By Sunday Dare
Professor Pat Utomi has once again chosen to dance naked in the public square, playing to the gallery with a familiar cocktail of grandstanding and gloom. This time, he has come to dismiss the reform programme of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as “ridiculous,” “poorly structured,” and, in a flourish of intellectual overreach, a “Ponzi scheme.”
At this point, the issue is no longer what Utomi is saying. The issue is why his interventions consistently collapse under the weight of their own exaggeration, under the slightest scrutiny or interrogation.
Any reflective — indeed, discerning — mind would note that, after all these long years of sophistry and vacuous pontifications, all Utomi can possibly point to as his bonafides or bragging rights in the civic space today are the ruins of Volkswagen Automobile Ltd and BankPHB where his much touted “academic wizardry” was exposed as “Ponzi scheme”.
An Economy of Words, Not Results
Utomi’s public persona has long rested on the alarmist aura of a “political economist.” But strip away the titles, the panels, and the endless commentary, and a more uncomfortable question emerges: where is the evidence of all his posturings in the public space?
Nigeria’s economic distortions did not emerge in a vacuum. They were sustained over decades by a rotating class of commentators and advisers who:
Utomi was not outside that ecosystem. He was part of it. Contrast this with measurable shifts under the current reform cycle:
These are not theoretical positions. They are structural actions with verifiable fiscal impact.
From Insider Comfort to Outsider Outrage
There is a pattern here that is too glaring to ignore. For years, the rent-seeking architecture of Nigeria’s economy—subsidy leakages, FX arbitrage, policy opacity—created space for a certain kind of “expert”: visible, vocal, and perpetually adjacent to power, yet rarely accountable for outcomes.
Now, that architecture is being disrupted. And suddenly, the volume of outrage has gone up. This is not a coincidence. It is a reaction.
When a system that once rewarded commentary begins to prioritize structural correction, those who thrived in the old order often rebrand themselves as its fiercest critics. Not out of principle—but out of displacement.
Meanwhile, early macro signals are adjusting:
The “Ponzi Scheme” Claim: A Collapse of Serious Thinking
Let’s be blunt. Calling a national reform programme a “Ponzi scheme” is not provocative—it is intellectually hollow.
A Ponzi scheme is built on deception and zero value creation. Nigeria’s reforms—however painful—are attempting to:
If anything resembled a Ponzi structure, it was the previous regime of:
An economy that sustained the likes of Utomi and his “Patitio’s gang” of economic bucaneers. Utomi’s analogy does not expose the present—it exposes a troubling looseness in his analytical discipline.
He ignores the fact that investor-facing fundamentals are being reset:
