Professor Pat Utomi, former presidential candidate of African Democratic Party (ADP) is quite a busy man, he has an enviable curriculum vitae. At the age of 26, he had a doctorate in his kitty.
At age 27, he was appointed Special Adviser to former President Shehu Shagari and at 32, he had the distinction of being the first Nigerian to be named Deputy Chief Executive of Volkswagen Nigeria. In his academic career, Utomi is one of the most senior faculty members of the prestigious Lagos Business School and also an award-winning author of the Business Policy book, Managing Uncertainties: Competition and Strategy in Emerging Economies.
As a political activist, he initiated the founding of The Concerned Professionals, which played a significant role in fighting dictatorship and simulating the pro-democracy movement in the dark days of the 1990s. As an entrepreneur, he has founded or co-founded several enterprises that are key players in the Nigerian economy. And currently, he is a public speaker in high demand, president of the United Niger Delta Energy Development and Strategy (UNDEDSS), a coalition of ethnic nationalities in the Niger Delta region.
He, in this interview, x-rays the Niger Delta crisis and gives his own blueprint for a lasting solution. Utomi gives an insight into why government is finding it difficult to produce a white paper on the recommendations of the Technical Committee on the Niger Delta, the problem with Nigeria. Utomi also explains why Volkswagen Nigeria died, his experience as Special Adviser to President Shagari; strong and weak points of Shagari and his government, why he is comfortable in Ohanaeze although he is from Delta State and his multiple close shaves with death.
On the soft side of life, after giving tips on how men can evade sexual temptations from the womenfolk, and perhaps, for the first time, the 53-year-old professor talks about his childhood, his family and how he nearly became a priest. It is Pat Utomi as never revealed.
Many steps have been taken to stop the Niger Delta crisis, yet it lingers. What is your blue print for a lasting solution?
First of all, it is important to be proactive in this matter. If the people who are in power had done the kind of things we were suggesting seven years ago, we wouldn’t be where we are. An elite that doesn’t have foresight keeps playing this catch-up game and the cost of the game keeps getting higher and higher like they are penny wise, pound foolish. And that’s where we are caught within. The problem of the Niger Delta is not a matter of just amnesty for people who took up arms. It is a mega issue. There is the issue of a people who have perceived over a long time that there is fundamental injustice. We need to get at the root of this very early in the day.
So, what are these things that are disturbing us? Let’s discuss them. But it seems we wish away the issues and assume that once we show magnanimity in pardoning those we consider offenders through an amnesty, all is well. Human history does not show that that is the way. What is at stake at the Niger Delta is the dignity of the human person.
Solving the problem has much to do with fairness in the way we approach things. The question that our dominant political power elite must ask today is, how did Nigeria end up with a federal constitution? Why did the founding fathers of Nigeria agree to the kind of structure that they got in place when the Independence constitution was being discussed? What were the things that informed the Lancaster House conference and did we have a Willinks Commission even before Independence that began to deal with the issue of the Niger Delta?
The truth of the matter is that the problem of the Niger Delta is a fundamental problem of democracy, which is how minority rights get accommodated in a big country? The Americans have dealt with it in so many ways like the Italians did too through their history. They have come to certain beliefs and understanding that have led to a continuous improvement in accommodation. Everywhere, it’s a challenge for human beings but whenever human beings eventually overcome their own limitations to accept that the mark of a civilized people is how they treat those who are less advantaged (I don’t want to call it less privileged) among them, and this advantage can be population in terms of minority/majority. It can be disability. When you see a more civilized society, people with physical disability are treated better.
So, in many ways, the challenge of the Niger Delta is evidence of lower level of maturity of our democracy. If you go back to the original question of why we had a federal constitution, what informed the principles of derivation, what informed the Willinks Commission and who you find. It’s a willingness by the majority groupings to accept the principle and the independence that is the basis for federating in Nigeria but once, through carelessness of those who ran Nigeria especially, under military rule when oil suddenly became an important factor.
The other things that sustained the other dominant groups in the system – things like agriculture, which made for prosperity in the core South East; in the core North. Because of carelessness in managing the economy; the fact that oil became a factor led to the less competitiveness of these other sectors and increasing dependence on oil. Because most of the oil came from minority areas, many of those who ran power, not being people of great foresight, assumed they could take it at will without obeying the very fundamental basis for Nigeria federating and so the principle of derivation began to gradually disappear. Any person who had the capacity to think would know that one day, that would become a sore point for those minority people who you can bully right now and in essence change the rule of the game. Time eventually proved that right. So, dealing with the Niger Delta problem is one, re-thinking Nigerian federalism is another. How do we return to being a truly federal structure?
Forget oil because it is a temporary thing. It is for now just like cocoa and cotton were for yesterday. What is it likely to be in 15 years supposing what becomes a dominant factor is high growth manufacturing which is located in Ogbomosho or located in Nasarawa or located in Maiduguri? Will you treat the issue the way you are treating our crude oil today? The next thing about principles is that they are constant. Once we agree on a principle, that principle should continue to govern relationships but people who are not used to deep thinking, unfortunately, our politics is dominated by such people today – you know, opportunists – people who have not developed themselves and because the political arena was seen as a place for scavengers when serious people ran away because they thought it was territory of scoundrels. They filled that space and they are the ones dictating how we live and not being given to sophisticated thinking, they make this short term kind of choices which invariably come to hunt all of us later.
That is what has happened in the Niger Delta unfortunately and the solution lies in dealing with both the dignity of the minority person, the principle of federalism and the need to compensate for the injustice the Niger Delta has suffered over this period. Amnesty is only an opening stanza in that process.
Do you agree the Federal Government is insincere in handling the region’s problems?
It depends on how you use words. Words can mean all kinds of things and you can use the word, insincerity in a very pejorative manner, that you cast them in the mould of wicked, terrible people who want to exploit others. Many times, I think that what is more like the real situation is the lack of foresight; lack of enough knowledge of the consequence of their behaviours and then it begins to look later like terrible, wicked, conniving, conspiracy whereas in the beginning, it was just people not thinking clearly. We obviously have a lot of shenanigans like the last so-called constitutional conference headed by Niki Tobi. Probably, those who set it up wanted it to be a lot of diversion. I don’t think that they seriously meant any serious reforms to take place in Nigeria so in that sense, those who say insincerity, may be they may have something genuine.
Why is it difficult for the government to produce a White Paper based on the recommendations of the Technical Committee on the Niger Delta, which it set up?
It is because governing in Nigeria has become far too much a great grand conspiracy theory – cloaks daggers, not being clear what you want so you set up a committee to give you breathing room to use to think and then you decide; may be, this committee wasn’t a very good idea so at least, it has kept them busy and talking and has delayed the whole day. So that happens frequently in government. Perhaps, there is a pressure group that goes to those who set it up and says, “Ah, do you think it is a good idea? Oh no, why did we do it?” So, you wait and collect their report and put it in a shelf.
Would you say the bombardment of Gbaramatu Kingdom by the JTF was justified?
I don’t think it is really a matter of justifying or not justifying anything. A sovereign state does not sit back idle and watch where its authoritative right to the deployment of the legitimate use of violence is challenged. No sovereign state stands up for it. In that regard, you expect that a sovereign state would want to show a good definition of authority structure in this country. However, how you proceed with your strategy, your short term tactic makes all the difference. If it is well informed, you will achieve greater results than where it is a knee-jerk thing. I don’t know what strategy informed the engagement on that score so it would be ill advised for me to make a judgment on whether or not it was a good thing or bad thing as such.
What is your stand on the call by some groups for the withdrawal of the JTF?
Again, things need to be discussed properly. I’m sure that even those who sent in the JTF may sometimes wonder if they have done the right thing in some manner of speaking but it comes back to the point I’ve just made about the authority of the sovereign state. I believe though that what may be what informed doing – the circumstance may be to phase out the military because they are unfortunately perceived as an army of occupation and phase in a well-trained police division with better training than the military if we still have a police force, and you can move those ones in, phase out the military because the authority for law and order still belongs in this system (the federal government).
So, if the Federal Government deploys one force instead of another to douse tensions for the moment, it could achieve a lot more than just deliberately saying ‘sorry, we can’t or just saying, okay, we agree, we are withdrawing to leave a vacuum. If you leave a security vacuum, the worse can happen. Let’s face it we face a great danger of becoming like Somalia. If we are not careful, warlords would just emerge and take over those places. So, I don’t think it is the wisest thing in the world to say, Okay, there’s a security vacuum because of pressure on us, we withdraw this JYF. There are no security operators maintaining law and order there. That would not be very wise.
Do you agree that the problem of Nigeria is leadership?
I think that is beyond dispute. What is leadership? Our people confuse the concept of leadership with power and authority. Let me attempt to draw from my training both as a political scientist and as a student of management to try and explicate what leadership really means. In political science where there is great concern for institution but the famous definition of government by David Einstein suggests authoritative allocation of values in society as being that sovereign. Where authority really formalized power and where power is defined from one of my favourite definitions of power is the 1957 definition by Robert Dahl where he says power is the ability of A to make B do what B would not ordinarily want to do. So people think that when they have power formalised as authority, they are leaders. A person of authority is not necessarily a leader.
Going back from political science now to management science, a leader in the view of many people who have studied management is somebody who exercises influence in a least cost manner. That is, about able to get others to work together to achieve a shared goal with very limited effort and this usually involves, if you go to somebody like Steven Covey who is a personal effectiveness guru, having two critical dimensions: knowledge because people follow people who know what they are doing and because of their knowledge are better able to see tomorrow clearly and suggest where the people should be following them to. And the second dimension is a sense of service. People who are able to sacrificially give of themselves for the good of others. Knowing that he knows what he is doing and knowing that he cares about you and would give of himself selflessly for your own sake, you don’t even think when you follow that person. That is a leader. Very few leaders are around in Nigeria today because of this obsessive self-love; this narcissism: ‘make me, myself and I’ have defined the culture of a player in public life in Nigeria today.
It’s not likely that they can be leaders. They may be powerful people – people who have authority but they are not leaders. In that sense therefore, Nigeria is hit by a fundamental problem of leadership. If you have leadership, there will be no situation where people are in such desperate material strait. Some people manage to eat one meal a day.
Some people have not seen light in two months in their neighbourhood and the people who say that they are in position of leadership are able to carry on in such a manner that they draw up most of the resources of the country for their own use. The scandal of how much members of National Assembly earn legitimately and then not to talk of those that might come not so legitimately, compared to what the average Nigeria earns just defines the fact that there is no leadership. If you go back to find examples of leadership in early Nigerian history, you ask yourself, Michael Okpara: dominant figure in NCNC, premier of Eastern Nigeria. How much did he have when he left the position of premier of Eastern Nigeria? As I heard from remarks many years ago, Okpara apportioned GRA Enugu and did not give himself one plot. The young men who are coming now 40 years after him are splitting GRA Enugu into smaller plots and giving themselves half of the place. So, you see a fundamental difference between Okpara and those fellows. Okpara was a leader. These fellows are not leaders.
That sacrificial giving of self for the good of others in not there. Go to the North, it’s the same thing. The Sardauna of Sokoto, when he was killed in 1966, he was considered perhaps the most powerful man in Nigeria. What did he have to himself? All his property were a few babaringa. That’s all. No big house in Sokoto that you can point to and say, that is Sardauna’s house. I can go on and on like that. There is nothing wrong in being rich but not at the expense of the people. So, if the National Assembly were an assembly of leaders, it would not appropriate the portion of the state resources that it is appropriating with very little contribution to growth of the state in the name of democracy.
There is evidence of the fact that leadership has gone out of the window. In leadership, you carry the people with you but everybody is acutely aware of the grave disconnect between the leadership elite and the Nigerian people. Indeed, I was part of a study a couple of years ago on the political economy of growth in Nigeria. I was working with some English academics on that project. What we concluded in the final analysis was that economic growth and, therefore, quality of life was a challenge in Nigeria primarily because politicians do not believe that they owe the electorate anything.
They did not get to power because the electorate voted for them. They got to power because one godfather said, it’s you! So they have a greater loyalty to servicing that godfather than to ensuring that the lot of the majority of the people is better. That is where the crisis of leadership lies. We don’t have people who have come out to serve charlatans who make a lot of noise about the people but look at their own life. How much have they sacrificed in the course of their life for others? Then you can gauge whether or not if they are in power, they would actually be sacrificial types or they would be self-seeking types.
What would you say was the problem with previous governments in Nigeria?
Different times, different challenges but the biggest challenge that we have had been the decline of our institutions and the collapse of our culture, and it has happened progressively. Let’s take election. Every election, we complain, this one is bad-o. Then the next one is worse. Every election in Nigeria is military rule and worse than the one before it.
A lot of us talk about the elections of June 12, 1993 as being the freest and the most preferred. Well, the next election in Nigeria took place in 1999, at least, at the national level. In 1999, the elections were clearly way out of the expectation compared to 1993 and Jimmy Carter was embarrassed to formally endorse the outcome as leader of a monitoring group. I remember being in Abuja on that day when a group of us hosted him and Collin Powell to dinner and we couldn’t get him to talk because he was so stunned by the obvious irregularities that he saw and found it quite a challenge. Then we said, oh! can it get worse than this? In 2003, it got much worse.
Well, those people we said could not get worse than 2003, we had 2007 which was a laugh, a joke. The whole world laughed at it but you know what? The guys who run Nigeria are ready to make 2011 a greater laugh and they have no shame. The challenge of Nigeria is that we have an elite that has no shame. So, Barack Obama wants to show you that the world has very little or no regard for Nigeria by going to Ghana and we shouted. Of course, Barack Obama will eventually come to Nigeria. Nigeria has its value in many ways that you cannot completely ignore so he will come to Nigeria eventually. But the point that needs to be made has been made that Nigeria is not the example that the world wants to see in Africa. Ghana represents it more. What more? Within a few days of it, the failed state indicators came out. Nigeria was 15th in the world while, Ghana was one twenty something.
We are in two different worlds and that’s how the world sees countries. I gave a speech on February 6, this year. I was praying, God, please, restore a sense of shame in Nigeria because the problem is that we stopped being ashamed of anything. The king is dancing naked in the market place. It doesn’t matter in Nigeria. Can you imagine if it was a normal place? The government is functioning at a time when everything seems to have packed up. Some people have not seen electric light in three months and people are complaining. A minister gets up and says, “all these critics talk nonsense, you know; we don’t just want to reply them because we are too busy working for Nigerian and everybody – foreigner and Nigerians are seeing that Nigeria has stopped functioning but the minister is unable to realize it because he has no sense of shame. If I were a minister in these times, I’d be going around with a newspaper covering my face but it doesn’t matter in Nigeria. That’s the country we live in.
If you should become president of Nigeria what would be your first action?
To create jobs and create jobs and create jobs. That’s the only way you will get people out of misery death. How do you create these jobs? In the first instance, sustainable jobs are created in the private sector but because of the urgency of now, you will use both the combination of public sector projects and an environment for private capital to come in to do infrastructure. And as you are doing that infrastructure, you are creating the conditions for the private sector to begin to thrive and to employ people. Right now, private sector is wobbly. Even Nigerians are moving to set up in Accra-in Ghana and government is not doing the public sector things. Perhaps, the most important transportation, as we are in Nigeria is the Lagos–Shagamu–Benin Expressway. Most people I know have typically spent four hours crossing Ore in the last couple of months.
We used to go from Benin to Lagos. I still remember clearly complaining about a family friend who gave me a ride in 1997 and he did Lagos-Benin in two hours, forty minutes. Lagos–Benin was considered a three-hour drive comfortably so but this guy did it in two hours, forty minutes. I don’t know anybody who can do Lagos–Benin today in five hours. There was virtually close because who will fly to Benin? Benin is just around the corner from Lagos but now, it is one of the busier airports because people are trying to fly over the bad road. That is the tragedy of nation building that we are faced with.
Are you a success by your reckoning?
I’m a complete failure. How can anybody live in Nigeria and consider himself a success? I’m a complete failure. I mean it. I’m not joking. What is success? All of us set goals for ourselves. The goal that I set for myself was to be able to affect any life that crosses mine positively and to be able to one day say to myself that I have achieved both material and spiritual immortality. Material immortality comes to you, in my view, when generations after look back to you with nostalgia and respect for how you affected your time and one of the easiest ways to achieve material immortality is through the written word – to write something that people will read after you’ve gone. We think of Shakespeare as if he was our next door neighbour but the man died many years ago. I routinely quote Niccolo Machiavelli in the print but he died 500 years ago. That in material immortality. Of course, for people of faith, spiritual immortality is to see God face to face. So that is how I defined success early in my life.
Have I been able to achieve that? I’ve been struggling so hard but look at the environment I live in. I cannot pretend that part of it is not my fault. You know, all that God is looking for is one man to stand up. We had too many alibis for not doing what is right in Nigeria. One of the alibis is how difficult things are. Oh, these people are terrible. They are dangerous, so people want to protect their comfort zones but it is just selfishness. Most among the educated Nigerian elite who took advantage of the system don’t speak the truth to power. They don’t speak up because they don’t want somebody who will get in the way of their billion naira contract tomorrow. So everybody makes ssh-ssh-ssh. Then when they see you in the corridors of Ikoyi Club, they will curse and complain and talk about Nigeria for the next three hours and then they get home to see invitation from the same people in power they criticized. The governor is launching a book tomorrow. They go and launch one for N50 million.
There is such hypocrisy in the country but I wonder how many people can really think of themselves as successes because they live in these kinds of times and could not even at least, speak up even though speaking up is not enough. Doing something is more important. As much as people will look at me and say, ah, at least you’ve tried, speaking up, this country is still a complete mess. How can I possibly consider myself a success?
If you were to give tips on success, what would they be?
Success is a very internal thing. It is a clear goal, a personal mission in life and radiating your vision of who you are literally to smart goals. There are goals that are very specific that you can measure – that are attainable, that are relevant, that are tangible. If you could reduce your vision to some smart goals and you can everynight examine your conscience and you are not far from where you should be, then you can say to yourself, my soul is running pretty close on track but if you are consumed by looking across the fence at your neighbour to know how many Mercedes Benzes he has, I assure you that you will never be able to attain success because you are constantly wanting more Mercedes Benzes, one that is bigger than his and it is a never-ending rat race. So, at the core of your attaining those goals will be the values that underlie the goals. I like to think of myself as one of the richest men in the world even if you may not find N50,000 in my account from time to time. I learnt this from two tracts. I read a tract that one of the greatest gifts any person can have is the gift of contentment.
I was very privileged to learn that early in life and it has helped me. The second was that many years ago, I got a very interesting wake-up call as to what to take seriously in life on the one hand but learning from that experience is what is really important in life. One of these soft sale magazines years ago had whether 100 Nigerians with most money abroad or something. The vendor brought the thing to my car window and I looked at it. My name was there. Fantastic! Nigerians with the most money abroad, so I quickly bought it and then burst out laughing and my driver thought something has happened to this man. He has finally broken down. It’s more than 14 years ago. So, when I got to Lagos Business School where I was an ordinary teacher and going up the staircase and laughing, one of my colleagues was coming down. I said, be careful how you talk to me, I’m one of the richest men in Nigeria. He said, what do you mean? Do you know how much money I have abroad?
As it turned out, on that particular day, my total foreign ownership of money came to $2,800 but the lesson that I took away from it was, if you carry yourself well, people can imagine to the lengths of the earth how much you are worth. Then he said to me, why are people stealing so much money? Is it your ego that is at work? I don’t want Babangida or that other person to be richer than me.
To heck! Who the hell whether he is richer than you or not so long as he eats three meals a day. For me, it has been a very important and powerful lesson that has helped me well and I’m thankful for it.
You rose from a corporate affairs position to the top at Volkswagen Nigeria. What happened to Volkswagen?
Very simple! In many ways, I like to hear that question because there are some people who are so illiterate that they think that they are pricking me when they make that statement. There was an executive of a company who has been speaking somewhere and it was like everybody was like, o, my goodness. This is so profound and he thought like, let me puncture this guy. Who does he think he is? What happened to Volkswagen? When I finished telling him what happened to Volkswagen, he felt like an ant. After all, I felt very sorry because I reduced him to an ant. Nigerians need to educate themselves so that they can make intelligent comments.
I think it was one morning, I was having breakfast at the Hilton at Abuja and Jean Louis Ekra, the Managing Director of Afri-Exxim Bank and one other Nigerian were talking and he said, you know, there is a problem with Africans that I notice. Africans just wake up and make bombastic statements about things they know actually nothing about and from there, it has been an article of truth and I laughed because it reminded me of the comment about Volkswagen because first of all, Volkswagen had no chance in hell of surviving the Structural Adjustment Programme and I said so the very day I was hired by the company and it is on record, and the thing that I am happy about my background is that I am a writing person and I don’t keep my mouth shut so you can find a record of everything I say.
You can crosscheck me on any matter. We were those analyzing Nigerian economy before they came head hunting me for Volkswagen. When I was offered the job, I said I was not going to take it. If you read my autobiography, To Serve Is To Live, I was, I would like to call it ‘whitemailed’, not blackmailed into going to Volkswagen because the person who was doing the headhunting, a very wonderful gentleman, the late Foluso Longe of Foluso Longe and Associates. He said to me, “look at you freelancing your way through life.
You have no big company experience. Why don’t you go to Volkswagen even if it is for two years and get big company experience? At least, you have that in your CV”. That is the first chapter of the book entitled, Still freelancing. When I arrived Volkswagen, the Structural Adjustment Programme which people like us had canvassed knowing that Nigeria didn’t have much of an option was being introduced in 1986. I said to them, if your adjustment programme is a serious programme, this company is dead on arrival; No chance in the world of surviving. The managing director at the time, one gentleman called Klaus von Bothmer, in fact, left the country. When he left Nigeria a couple of months after I joined the company, he gave an interview to Manager magazine in Germany.
He made the point that I was making that the company will not survive one or two years. The maximum thing is that the company stayed around as a manufacturing venture for another 10 years, not because it should have but we kept managing it. But he didn’t give it more than two years and I didn’t think it ought to have survived in the form that it was in. The other point that anybody who is thinking should think of is that manufacturing has collapsed in Nigeria across the board. We are not talking about Volkswagen. We are talking about every sector of manufacturing. The most important manufacturing sector back in those days was textile. It employed more people than any other sector in the Nigerian economy except government. Textile industry is dead; completely gone.
So, why do you look and say, what happened in Volkswagen? You are being deaf then. You don’t know that it couldn’t have; it shouldn’t survive but it should have in a different mode. The question is: what mode was that? And that’s where I’m happy that I’m a writer.
As past of the series on Structural Adjustment Programme, I was invited by ThisWeek magazine, the forerunner of ThisDay published by Nduka Obaigbena to do a piece on the subject and I made the same point that I was making. It was in 1986; that Volkswagen of Nigeria should not, at least, in its current form, survive; that it cannot and even if for some reason you can make it, it should not because you are under an uncompetitive kind of environment. My personal proposal was that we could create even more jobs and keep the company running if we exit trying to manufacture cars because there is no way we were going to be competitive in that area; that what we should do as a company is a written agreement with the Volkswagen Group and we say to them, look, Nigeria has competitive advantage in growing rubber.
In my understanding, it is said that we have one of the best yields per hectre for rubber in the world even though we have not managed it well. Supposing the Volkswagen Group were to concede the production of one rubber component to Volkswagen of Nigeria, Volkswagen of Nigeria would be able to earn billions of dollars from the export of that component to the Volkswagen Group and then we can import the cars. I was nearly killed. “Ha! These people don’t want Nigeria to be a manufacturer of things. One man called me and praised my courage and my intellect.
That man is Victor Odozi who was deputy governor of the Central Bank at a time and the intellectual arrowhead of government policy and Victor Odozi said to me in that phone call that you know very few people will have the kind of courage and conviction that you have to be able to be so candid about an organisation that pays their salary. So to come back 15 years and have people who don’t understand anything ask you what happened to Volkswagen just shows me why Nigeria is where it is because we have no institutional memory.
We have academics who have not done their homework, who make comments without understanding the basis on which they are making comments. We have people who are trying to find anything to say anyway about people without reflection. So yes, Volkswagen had no business surviving SAP and it did not survive SAP.
How do you feel now the company is dead?
Well, I told them that it would happen. It’s not my own, what can I do? I put the argument to the German about what could possibly be done and the German said to me, “Look, your country is not a serious country. At least government is a partner in (this business). They won’t get government to pay its own shareholding. We’ve been chasing them for N800,000 for years – government of Nigeria.” That time N800,000 was like $1 and something dollars. We’ve been chasing government for years to pay and it was not paid until a personal relationship and he’s still alive and thank God, he is there. A personal relationship between myself and one Minister of Industries, Air Vice Marshall Mohammed Yahaya led him to writing the cheque for the Ministry of Industries even though Ministry of Industries is not a shareholder. The shareholder is the Ministry of Finance Incorporated but because I harassed him so much, he asked the ministry to prepare a cheque for N800,000.
That was how Volkswagen of Nigeria got the second call of its capital from the Federal Government of Nigeria. That man said: “Look, your country is not serious. You want us to do this. It’s a brilliant idea but how can you rely on a country like this?” So at a point in time when they wanted to get out of the country, I said okay, you want to get out, let me show you that a privately run company can be more serious. They said, okay, put together a management buy-out. I put together an arrangement that signed an MoU with Volkswagen where I would take over their interest in the company. When the Nigerian directors heard about it, they declared civil war. I don’t have money. I raised a trustee proposal. I discussed with Chief MKO Abiola.
In fact, it was Air Vice Marshall Yahaya who said to me, “before this people will kill you, leave this thing for them. “I don’t want to tell the whole story. You know the intrigues that can happen in Nigeria in this kind of thing. That will be for another book. So I thought about it and went to Chief Abiola and sold the idea of his taking over the interest to him. So, I then went back to Germany and got the Germans to rescind the MoU I had with them and replace it with the one that I designed with Abiola. Now, we do not know how that whole story would have ended because a few months after, Chief Abiola declared his interest in running for president and the rest became history.
By EMERSON GOBERT, JR
September 26, 2009
