By Pat Utomi
I was genuinely thrilled to read Sunday Dare’s response to my recent commentary on the management of the economy. Setting aside a regrettable touch of incivility, his engagement could have served as a stellar contribution to the marketplace of ideas—the very essence of a functioning democracy.
I know Sunday Dare well. For many years, he was often the one who welcomed me at the door of the Tinubu residence on Bourdillon. I have always rated him as considerably more polished than those in that orbit who are quick to descend into ad hominem barbs and base insults. Consequently, I do not mind the name-calling or the attempts at denigration; it goes with the territory of public discourse in Nigeria. More importantly, his intervention provides an opportunity to elevate the conversation on economic management with better information and a clearer context. Too many lives hang in the balance for us to avoid an honest and intelligent discussion of this matter.
Setting the Record Straight: A Rebuttal of Innuendo
Before returning to the core economic debate, let me dispel the predictable disinformation attempts. I remain grateful to God that, after nearly fifty years of public life, those who wish to be nasty are forced to recycle two tired references: my time at Volkswagen of Nigeria (VWoN) and my role as a Non-Executive Director on the BankPHB Board.
Consider the Volkswagen narrative. Notice that no one ever points to a single infraction I committed there. It is always an innuendo—the vague insinuation that a company I worked for failed at a later point in its history. By that logic, one might as well accuse Bola Tinubu of culpability for Mobil’s eventual exit from Nigeria. I would never say anything so intellectually dishonest. Yet this is the flimsy weapon his supporters wield whenever they are unable to offer a reasoned response.
It is a historical fact that virtually all motor assembly plants in Nigeria collapsed. Even if we were so uncharitable as to blame the staff on whose watch an industrialisation strategy crumbled, it is noteworthy that two German Managing Directors—Piech and Bublitz—and another Nigerian ran the company after I left, of my own volition. My thoughts on the company’s challenges before and after my joining are fully documented, including in a This Week magazine piece I wrote when headhunters approached me in 1985. In my book To Serve is to Live, I described my move to VWoN as a result of being “whitemailed.” The record is clear.
As for BankPHB, where I served as a Non-Executive Director—often on a leave of absence while running for public office—it is telling that the same smear campaign never targets the actual Chairman of the Board, Kola Abiola, or esteemed figures like Akin Kekere-Ekun. This selective outrage reveals a desperation to find something unpleasant about those who speak truth to power. Other directors who were far more involved in daily operations have gone on to occupy larger roles in the industry, a testament to the fact that governance could not have been the caricature some paint. The conclusion is obvious: they simply cannot find anything of substance. It takes grace to operate in the manner I have been privileged to do. To God be the glory.
The Core Issue: Stabilisation or Ponzi Scheme?
What truly seems to have gotten under Sunday Dare’s skin is my characterisation of certain economic stabilisation reforms as a “Ponzi scheme of sorts.”
Perhaps Sunday forgets easily. If memory serves, he was present at a programme organised by Alim Abubakar at Oxford University over a dozen years ago. I was on the faculty. Had he been in my class for all the presentations, he would have heard me use those exact words even back then.
Let me be clear: I supported the Washington Consensus and Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The promise then was that the pain would precede the gain. I even employed the J-curve to explain the lag between policy implementation and economic results.
However, the reality I observed was starkly different. I watched a select few become fabulously wealthy through financial-sector reforms and privatisation, yet sustainable, broad-based growth never materialised. Reading Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s critique of the IMF as a debt collector for Wall Street banks—and witnessing firsthand how SAP decimated our education and healthcare systems, the very bedrock of human capital development—forced a reckoning. I began to see such stabilisation outcomes as akin to a Ponzi scheme: they free up frozen credit lines and create an illusion of market vitality, but they offer little in terms of genuine entrepreneurship stimulation or frameworks for making markets work efficiently.
As a personal initiative, I began teaching Entrepreneurship at the Lagos Business School and collaborated with colleagues at Harvard Business School to design a course on Making Markets Work. By contrast, stabilisation programmes naively assumed that markets would naturally follow liberalisation, ignoring the lessons of strategic industrial policy in Asia. We ended up as the world’s poverty capital, having missed the growth those policies promised. A few months ago, BusinessDay published extracts from a book I am currently writing on this very subject.
When the Asian Financial Crisis erupted in 1997, I embedded myself in Malaysia and Indonesia and was present at the World Bank Annual Meetings in Hong Kong, where the ideological battle came to a head. My op-ed in The Guardian, written from Jakarta in October 1997 and titled ‘The End of Anwar Ibrahim,’ should still be available for those who care to educate themselves. I suspect Sunday Dare would be even more shaken if he were to read Bad Samaritans by the South Korean-born Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang.
To be alive and watch Nigeria repeat the same mistakes is painful. To see individuals like Sunday, who have the background to interrogate these ideas more effectively, resort to abuse instead of learning is profoundly discouraging.
Having made the basic point, I welcome a rigorous debate on this matter with anyone. I promise to turn the other cheek to any further insults. Freeing our children from the road to serfdom is a cause worth being insulted for.
Pat Utomi
Founder, Centre For Values in Leadership
