Since bursting into national consciousness, Professor Patrick Utomi has convinced himself that he is the Nigerian equivalent of Albert Einstein, Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes rolled into one.
For decades, as a public intellectual/commentator on national affairs and economic matters, Utomi has consistently shared his views on the world and on how Nigeria’s political economy should be constructed. Like Peter Obi, his newfound comrade-in-arms, Utomi copiously cites examples from South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Chile, among others. While there is no doubt about the quantum of economic theories Utomi has memorised, there is always a limit to book knowledge when the realities of the real world show up.
In the furnace of the real world, Utomi has been tried, tested and allowed to demonstrate the applicability and practicality of his ideas. While he has had the opportunity at many fora to defend his own record, the verdict remains that he did not cover himself in glory as Managing Director/Chief Executive of the defunct Volkswagen of Nigeria and as the Vice Chairman of BankPHB of equally blessed memory.
From the sordid details revealed in court after forensic investigators visited, Utomi essentially presided over a bank where depositors’ funds were converted into private pockets in the most primitive way. Alas, the enterprises that would have been a showpiece or foretaste of what Utomi is capable of doing at a higher level of public leadership went down under his “brilliant” watch.
At BankPHB, there was also a massive shareholder value erosion and insider abuse. Francis Atuche, the bank’s Chief Executive, is serving a jail term for the mismanagement of a bank in which Utomi served on its Board of Directors. Were Utomi really capable of any sense of propriety, he ought to be in self-seclusion over the unravelling of BankPHB and not continue his often annoying career of sophistry and peddling of untested economic doctrines.
The other side of Utomi was also exposed when Senator Ibikunle Amosun claimed an NGO controlled by the self-styled political economist had offered him an unsolicited award, ostensibly to influence him to approve an unfair consideration in a disputed property case before him while he was Ogun State Governor. So much for a moral crusader!
Overall, there is a pattern to Utomi’s intellectual arrogance. Every four years, he comes out to mount a moral high horse on who should lead Nigeria. He touts himself as a political strategist with an uncanny ability to cobble victory at the polls for whoever he backs. Yet, time and again, he has failed. But rather than accept loss with humility and introspect as an intellectual should do, he will rather raise a storm. That was what he did in 2023, using his social media platform to mislead the gullible at a critical time, proclaiming his candidate’s victory before the election results were announced.
As another election season is upon us, Utomi has again taken to shooting from the hip, even when facts and logic are not on his side, attempting to discredit President Bola Tinubu’s leadership of Nigeria and to describe his reform agenda in unflattering terms.
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Feeling over the moon immediately after the convention of his own faction of ADC in Abuja, Utomi was on television, pouring invectives on President Tinubu and the governing APC. He also took out a ThisDay newspaper back page where he labelled the ongoing economic reform programme as “ridiculous”, dismissing it as a “Ponzi scheme.” Here is a man who, out of political convenience, is attacking the same free-market economic offerings and prescriptions he built his public acclaim on.
For far too long, Utomi and those of his ilk have held themselves up as the moral arc of society and their economic prescriptions as canon.
Once any administration refuses to lean on them and their personal economic and political interests do not find immediate accommodation, personal frustration is then packaged and presented as national outrage. Yet, when he was finding favour in Asiwaju’s eyes, Utomi used to frequent his Bourdillon home, extolling his generous host to the high heavens as “visionary”. In fact, a viral video shows Utomi dancing ecstatically to “Sakara” music in a casual shirt and trousers behind Asiwaju Tinubu at his Bourdillon residence, moments after the APC was declared the winner of the 2015 polls.
He was among those who courted Tinubu to advance their own political ascendancy. If Tinubu had supported and funded his ambition to be Delta State governor in 2019, as he wanted, Utomi would be dancing to a different drumbeat today. While for decades, Utomi has told us many things that are wrong with Nigeria, even if he has failed at the micro level to demonstrate how to put things right, it is now time for him to take a back seat from his selective outrage.
-Ajayi is Senior Special Assistant to President Tinubu on Media and Publicity
