Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo has alleged that the government
of former President Goodluck Jonathan “essentially shared” N150 billion
two weeks to the 2015 polls.
He said while the current
administration with less revenue, has increased capital funding by 400
percent in power, works and housing, defence, transportation,
agricultural sectors, the Jonathan administration with surplus funds,
spent N14 billion on agriculture in 2014, N15 billion on transportation,
and a total of N153 billion on infrastructure in three years.
Osinbajo
said while the government of President Muhammadu Buhari has not
completely dealt with corruption, it has demonstrated enough political
will to reverse the trend.
He spoke on Monday during the 7th
presidential quarterly business forum for private sector stakeholders
which held at the old banquet hall of the presidential villa, Abuja.
The
forum provides a platform for private sector/business leaders and
groups to engage with top government officials such as ministers,
advisers and heads of agencies.
“In one single transaction, a few
weeks to the 2015 elections, sums of N100billion and $295million were
just frittered away by a few,” he said.
“Nobody should talk about
the economy when you have this kind of huge leakages and huge
corruption. Corruption that completely makes nonsense of even what you
are allocating to capital projects.
“We saw from the presentation
of the minister of finance that N14 billion was spent on agriculture in
2014, transportation N15 billion, so the total spent on infrastructure
in those three years were N153 billion and in two weeks before the
elections, N150 billion was essentially shared.
“So, if your total
infrastructure spending is N150 billion and you can share N153 billion,
that is completely incredible. That sort of thing doesn’t happen
anywhere else in the world. And when we are talking about the economy,
we must simply understand that that is the problem.”
The
vice-president added that most Nigerians, for some reasons, do not
discuss the role of corruption in crippling the nation’s economy.
He
said though corruption is not easy to stamp out, if the country sticks
to the policy of ensuring that there is no impunity as far as public
finance is concerned and people are held to account, the economy will
“soar in no time”.
“I must ask again what is wrong with the
Nigerian economy and what do we need to do to correct the flaws. There
are several issues many of which have already been articulated but I
want to talk about what I think is the biggest problem which for some
reason we hardly talk about when discussing our national economy,” he
said.
“This is grand corruption in the public finance space.
Sometimes the way we talk about the Nigerian economy it does appear as
if it is the economy of say Norway or somewhere where all things are
equal. Even when we refer to what has taken place in our economy, we
almost sound as if this is in every sense a very normal business
environment, a very normal public finance environment but that is not
the case.
“I do not think that any consideration about our economy
development can be properly and honestly done without fully analysing
corruption, especially grand corruption in the public finance space. You
see that despite record high levels of oil prices, very little was
invested in infrastructure and a record level of leakages were recorded
in the past few years.
“This is the fundamental issue in our
economy. Corruption affects everything. It affects even judgement as to
what sort of infrastructure to put in place or whether infrastructure
will ever be complete. It is so fundamental that we can’t even think of
our economy without thinking of what to do about it.
“Sometimes
when we talk about our economy, we talk about the fact that we have
relied on single commodity and that is one of the reasons why we are
where we are. Yes, that’s quite true, but the fact is that proceeds from
that single commodity was regularly hijacked consistently by a few.
That is really the problem. If we had spent the proceeds from that
single commodity the way we ought to, we won’t be where we are today.”
TheCable