Prof. Pat Utomi has issued a formal rejoinder to Sunday Dare, Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Media and Public Communication, defending his characterisation of certain Nigerian economic stabilization reforms as “a Ponzi scheme of sorts” and firmly pushing back against what he calls predictable disinformation and personal attacks on his professional record spanning nearly five decades.
Utomi’s detailed response was triggered by a op-ed from Dare published in The Guardian and THISDAY on April 16, 2026, titled “Utomi: An economic buccaneer flirting with intellectualism.”
In that piece, Dare dismissed Utomi’s critique of the current administration’s economic reforms as intellectually hollow and sought to question the economist’s credibility by referencing his past roles at Volkswagen of Nigeria (VWoN) and as a Non-Executive Director on the BankPHB Board—both institutions that later experienced corporate difficulties.
In his rejoinder published on April 19, Utomi began by expressing genuine thrill at Dare’s engagement, noting that setting aside “a regrettable touch of incivility,” such engagement could have served as a stellar contribution to the marketplace of ideas.
Utomi revealed that he knows Dare well, recalling that for many years, Dare was often the one who welcomed him at the door of the Tinubu residence on Bourdillon.
He stated that he has always rated Dare as considerably more polished than others in that orbit who quickly descend into ad hominem barbs, and consequently, he does not mind the name-calling.
More importantly, Utomi said Dare’s intervention provides an opportunity to elevate the conversation on economic management with better information and a clearer context, stressing that too many lives hang in the balance to avoid an honest and intelligent discussion.
Setting the record straight on the innuendos, Utomi noted with frustration that after nearly fifty years of public life, those who wish to be nasty are forced to recycle just two tired references: his time at VWoN and his role at BankPHB.
On the Volkswagen narrative, Utomi pointed out that no one ever points to a single infraction he committed there, arguing that it is always a vague insinuation that a company he worked for failed at a later point in its history.
He applied the same logic to argue that one might as well accuse Bola Tinubu of culpability for Mobil’s eventual exit from Nigeria, a statement he said he would never make because it is intellectually dishonest.
Utomi stated as a historical fact that virtually all motor assembly plants in Nigeria collapsed, and noted that even if one were uncharitable enough to blame the staff on whose watch an industrialization strategy crumbled, two German Managing Directors—Piech and Bublitz—and another Nigerian ran the company after he left of his own volition.
He added that his thoughts on the company’s challenges are fully documented, including in a This Week magazine piece from 1985 when headhunters approached him, and in his book To Serve is to Live, where he described his move to VWoN as a result of being “whitemailed.”
Addressing the BankPHB reference, where he served as a Non-Executive Director often on a leave of absence while running for public office, Utomi found it telling that the same smear campaign never targets the actual Chairman of the Board, Kola Abiola, or esteemed figures like Akin Kekere-Ekun.
He described this selective outrage as revealing a desperation to find something unpleasant about those who speak truth to power, noting that other directors who were far more involved in daily operations have gone on to occupy larger roles in the industry.
Utomi concluded firmly that the obvious conclusion is that his critics simply cannot find anything of substance, adding “It takes grace to operate in the manner I have been privileged to do. To God be the glory.”
Turning to the core economic issue, Utomi addressed what truly seems to have gotten under Dare’s skin: his characterization of certain economic stabilization reforms as “a Ponzi scheme of sorts.” Utomi reminded Dare that if memory serves, Dare was present at a programme organized by Alim Abubakar at Oxford University over a dozen years ago where Utomi was on the faculty, and had Dare been in his class for all the presentations, he would have heard Utomi use those exact words even back then.
Utomi clarified that he supported the Washington Consensus and Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the promise then that the pain would precede the gain. He even employed the J-curve to explain the lag between policy implementation and economic results.
However, the reality he observed was starkly different. He watched a select few become fabulously wealthy through financial-sector reforms and privatization, yet sustainable, broad-based growth never materialized. 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 Nigeria’s education and healthcare systems—the very bedrock of human capital development—forced a reckoning.
Utomi wrote that he began to see such stabilization outcomes as akin to a Ponzi scheme because they free up frozen credit lines and create an illusion of market vitality, but offer little in terms of genuine entrepreneurship stimulation or frameworks for making markets work efficiently.
As a personal initiative, Utomi began teaching Entrepreneurship at the Lagos Business School and collaborated with colleagues at Harvard Business School to design a course on Making Markets Work.
He argued that by contrast, stabilization programmes naively assumed that markets would naturally follow liberalization, ignoring the lessons of strategic industrial policy in Asia. The result, he said, is that Nigeria ended up as the world’s poverty capital, having missed the growth those policies promised.
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He noted that a few months ago, BusinessDay published extracts from a book he is currently writing on this very subject.
Utomi further recalled that when the Asian Financial Crisis erupted in 1997, he embedded himself in Malaysia and Indonesia and was present at the World Bank Annual Meetings in Hong Kong, where the ideological battle came to a head.
He referenced his op-ed in The Guardian, written from Jakarta in October 1997 and titled ‘The End of Anwar Ibrahim,’ which he said should still be available for those who care to educate themselves. He suggested that Dare would be even more shaken if he were to read Bad Samaritans by the South Korean-born Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang. Utomi expressed pain at being alive to watch Nigeria repeat the same mistakes, and said it is profoundly discouraging to see individuals like Dare, who have the background to interrogate these ideas more effectively, resort to abuse instead of learning.
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