FORMER presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Mega Party (SDMP), Pat Utomi, has said the country cannot make progress as long as the political actors abhor intellectual engagements.
The Professor of political economy noted that the Nigerian political space stifles brilliance and intellectualism and anybody who has these traits is seen as a threat and quickly isolated by the people who dominate the space.
Prof. Utom said this today while featuring on Arise Television’s daily programme ‘The Morning Show’ monitored by Naija Times.
He stressed that for the country to make progress, its political parties must be driven by ideologies and; dispense with the misconception that, “if you think you’re a problem.”
Utomi said, “I say I belong to a political party but I say publicly, repeatedly that there is no political party in Nigeria. We tried to organise one and state capture captured it, so it turned out not to be a political party.
“Until a political party articulates a set of ideas about the world and say that our business is to recruit people who believe in these ideas and then form institutions that socialise those people into a complete understanding and then get them in competition with one another about who will be most remembered for advancing those ideas.”
The management expert traced the root of Nigerian politicians’ aversion to intellectualism to 1999 when the nation transitioned from a military dictatorship to a budding democracy and allowed soldiers to dominate the major political parties, a development he described as “funny thing”.
“In Nigeria, we concocted this funny thing in 1999, allowed soldiers and their bagmen who had looted the Nigerian treasury to be able to fund some funny arrangement around the country and Nigerian political parties actually became anti-intellectual.” He said.
Utomi added that there must be a paradigm shift in the mentality of those who come together to form political parties, stressing that without that the country will continue to “sit in the gutters.”
“The thinking in Nigerian political parties is that if you think you are a problem and the goal of the party is to isolate people who think. This country cannot make any progress, we’ll sit in the gutters, that’s the only way a country like that goes.
“We must change the kind of political parties we have, find people of ideas who have a vision of the country as leadership is about knowledge, it’s about a sense of service. If either is missing you can’t be a leader,” he said.
The former presidential candidate also said the political space must be dominated by visionaries who are committed to service rather than self-aggrandizement.
He said, “If you look at the Nigerian political arena, knowledge is completely missing, they have no idea of where the country should be going. A sense of service does not exist because state capture and the advance of self overtakes everything.”
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