women who said that though they are retirees they are also Obidients. So, this is where we are.
But is the idea of the ‘Big Tent’ itself resonating well with the youths?
It is not for acceptance, it is for action. It is what you use to get things done. In fact, some diplomats were with me some weeks ago and I was explaining the concept of the ‘Big Tent.’ Within the ‘Big Tent’ you have the shadow cabinet, let us call it that which takes every activity level of government with the best of the best as focal persons. Each of those focal persons works with a team of experts, sometimes 30 experts of Nigerians from across the world, analysing, then informing the focal person, who then brings it to the shadow cabinet from which the candidate is given advice.
When we finished, one of the diplomats from one of these big missions in-charge of political and economic issues said, “Did they not say that you people don’t have structures? Has any of their structures the quality of what you have just described? I said, don’t mind them. Let them just be talking about structure, when we are the real ones who have structure.
Do they have that? Even knowing what the issues are. But we are taking on every policy issue and the finest Nigerians in those areas in the world – some in Australia, many in the US and of course, several in Britain. Our shadow minister for health is a doctor working in the UK dealing with these issues working in the NHS. She is reflecting this everyday in the input of policy ideas that we are generating so, you tap into the best that Nigeria has to offer to use to make the Big Tent a true, strong place that people can expect that they will run into and they will find answers.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has written another letter where he endorsed Peter Obi. Expectedly both the APC and the PDP are up in arms pillorying him even when they claim he has no electoral value and therefore his endorsement is of little or no value. Do you agree?
Of course, I don’t expect that they will agree with him, that is why they are running because they are driven by themselves. Of course, this is a democracy and they are entitled to be so driven. So there is nothing wrong with that.
Now, Obasanjo is a very fascinating man. I have over 40 years history of engagement with him, most of the time fighting, many times concurring. But you cannot take away from him the fact that he is Nigeria’s foremost statesman. When President Obasanjo writes in this kind of mode, he is not only writing to those who are reading, he is writing to history. And it is to history that he sends this letter of endorsement. It is to his credit that he is one of those who have the moral gumption to stand up to what he believes in whether you agree or disagree with him.
Now, I have had the privilege and opportunity in my life to interact with incumbent and former heads of state in Nigeria’s history. There is probably no living Nigerian former head of state that I am not in a personal relationship with. One of them called me yesterday, not Obasanjo, at 12.48 am to wish me happy New Year and to pray for Nigeria. But not many of them will do what Obasanjo has done. But in every conversation, I know their feelings and I know that a majority of them endorse Peter Obi. That is all I can say.
Obasanjo spoke about what he called the TVCP – track record, vision, character, physical and mental capability – but other candidates also claim that they have the track record of achievements, vision, character and physical and mental capacity to superintend over the affairs of Nigeria. So, what makes Obi stand out in any these qualities?
Let us take the issue of personal strength – physical fitness. The reason that I stepped down for Peter Obi is that he is about six years younger than myself and so I reasoned that he will be stronger for the sake of the country. I know that these other ones are older than myself. In some cases we don’t know the exactness of their age but at least they are older than me. So, I assume that Peter will be much stronger physically and it matters. It is not a joke.
Character: Like I said earlier, they are all friends of mine and it is not proper in the conduct of relationships to comment about matters of character of your friends in public. But I can only say to you that well as I know them, I know Peter Obi and I have had occasions to be able to rely more on Peter Obi in the past than the others. Let us take that as a statement on my view of character.
Performance: I once said that one of the terrible things about our evaluation of character and p0erformance is that Nigerians tend to confuse longevity with experience. The person who put it in proper context was a great management consultant who lived in Nigeria for many years, an American who started Anderson Consulting in Nigeria, Dick Kramer. And Dick once said to me that the problem with Nigeria is that many people who have one year’s experience repeated 30 times like to claim that they have 30 years’ experience.
Bola Tinubu served as governor of Lagos State for eight years, Peter Obi served as governor of Anambra State for eight years. Peter Obi started as a business person from the scratch and built a multi-billion Naira venture. The others especially played in business as beneficiaries of their sojourn in public life. They didn’t take any seed capital to build a great business. That is experience on the part of Peter Obi.
Do you agree with those who are predicting that the presidential election may not be decided on the first ballot?
Well, in politics everything is possible. But if we do a good job, there should be no need for a run-off election. In fact, if we do a good moral job, I expect these two gentlemen – Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu – to step down from the election because they will see that morally, they are on the wrong side of history. And when the stark reality is staring everybody in the face, the greater person for history is the one who says, no más – no more.
You know when Mohammed Ali came back after his three-year layoff for refusing to be drafted into the U.S. military and was fighting the Argentinian brave bull, Oscar Bonavena, in December 1970, at the Madison Square Garden, and they were throwing these punches, the great Argentinian at a point in time looked at Ali, looked at himself, looked at history and looked at the punches he was taking and he said no más – no more. He turned his back and walked to his corner.
I think there should be a no más moment for Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu. They will stand a greater place in history if they do that.
But contrary to your position, there are other friends of yours like the governor of Anambra State, Prof Chukwuma Soludo, who insist that Peter Obi stands no chance in the election at all.
The problem I have with Chukwuma Soludo’s comment is that he is a man who frequently refers to evidence. He is always talking about evidence-based policies. How can he then, in the face of polls that say Peter Obi is leading, say he cannot win? That means there is a construct in his mind beyond evidence in the remark that he has made. And it is important to examine your conscience when you say that.
Do you have any fears for the 2023 elections?
Look, there has been no real elections in Nigeria since 1999. I can tell you this for free. It has been a mess. I had the privilege of being in a meeting in Washington lately and I challenged my American friends, senior government officials, I said you all know that the truth is that you have favoured stability over democracy in Nigeria.
Even starting in 1999, I was personally involved. Aliko Dangote, Umar Abba Gana, myself – a group of us – hosted President Jimmy Carter, Collin Powell and their delegation to dinner when they came for election monitoring in 1999. And I said to President Carter as they were coming in, what do you think of the elections? He was tongue-tied and didn’t know what to say. Then Princeton Lyman, who used to be U.S. ambassador to Nigeria in the 1980s, who was in their company, kind of pulled me aside and said, “Pat, the naked truth is that if the army wanted to give this election a bad name, they tried very hard. We saw soldiers carrying ballot boxes, we saw all kinds of things.
“But more interestingly, we were driving outside Abuja, in Nasarawa State around 1 pm and we saw a polling station and we pulled up there, nobody had showed up to vote. And President Carter asked them, how can it be that one o’clock in the afternoon, no single person had showed up to vote? And the people said, we don’t know why. And then we drove off further. An hour later, we were driving back and President Carter said, let us stop there and see.”
And then they got there and everybody registered had voted. If that happened in 1999, almost every election since then has been worse.
Let me give you an example. The last election in 2019 – Buhari versus Atiku. I was at a cocktail at the British Deputy High Commissioner’s residence, and now I can even say it because it wouldn’t have been popular to say it publicly prior in this manner but I had mentioned it without saying who and who were involved. At that cocktail, the political councillor from the American embassy was chatting with Oscar Onyema, who was then the Director-General of the Nigerian Stock Exchange, so the guy said to him, these elections were a complete joke.
And Oscar said to him, but you guys said it was okay? And he looked at Oscar and said, do you guys want us to come and tell you that your mess is smelling? That is your problem. So, they know we have always had messes called elections.
So, I said to my friends in Washington, you guys have had this running. This is one time that you don’t make that mistake. You have “stability” in your mind over democracy which is really institutionalisation of anarchy, which is really the institutionalisation of fascism, the cost may be too high for you to bear. The young of Nigeria are so angry that the country will be on fire.
