Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has said the N15.6 trillion Lagos-Calabar Coastal highway project is wasteful and corrupt.
Also, he said the building of a new official residence for Vice President Kashim Shettima at N21 billion was a misplaced priority and a ploy to embezzle public funds.
The former president stated this in chapter six of his new book Nigeria: Past and Future.
Nigeria: Past and Future is the second of the two new books Obasanjo presented to the public to celebrate his 88th birthday last week.
Obasanjo said the President Bola Tinubu administration was into the game of short-changing the over 230 million Nigerians, adding that it would continue because “everything is said to be transactional and the slogan is ‘it is my turn to chop.’’’
The Presidency was yet to respond to these latest criticism of its policies by the former president as at press time.
According to the former President, majority of past presidents, governors, ministers, commissioners even local government chairmen were 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 those aspiring to be governors or to lead the country in one form or the other are only concerned with using their offices to enrich themselves and their cronies and then leave the country worse than they met it.
He accused most office-seekers in the country that they would obtain loans of billions of naira believing that paying back from the public funds after being elected won’t be a problem.
“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.’’
“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!”
The former President called for the 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 suggested.
