Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has berated most political officeholders for using state resources for personal aggrandizement.
Obasanjo lamented the increasing rate of poverty among the masses in the country, while the political class continues to amass wealth for themselves.
The ex-leader revealed this in 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.
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.
Obasanjo 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 gotten 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 the realities and truths 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.”
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 practiced and see how it could be modified to reflect African uniqueness.
“If the West, from where 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, and conduct 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, if not all, the faults we have found in Western liberal democracy,” he suggested.
