Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has harshly denounced the ₦15.6 trillion Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway project, labeling it as a corrupt and wasteful endeavor.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has criticized the ₦21 billion allocated for the new official residence of Vice President Kashim Shettima, labeling it a misplaced priority and a means of embezzling public funds, as revealed in chapter six of his new book, ‘Nigeria: Past and Future’.
One of two new books was unveiled last week to celebrate Obasanjo’s 88th birthday. Meanwhile, the Minister of Works, David Umahi, revealed that the 700km Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway will cost N4.93bn per kilometre.
The contract was awarded on a counterpart-funding basis, not a Public-Private Partnership.
For the pilot phase, N1.06tn has been released, covering six per cent of the project, which starts at Eko Atlantic and ends at the Lekki Deep Sea Port.
Several notable Nigerians, including Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in the 2023 general elections, have raised concerns about the Federal Government’s decision to award a contract to Gilbert Chagoury’s Hitech Construction Company without competitive bidding, with Chagoury believed to be a long-time business partner and friend of Tinubu.
In his assessment of Tinubu’s two years in office, Obasanjo stated that it appears the exploitation of over 230 million Nigerians will continue, with everything being transactional and the prevailing attitude being ‘It is my turn to chop.’
When contacted on Wednesday night, Presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga refused to comment on Obasanjo’s criticism of his principal. Obasanjo claimed that the majority of individuals who have held leadership positions in Nigeria, including governors, presidents, ministers, commissioners, and local government chairmen, are ill-prepared, satanic, self-centred, and solely focused on enriching themselves, while the nation remains impoverished and underdeveloped.
According to Obasanjo, many individuals seeking to become governors or leaders are primarily motivated by a desire to exploit their positions for personal gain and leave the country in a worse state than they found it.
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 challenges facing the country, the former President said that there is a need to interrogate the Western liberal democracy being practised and see how it could be reviewed to reflect African peculiarities.
“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.
