Political economist and chieftain of the African Democratic Congress, Professor Pat Utomi, has stated that Nigeria is in a “complete mess as a result of failed leadership, deepening corruption and collapsing public confidence in government institutions.”Nigeria Travel Guides
In an interview with Vanguard, Utomi said
‘’Nigeria is in a complete mess. Maybe a simple way to showcase the failure of leadership or the lack of leadership in Nigeria is to tell a small story about Egypt. I was at a conference in Cairo, which took place in the new Cairo. Egypt is building a new Cairo, a new city, out there in the desert. 14, 16-lane highways, probably it will be competing with Dubai very soon.
Outside the conference venue, a number of senior Nigerians were just standing, lamenting, as usual, the Nigerian story. And we started talking about power. We started from power. Power is, as you know, a complete mess in Nigeria even though the man in Aso Rock says that he should be judged on power, if he doesn’t fix power within one year, we should chase him out. So, I wonder why we have not chased him out yet. Why is he still there because power is a complete, total mess.
I live in Band A, as they call the territory. I don’t get power most of the time, and I still pay three times what a university professor’s salary is, for power that is less than half the need that I have. I have solar, diesel generators, all of them supplementary to Band A, which still takes three times what I should earn as a university professor, if I were in a regular university.
How does that make sense? We’re talking about power. And we’re talking about Siemens, and how Nigeria and Egypt both approved Siemens at about the same time. Nigeria wanted to increase its power supply to 10,000mw or whatever megawatts. Egypt’s strategy is to always have twice as much power as it needs at any point in time. So, as the need is increasing, they are adding. But we are at the point that we have crippled our industries because there is no power. So, industries are not competitive in Nigeria. SMEs that are dependent on generators for power supply are unable to give services because of the cost of petrol and diesel.
Egypt said to Siemens, look, we would like to provide some state guarantees. You go and raise money, build us power to give us this kind of output. Nigeria said, okay, we will pay you to do this and that. Our leaders calculated all the money for them, began to look for the money we don’t have, and began to pay them. Meanwhile, we could use more power than Egypt. And Siemens could better collect its own revenues in Nigeria than in Egypt. However, because the Nigerian leadership is about stealing, they want to collect the money for the project so they can put most of it in their own pocket. So they made us an unintelligent deal with the same Siemens compared to Egypt.
Then the war in Ukraine started, Siemens said, ‘we are in Ukraine, manufacturing equipment for Nigeria. So it means that it is not very likely that we are going to supply you with everything you have paid for’. Whereas, that of Egypt is fully in place, financed by Siemens finding the money from wherever.
So, as we were discussing, one of those telling the story was the president of the African Finance Corporation, AFC, a Nigerian. We started talking about the quality of leadership in Egypt, that’s achieving all these extraordinary things. And he said, let me tell you guys one story: there is a road project we were co-financing, that is AFC and Egypt and Egypt gave a timeline to the contractor: ‘Look, you deliver this project in 18 months, 10 days. If anything goes wrong, you don’t deliver on that day, you will pay.’
The company that was to do this particular road project discovered that there was a mountain on the way that would make them not to be able to deliver on time. So they came back and said, ‘sorry, we don’t think this timeline will work because we didn’t anticipate this obstacle on our way’.
So, the president said, let us all meet at the site where this mountain is in two weeks or something. Everybody got ready, financiers, contractors, and that day they showed up at the site. Everybody was looking at each other. What happened? There was no mountain. The man within those two weeks had blown the mountain off the face of the earth. Just literally detonated the entire thing. And he said, any problem with the deadline? Everybody was looking at each other. That’s the kind of seriousness of leadership that Nigeria has lacked. And this is why it is in a mess.”
