Lagos-Calabar highway project wasteful, corrupt – Obasanjo

By Our Correspondent  

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has described the N15.6tn Lagos-Calabar Coastal highway project as wasteful and corrupt.

He equally slammed the President Bola Tinubu administration for spending N21bn on a new official residence for Vice President Kashim Shettima, calling it a misplaced priority and conduit designed to embezzle public funds.

The ex-leader disclosed this in chapter six of his new book, ‘Nigeria: Past and Future’ where he painted the portrait and characters of chief executives at both the federal and state levels.

The book was one of the two new books unveiled to mark Obasanjo’s 88th birthday last week.

The Minister of Works, David Umahi, had revealed that the 700km Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway will cost N4.93bn per kilometre, stating that the contract was awarded on a counterpart-funding basis and not a Public-Private Partnership.

About N1.06tn has been released for the pilot phase, or six per cent of the project, which begins at Eko Atlantic and is expected to terminate at the Lekki Deep Sea Port.

Many prominent Nigerians, including the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party in the 2023 general elections, Atiku Abubakar, have questioned the Federal Government’s decision to award the contract to Gilbert Chagoury’s Hitech Construction Company without competitive bidding.

Chagoury is believed to be Tinubu’s long-time business partner and friend.

Assessing the two years of Tinubu in office, Obasanjo said it appears that the game of short-changing the over 230 million Nigerians would continue because “Everything is said to be transactional and the slogan is ‘It is my turn to chop.’’’

Presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, declined to react to Obasanjo’s criticism of his principal when contacted on Wednesday night.

The former President said the majority of those who have been opportune to hold leadership positions in the country as governors, presidents, ministers, commissioners even as local government chairmen are ill-prepared, satanic, self-centred and are all out to corruptly enrich themselves while the nation continues to wallow in abject poverty and condemnable underdevelopment.

Obasanjo said that many clamouring to be governors to lead the country in one form or the other are only interested in using their offices to enrich themselves and their cronies and then leave the country worse than they met it.

The former President pointed out that most office-seekers in the country would go as far as obtaining loans of billions of naira believing that paying back from the public funds after being elected won’t be a problem.

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 concluded.