Former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo today expressed expressed his willingness to appear before the Senate panel on Privatization.
He was responding to the series of allegations leveled against him by his former colleague, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida over his performance in office, and those of fomer Director-General of the BPE and minister of FCT, Malam Nasir El-Rufai.
Obasanjo declared that he was ready to show up at any sitting to explain himself on the issue declaring, “anybody who wants me for any event, I’m available.”
Speaking on his role in the privatization of Nigeria Airways, Obasanjo affirmed that he blocked the sale of Nigeria Airways in order to remove the hardship on Nigeria. “I blocked the sale of Nigeria Airways, not that I attempted to block the sale of Nigeria Airways. When I was military head of state, Nigeria Airways had 32 aircrafts, by the time I came back as elected president of Nigeria, Nigeria Airways had only one aircraft.
"...the amount of money we will have to pay if Nigeria Airways was sold, what we would get out of it is less than 10 percent of the debt we have to pay. That will be the debt Nigeria tax payers will have to pay; that will not be the way to run the affairs of this country.
Obasanjo asserted that since he could not run his own affairs that way, “so I opted for liquidation. So, it was bankrupted, it was liquidated; in which case whatever you gain from liquidation which is also a form of sale, it means the burden will be shared by all the creditors and everybody. So, if I owe you 10 dollars and what I sell
when I am liquidated is two. That’s what you get. So, I did not allow normal privatization or sale because it would have put very heavy burden on Nigeria.
He also reacted to the comments by Gen. Babangida who had castigated his administration, particularly on the power situation in the country.
He said he was phoned by someone who directed his attention to the story. "I said I don’t believe it. He said check on all the papers and I said get me all the papers, they got me the papers and I read; it’s a little bit unlike Babangida."
While giving his clarifications on the matter, he said that some of the allegations raised by IBB, “were unfortunately not well thought-out. For instance, he talked about our energy. When I was the military head of state, I built Jebba dam; built Shiroro dam, I prepared the foundation of Egbin plant which President Shagari completed and commissioned. That time the money we were making was not up to the money Babangida was making annually for his eight years and
yet we built two dams.
“Because it was important, you know that power is the driving force for development and for any developing country. But since the building of Egbin power plant, until I came back in 1999 there was not any generating plant for almost 20 years and Babangida spent eight years out of that. Now, he has the audacity to talk about anybody; I think that is unfortunate.”
He went further to highlight some of the power plants projects his administration built as a civilian president, which include, Papalanto and Omotosho, “and others and I started five what they called Independent Power Stations which were stopped for two and a half years. Now, the present administration has started building a new power project at Uyo.
“As a country, Nigeria should be adding nothing less than 1,500 megawatts annually. South Africa with a population of 50 million generates 50,000 mega watts. Nigeria with a population of about 165 million we are not generating, we as at 1999 met 1,500 mega watts before we took it up to 4,000 mega watts. What we started they are now allowing it to go on. I believe if they continue with the programme that we left, In another two years, we will get to 10,000,” he said.
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