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.”
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