Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has described as wasteful and corrupt most of the projects being executed by the President Bola Tinubu administration.
Obasanjo lambasted the Tinubu administration for spending N21 billion on a new official mansion for Vice President Kashim Shettima, calling it a misguided priority and a conduit for embezzling public funds.
The ex-leader revealed this in chapter six of his new book, ‘Nigeria: Past and Future,’ in which he depicted the portraits and personalities of federal and state chief executives alike.
The book was one of two new books released to commemorate Obasanjo’s 88th birthday last week.
Obasanjo also condemned the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway project.
The Minister of Works, David Umahi, announced that the 700-kilometre Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway will cost N4.93 billion per kilometre, noting that the contract was given on a counterpart-funding basis rather than a public-private partnership.
The pilot phase, which begins at Eko Atlantic and is planned to end at the Lekki Deep Sea Port, has been allocated around N1.06 trillion, or 6% of the total project budget.
Many prominent Nigerians, including Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party’s presidential candidate for the 2023 general elections, have questioned the Federal Government’s decision to award the contract to Gilbert Chagoury’s Hitech Construction Company without competitive bidding.
Chagoury is thought to be Tinubu’s long-time business partner and friend.
Assessing Tinubu’s two years in government, Obasanjo stated that it appears like the game of short-changing nearly 230 million Nigerians will continue since “everything is said to be transactional and the slogan is ‘It is my turn to chop.'”
When asked about Obasanjo’s criticism of Tinubu on Wednesday night, presidential spokesperson Bayo Onanuga declined to comment.
The former President stated that the majority of those who have been appointed to positions of leadership in the country, such as governors, presidents, ministers, commissioners, and even local government chairmen, are ill-prepared, satanic, and self-centred, and are all out to corruptly enrich themselves while the nation continues to suffer from abject poverty and condemnable underdevelopment.
According to Obasanjo, many people who want to be governors or lead the country in some way are simply interested in using their positions to enrich themselves and their cronies and then leaving the country worse off than when they arrived.
The former President stated that most office-seekers in the country would go so far as to borrow billions of naira loans, assuming that repaying them from public monies once elected would not be an issue.
He stated, “How do you explain the situation of a chief executive, a governor, whose business was owing the banks billions of naira and millions of dollars before becoming a governor and within two years of becoming governor, without his company doing any business, he paid all that his businesses owed the banks.
“You are left to guess where the money came from. Having got away with that in the first term, he consigned to himself almost half of the state resources in the second term. He was a typical example of the goings-on at that level almost universally in the country with only a few exceptions.
“State resources are captured and appropriated to themselves with a pittance to staff and associates to close the mouths of those that could blow the whistle or raise alarm against them while in office and when they are out of office.’’
He further noted that “The ones that are criminally ridiculous are the chief executives that deceive, lie and try to cover up on the realities and truth of action and inaction on contract awards, agreements, treaties, borrowings and forward sales of national assets. Such chief executives are unfit for the job they find themselves in.
“Typical examples of waste, corruption and misplaced priority are the murky Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road on which the President had turned deaf ears to protests and the new Vice-President’s official residence built at a cost of N21bn in the time of economic hardship to showcase the administration hitting the ground running and to show the importance of the office of the Vice-President. What small minds!”
To address some of the difficulties facing the country, the former President noted that there is a need to investigate the Western liberal democracy being practised and see how it could be modified to reflect African uniqueness.
“If the West, from where the liberal democracy started should complain about it not working well for them, we should be wise enough at this stage to interrogate, carry out introspection, internal analysis and realise that Western liberal democracy is not working for us and is not delivering apart from the shortcomings of the operators.
“We should seek democracy within African history, culture, attributes and characteristics, one that will take necessary African factors into consideration. Until we can get a better word or description for it, let us call it Afrodemocracy.
“It is from Afrodemocracy that we will draw up an African people’s constitution for any African that chooses to go the way of Afrodemocracy, which will avoid most, to all, the faults we have found in Western liberal democracy,” he suggested.
