Ebun Adegboruwa, a Lagos-based lawyer, in an interview with OLUSOLA OLAOSEBIKAN brands President Olusegun Obasanjo a failure Could you briefly assess President Olusegun Obasanjo vis-à-vis his administration? Normally, we would have started from 1976. But from 1999 till date, it is an administration that came to fritter the resources of Nigeria, an administration that came to squander the confidence of Nigerians, an administration that came to impose a culture of violence and lawlessness, a culture of official corruption. But I think on the other hand too, economically, it was a regime that came to empower its own friends, captains of industry whom he promoted to appropriate the collective wealth of the people in the name of commercialisation, privatisation and all the rest. So, economically, yes, he has assisted and upgraded the welfare of his supporters who have taken over. In some other areas like the GSM, yes, he introduced the GSM. But unfortunately, he was unable to monitor the success of the GSM to the extent that it has become a liability on Nigerians, such that the phone is no longer affordable. So, if you want to assess General Olusegun Obasanjo, you’ll look at all the facets of Nigerian life. Talking about education, the universities are dead now. And there are close to 50 private universities in Nigeria now. Two of them owned by General Obasanjo and one by his Vice President, ABTI University in Yola. So that, in education, what the government has done is to kill public interest, so as to make it lucrative for private institutions which are milking individuals. What has happened is that the children of the rich are either attending London School of Economics and Political Science, Harvard University, London University, Cambridge, or they are attending Covenant University or Bells University or Igbinedion University or ABTI. So, the ones that the masses can afford, the Obafemi Awolowo University, University of Ibadan, the University of Maiduguri, are dilapidated. It is no longer productive for you to think of taking your children there because a programme that is meant to take four years, by the time you calculate all manner of frustrating programmes that the government has installed in these institutions, it becomes difficult to graduate. Even at the secondary level, the system has been destroyed such that it becomes no longer advisable to patronise these schools, except you opt for the British-American International School, Lekki International School and others. So with this structure, poverty will certainly be on the rise. Because if your child cannot go to school, it automatically means that the best he can get is technical employment, whether as a manual labourer or an apprentice. He becomes like a slave to the children of the rich who are able to afford education and the rich will continue to dominate those who cannot afford education. In the area of aviation, just go to any airport in the country, you’ll experience what I am saying. I took an aircraft from Abuja or Lagos sometime ago and we almost died. We were hovering around in the air for close to 30 minutes, we could not land in Lagos until the pilot was almost crashing into a helicopter. And that is the story of aviation in Nigeria. You remember how many crashes we have suffered. There’s no airport, currently in this country that you can go to and say your flight will leave at the appropriate time. Flights are cancelled and delayed indiscriminately, the planes are terrible. This is just the airport. Go through the roads and it’s another disaster. Just take a trip from Lagos to Benin, you’ll see what Nigerians are going through in terms of transportation. So you see that there’s no facet of Nigerian life that the government has improved. I mean, the military regime of General Sani Abacha was generating 4,000 mega watts in his wicked days in this country. Under Obasanjo we got to a stage where we could not produce 500 mega watts. So, this government has taken us backward. Generally, we have not seen any significant improvement in the life of the ordinary man. The President was certainly running a government of crisis. Either they kill Bola Ige today and it will be in the papers for the next one or two months. And as Nigerians are trying to get used to that, you hear it is the Niger Delta. Before you go and settle that one, another crisis has come up. So, we were just in that kind of situation from 1999 till date. The President was actually running a government of distractions. Scandal was the hallmark of the government. Even in the National Assembly, the man succeeded in planting crisis. Up till now, you know he has refused to sign the Freedom of Information Bill simply because he wants them to call it Right to Information Bill. This is somebody whom we placed in a position of trust, but he wasted the opportunity. He sees himself as somebody wiser than Solomon, braver than David and more knowledgeable than Jesus Christ. As far as Nigeria is concerned, he believes there’s nobody who can compare with him in wisdom. But we must come to the irresistible conclusion that Nigeria went backwards in the time of President Obasanjo. But the external debt settlement is said to be a plus for the administration... When you talk about debt recovery, who is not owing? Even America is owing. So why the rush to pay debt when your people have not eaten? And, in any case, why did Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala leave the government? Was it not because of the various scandals that trailed the so-called debt recovery? I didn’t think it was necessary to rush to pay that money. Then, number two, if you use such resources to empower and develop your people, it would have been acceptable. Is it not now that the President is leaving office that he is awarding contracts of N500billion and mobilising immediately? We underestimated him. He will continue to wear Bushmen dresses and continue to behave like a farmer and a jester, whereas he was scheming frantically to acquire wealth. Fani-Kayode said that he realises N30 million every month from Ota farm. A place that was almost moribund by the time he came back from prison!
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 10:34:16 +0000