It would have been difficult to pin Professor Pat Utomi down for a personality interview if he was not cornered during one of his numerous lectures. People were already waiting to see him but he agreed to be interviewed for 10 minutes. The idea was to get him to tell the story of his life. He did, kicking off with the story of his dramatic birth. “I was born in Kaduna on February 5, 1956,” he reminisced.
“My family actually lived in Jos at the time. I was told that on the day I was born, the queen of England, Queen Elizabeth II, who was then a very young queen, visited Nigeria. A lot of people craved to see the queen. So did my pregnant mother, who visited Kaduna with an aunt of mine and her husband. She joined people queuing up to greet the queen. There and then, she started experiencing labour pains. There was no time to get to the hospital; they had to quickly rush her to the house where she gave birth to me.”
Not even his transition from infancy into adolescence would be forgotten so soon. Quite adventurous, the young Utomi was right in the middle of them all.
Chuckling, he said, “In primary school, I was influenced by catechists of American origin. That was the same period John .F. Kennedy was the President of the United States of America. The Kennedy mystique caught up with so many of us young ones. At the age of seven, I was reading books about Kennedy. I am sure it must have affected my reading orientation later in life because I read a lot of Kennedy books.
“I remember people used to joke about me as 10 going on 18! I had very strong views at the time and got into a lot of trouble for expressing my views to different kinds of people.”
A politician, Utomi is also a professor at the Lagos Business School, which he co-founded. He hails from Ibussa in Oshimili North Local Government Area of Delta State and would always remember his narrow escape from death during the Nigerian civil war.
He gushed, “I was also a bit of a rascal as a child. The civil war met me as a child and I was even ‘captured’ by Federal troops after crossing the River Niger into Nigeria by canoe from the Biafra side. The Nigerian soldiers, on seizing our canoe, ordered the men to line up. What that meant was that we were to be massacred.
“When the officer cocked his gun to shoot at us, a truck pulled up and a battalion commander came out and asked him what he was doing. It turned out that the battalion commander, a Nigerian army colonel, was my father’s friend. My father had been in Lagos before the war while I went to Christ the King’s College, Onitsha. When the war broke out, my family was on the Nigerian side while I was on the Biafran side. When the battalion commander saved our lives, I joined my parents in Lagos and resumed family life. So, while the rest of my classmates were dodging bombs in Biafra, I was dancing to James Brown’s music in Lagos.”
Crossing from Onitsha back to Lagos, Utomi continued his education at the Loyola College, Ibadan. After graduating from college, his aspirations skyrocketed!
Explaining that he almost became a pilot, the scholar-in-residence at the Harvard Business School and the American University in Washington, D.C, said, “I graduated from Loyola College, Ibadan at the age of 15. One of my best friends rushed off to flying school immediately to learn how to become a pilot. Then, the Nigerian Airways was in the stage of infancy and they absorbed young school leavers without asking for their certificates. The pilots lived flashy lives with cars and a lot of money to spend and I made up my mind to become a pilot. My father took me to a friend of his who was a director in Nigerian Airways.
“We were all in agreement that I would go to flying school but since I was still too young, I should try and spend one or two years in the university and make friends. I took the concessional entrance exams into the university; my aim was to spend just two years making friends before going to flying school.”
Sometimes, dreams could die. The young man changed gear when he accidently became his school’s librarian. “After the civil war,” he recalled, “books and journals were donated from all over the world to university libraries. However, the departments could not afford to pay librarians and the libraries remained shut. The Head of Department asked the students to organise themselves and pick volunteers to man the library. The students refused to volunteer and the library stayed shut. One day, I walked up to the HOD and volunteered to run the library. He was so shocked at the most unserious student volunteering to run the library that he promptly handed over the keys to me. Once that happened, I had a sense of responsibility and knew that unless I was around, people could not use the library. Since I was there, there was nothing else to do than to read all the books! That changed my life tremendously. Also, I changed my mind about going to flying school and instead, went straight to graduate school abroad after youth service. By the time I was 22, I had two masters’ degrees. After submitting my PhD thesis, I got on the first plane coming back to Nigeria.”
Then, he met his wife. “I met her immediately I returned from the United States. I had this childhood friend whom I ran into on my return in 1972. He had a girlfriend who was a final year student in Idi-Araba College of medicine and the lady had a roommate. We ended up marrying both women,” he recounts.
Asked if he was fulfilled, Utomi answered in the affirmative. Meanwhile, he admitted feeling sad over an issue.
“I feel sad sometimes, at the collapse of culture in Nigeria. The fact that we have different religions should not make everything come down to the size of a bank account as if we don’t understand that there is a lot more to life.”
At this juncture, he needed to correct a wrong impression some people have of him. He had this to say, “People always think that I am a very rich man. They also think that the only thing I do is read. Almost all the gifts I get are books. On a flight from Abuja to Lagos, I received three books as gifts. All I know is that I read books for leisure and it is a relaxing exercise for me. I played squash a long time ago but I am not doing that anymore.”
Style, he said, means a different thing to him. Utomi would inform you that he likes harmony in his dressing. “I like harmony. I love my colours to complement themselves. I am not a great shopper but I can just walk into one or two shops and pick what I want and won’t bother going further. I leave style to my daughter.”
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