Utomi At 60: Bringing Back The Gang
In English folklore, Robin Hood led a gang that robbed from the rich to give to the poor. The benevolent gangsters laid low in the woods and disposed the wealthy, in pursuit of a philosophy that championed the equitable distribution of riches in society. In our age, a man called Patrick Ikedunachi Utomi has had his own group, chivalrously called Patito’s Gang. He and his ‘gangsters’ stayed in the TV studio. Weekly, in the 1990s, the gang hid in a heavily sound-proofed building in Surulere, Lagos. They ambushed viewers in the comfort of their homes as they sought to reform society along quite radical lines.
Being among those the Gang waylaid, I can safely declare that their mission wasn’t different from what the medieval Robin Hood wanted to achieve. The robber desired social justice by applying unlawful methods. Of course, he might claim he settled for unlawful means to return what he deemed to be unlawfully gained wealth to the original owners. But could he present evidence that the wealth was unlawfully made?
Pat Utomi and his studio gang also were not pleased with the condition of a society that was heading towards a precipice overlooking a bottomless pit. The situation had bred both open and covert mental poverty and inequity in Nigeria. The military sat atop the state. A succession of their juntas over the years couldn’t arrest the decay. Power had to be wrested from the soldiers and given back to the people.
Part of Utomi’s intervention was the formation of Patito’s Gang. If he couldn’t adopt the rawness of Robin Hood, he would take the pacifist route of what a columnist, Louis Odion, has called “scholarly activism”. He believed, as he still does, in the superiority of knowledge power. For, indeed, if you equip the people with scholarship, you would have put them on a flight to emancipation, free from emasculating ignorance, dogma and poverty.
This was Patito’s Gang agenda. Nigeria needed help to annul her forced pact with mediocre and pedestrian politics along with the business and governance it generated, all brought about by the military and their civilian conspirators. Such help could come if space was provided for unfettered intellectual debate by town and gown. These refined successors of Robin Hood were determined that in the long run what they prescribed, a death blow on corruption and barracks hegemony, equitable share of the national wealth, democratising education opportunities, empowerment of the youths, women and the vulnerable in society, would first lead Nigeria to make a U-turn from the cliff edge path and then make the country take the sane route to the Promised Land of wealth for all.
Given the impact of those discussions, most Nigerians have wondered why Pat Utomi has not transcribed the studio deliberations into a multivolume book to be in the public libraries, universities and private homes, the same way the ‘gangsters’ made their way into our homes in the 1990s.
I regret not taking up this issue with Innocent Nwabuzor (of blessed memory) and Cletus Chukwuma, two old friends who worked on the set of Patito’s Gang.
Last week, as friends and well-wishers celebrated the 60th birthday of Pat Utomi, it dawned on me that if he had come out with a publication trapping the gangs recipe to the national question, it would have prompted the chief ‘gangster’ to go the whole hog towards implementing the ideas in the book, namely, moving into politics to walk the talk, as the cliché goes.
Years earlier, Pat was actually in politics as an aide of President Shehu Shagari. Then a brash young man with progressive predilections which we gleaned from his writings, Utomi made many to ask: why is he in the conservative camp of the National Party of Nigeria?
By 1993, Utomi, long a PhD holder, bared his fangs over the June 12 presidential election. He wrote numerous anti-military articles in the popular media. One of them was, “We must say never again.” He says of the write-up: “That piece led to the establishment of ‘Concerned Professionals’. It was arguably one of the stout movements of resistance against military regime… we played a very important role in bringing military regime to an end in the country”.
Professor Pat Utomi has since moved into fullorbed politics, combining it with entrepreneurship, academic and administrative work, civil activism, mentorship and philanthropy. Although there has been some aborted presidential bid, this son of Ibusa, a mangrove setting in Delta State, is credited with a chunky role in the erection of the opposition that toppled the 16-year rule of the Peoples Democratic Party and brought into power President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015.
By the way, Utomi is also a journalist, frequently the victim of accusations that he has ‘ported’. But judging from a recent unpleasant encounter he had at the hands of the media, he is in grief, mourning the profession’s seeming departure from the track of integrity, which his days in the 70s produced.
Note Utomi’s doleful bitterness and nostalgia in his reaction to a report that misrepresented his position over Buhari’s initial appointments: “What I did find quite troubling about it all was the near total absence of serious home work in both the reporting and the reaction to the report… but a lazy reporting culture has come to feed on and feed declining civic culture in which the object of public conversation is to typecast people, go into name calling and in the social media hauling insults without understanding what is being discussed.”
Well, joining the rare breed of the 60-year-olds, as he just did, would deepen Pat Utomi’s heartache and prod him to help recover what is lost as he contemplates society’s missing innocence and values. That should pump into him a new zest to work more for the redemption of his compatriots. Older persons are armed with some insight denied the inexperienced.