By Cynthia Alo
Renowned scholar, economist, and former presidential candidate, Professor Pat Utomi, has described the defection of former Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, from the African Democratic Congress, ADC, to the New Democratic Congress, NDC, as a wise and timely decision, even as he declared that primary election processes across all Nigerian political parties are a complete farce driven by party bosses imposing candidates.
Utomi, who was recently appointed deputy chairman of the ADC manifesto and policy committee before the party crisis forced a realignment, made the declaration during an appearance on Arise Television’s PrimeTime programme.
“With the benefit of hindsight, you can see that if he didn’t move, he would have been trapped,” the professor said.
“The way the process has been managed generally across the board makes all the primary processes a complete farce. It doesn’t matter what party; they are all a farce of sorts, with party bosses more or less imposing people.”
Utomi, who said he was out of the country when the move to the NDC took place and had initially argued that everyone should remain in the ADC and fight for the platform, said very undemocratic games were being played to prevent a certain candidate from appearing on the ballot.
“They had to play quick to escape being caught in the trap. And perhaps, in the benefit of hindsight, maybe they were wise,” he said.
In his own position amid the party reshuffling, Utomi clarified that he immediately activated his Big Tent coalition, a cross-party platform he has built over the years upon hearing of the ADC-to-NDC move, insisting that the Big Tent would chart its own independent roadmap regardless of whatever party he might be nominally associated with.
“It doesn’t matter what party at any point in time I may or may not seem to be identified with; I have a problem with most of them,” he said pointedly.
Addressing the fate of the ADC manifesto he was helping to craft, Utomi said the project had not failed but had been redirected through the Big Tent framework, which he said was now developing a manifesto for Nigeria that political actors across parties could be socialised into.
“Those political actors who have both the capacity, the competence, and the disposition, who are willing to walk that path, we will endorse even if they came from this party or that party as the big tent,” he said.
On the opposition’s continued fragmentation ahead of 2027, with Atiku Abubakar in the ADC, Obi in the NDC and other figures scattered across platforms, Utomi was blunt, saying opposition leaders could be far more reasonable than they currently are.
“This obsession with power and public office is a disease Nigerian political actors need to be purged of, really, treated for,” he said. “We need to bring Nigerian politicians and put them through some kind of psychiatric processing.”
He argued that Nigeria’s political space was being choked by recycled politicians with nothing to offer, borrowing the words of a former executive of consulting firm Anderson: “A Nigerian will say to you, ‘I have 30 years’ experience’, and you look at him; he has one year’s experience repeated 30 times.”
On his widely publicised declaration that NDC polling unit results would be transmitted live and monitored globally by international media organisations, Utomi clarified that the statement originated two months ago from the Big Tent, not the NDC, and described it as part of a broader operational plan.
“The idea is not for just that body that I was speaking for to do it, but to encourage complex redundancy of the process,” he explained, adding that church groups, diaspora networks, and civil society organisations were being mobilised to photograph and simultaneously upload result sheets the moment they were signed at polling units.
He also disclosed plans for a ‘Voter Corps’ funded partly by diaspora Nigerians, under which individuals who photograph and upload polling unit result sheets would receive a cash equivalent of $50 transferred directly to their accounts.
“That will energise Nigerians and make them interested in this process,” Utomi said.
On President Bola Tinubu’s three years in office and the administration’s claims of improved revenues, exchange rate stability, and investor confidence, Utomi was dismissive, saying the statistics were masking a deeper crisis in living standards.
“Of course, they are masking a deeper crisis,” he said, adding that Nigeria was repeating the same discredited Washington Consensus policy framework that had stifled growth across developing economies, a subject he said he was currently documenting in a book.
