The Convener of the National Consultative Front (NCFront), Professor Pat Utomi has said that the reasons for Nigeria’s current economic challenges is due to the fact that the Nigerian state was constructed by politicians not to serve the best interest of the people, but to encourage corruption.
The Professor made this assertion in an interview with ARISE NEWS on Tuesday, where he discussed the work of the NCFront with the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the Labour Party (LP), and the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) as the political parties are focusing on creating a merger that will build a strong political party in Nigeria.
Utomi, as he spoke on the stunted economic growth and challenges faced in the nation, said that while he was interviewing civil servants for his book, a respondent said that civil servants do not work because the political party that come into power does not have an agenda for the government organisation in place to boost growth and development.
“The truth of the matter, the naked truth, is that what is happening in Nigeria is inevitable because the Nigerian State is not constructed to serve the Nigerian people. It is constructed to be bargaining between politicians looking to share booty. Because that is what it is, you will have all this corruption,” he said.
He said the reason for Nigeria’s lack of growth, and the reason for several multinationals leaving the country, is majorly because of the blatant corruption that has been displayed by Nigerian politicians and those in government.
Utomi further said, “Nigeria is not a working democracy, and part of the effort of building a strong and viable political party is to make our democracy work first and foremost, before other people begin to think about another election. The problem with Nigeria is that we’ve fought in terms of elections. We go through a mess that is called an election, we say okay, let’s wait for the next one. No, that’s not how countries grow and develop. Countries grow and develop, first of all, by founding political parties.
“I can say without any feeling of wrong that we don’t have a political party in Nigeria today. What we have managed to couple together since 1999 have been platforms for machine politics where the game is about just grabbing power rightly or wrongly and sharing spoils.”
He went on to say that in engaging in the cycle of violent elections without properly building political parties, what Nigeria had done was to neglect the development of the country, as well as the neglect of Nigerians who end up bearing the brunt of the challenges between politicians.
Addressing the reactions of Nigerians to the problems faced in the country, he said, “The Nigerian people have become so frustrated, so fed up, with the nature of the way Nigerian politicians carried on, that when Peter Obi said the right things, it resonated and drove the emergence of a movement that generally got called the Obidient movement around the world, Nigerian diaspora. And if you look at the resurgence of many of the success stories of the 20th century, they had a diaspora base.
“So, the Nigerian diaspora rallied very strongly around the fact that this gentleman was saying a few things right, and a campaign like Nigeria hasn’t seen in a long time happened, and it was deliberately sabotaged, whatever you say about it. The point remains, how do you go forward when you meet this? You’ve got to realise and take advantage in trying to save Nigeria that the majority of this country is young. A significant part of our population is under 25. It is fed up, it is looking for something new, but it is also trapped. That’s the most dangerous thing about where we are. This generation is trapped in their values.”
Utomi was then asked who he believes should lead the merged party, if the merger is indeed successful, and he replied saying that it doesn’t matter who is in charge, but what matters is that a strong political party that can properly lead and grow the nation is brought about.
“Let’s build a great party that can show the way for Nigeria. When we then build it, the people, who from the social movement that come together in addition to the political parties that come into this one truck, subscribing to certain values, subscribing to ideologies of how you make a nation happen, those people will determine who among those who seem interested can go forward.
“This is what our country does need, this is what it must have, but it should not be about some individual advertising that they are the ones who should or not. Nigerian people will determine that when the time is right. But let’s all agree that Nigeria is worth the trouble, the saving, and let those values, those strategies, those ideas, that can help us create an entrepreneurial people’s capitalism that can take us away from this elite struggle to consume the little that is coming out of oil, to a broadly growing economy.”
Ozioma Samuel-Ugwuezi
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