Osamagbe Imadiyi
Olusegun Obasanjo, the former president, has called the N15.6 trillion Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway project corrupt and wasteful. He also criticized the administration of President Bola Tinubu for spending N21 billion on Vice President Kashim Shettima’s new official residence, claiming it was an inappropriate priority and a means of embezzling public funds. The former leader revealed this in chapter six of his recently released book, “Nigeria: Past and Future,” in which he portrayed the personalities and characteristics of state and federal chief executives. The book was one of two new books released last week to commemorate Obasanjo’s 88th birthday.
Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in the general elections of 2023, is among the many well-known Nigerians who have questioned the Federal Government’s choice to award the contract to Gilbert Chagoury’s Hitech Construction Company without holding a competitive fair. When contacted Wednesday evening, presidential spokesperson Bayo Onanuga refused to comment on Obasanjo’s criticism of his principal.
The former president claimed that most of the people who have had the chance to serve in the country’s leadership roles—as governors, presidents, ministers, commissioners, and even as chairmen of local governments—are unprepared, demonic, and self-centered, and they are all out to corruptly enrich themselves while the country remains in shocking poverty and underdevelopment. The former president noted that the majority of political candidates in the nation would even go so far as to take out billion-naira loans in the hope that they would not have any trouble repaying them with public funds once they were elected.
He said, “How do you explain a situation where a governor and chief executive had a business that owed the banks millions of dollars and billions of naira before he was elected governor, and two years after taking office, without his company doing any business, he paid off everything his company owed the banks? You have to speculate as to the source of the funds. He kept nearly half of the state resources for himself in the second term after getting away with it in the first. With very few exceptions, he was a typical example of what was happening at that level practically everywhere in the nation. While in office and when they are not, state resources are taken and appropriated to themselves with little assistance to employees and associates in order to silence anyone who might raise concerns or blow the whistle against them. The shady Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road, where the President ignored protests, and the new Vice-President’s official residence, which was constructed at a cost of N21 billion during a period of economic hardship to demonstrate the administration’s rapid progress and the significance of the Vice-President’s position, are prime examples of waste, corruption, and misaligned priorities. What dimwits!”.
