A chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress and former presidential candidate, Prof. Pat Utomi, has condemned the nomination process of political parties in the country as corrupt and regressive.
Utomi, a professor of political economy, spoke to Punch in a telephone interview that the anti-corruption war remained an important project that every Nigerian needed to buy into and uphold.
He said, “I do believe that the government, in spite of the apparent challenges, has done a lot more than often appears on the matter. If you realise that the fundamental thing that has bound those who have run Nigeria for more than a generation is the democratisation of corruption, you will realise how deep-rooted the problem is.
“So, one must pay tribute to people who recognise that it is a cancer and want to excise it before metastasis consumes all of us. However, in dealing with this problem, it would be short-sighted to assume that it would be easy sailing. As they say in the cliché, when you fight in corruption, corruption fights back.
Utomi explained that in critical moments, one of the first things companies around did was try to institute a change process.
One of the best admired ways of changing a system, according to the economist, is to change its culture.
“In change management, culture change initiatives are called programmatic change efforts. The truth of the matter is that less than 30 per cent of the major programmatic change efforts in corporations around the world truly succeed. Yet, it’s still powerful that that 30 per cent is worth the efforts at culture change.
“I can think of a number of additional approaches we could throw into what the government has deployed. However, I think it is not fair by looking at what seems to be institutional pushback and therefore conclude that the effort is not worth it. It was and is still worth it because, if we don’t, corruption will kill Nigeria.
“Everything is affected; that we have bad leaders in our country is partly corruption because the political party process is a corrupt process.
“Because it’s corrupt, people who are natural leaders or have the capacity to lead don’t emerge from the process, and because they don’t emerge, the kinds of people who come out ensure that we’re going through this vicious cycle, back and forth, a lot of motion with no movement or progress,” he added.
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