Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has said that late President
Yar’Adua was wrong for cancelling the sale of the Kaduna and Port Harcourt
refineries to a Dangote-led consortium by his administration.
In the
second part of an interview granted a private television station, Channels
TV, monitored by our correspondent on Wednesday, Obasanjo accused
Yar’Adua of sacrificing public interest on the altar of pressure by some people
by cancelling the said contract.
Obasanjo,
while justifying some of the claims he made in his controversial three-volume
autobiography, My Watch, spoke about his efforts to get people
to invest in the oil sector and how the country eventually secured buyers for
two of its four refineries.
He
said, “Eventually Aliko Dangote led a group that paid $750m for the privatization
of two of the refineries – 51 per cent privatization – and my successor
(Yar’Adua) came (in), he turned it down. In fact, he paid back the money
because they (investors) had paid the money.
“And I
went to him; I said ‘look, do you know…? And he said well, he did it because of
pressure. I said ‘pressure?’, so to you what matters is pressure, not what is
in the best interest of Nigerians. I said, but you know it will not work. Then
I said in 10 years, if you continue, you would have spent two times the amount
that these people had paid and it still would not work. And that is what
happened.
“Today
those two refineries, you can never make them work. And if we are going to sell
them, we would be lucky to get $250m out of them because they have become a
huge scrap. Now, why shouldn’t I explain that (in my book)?”
The
former President, who denied leaving out parts that painted him in a bad light
in the book, said he cared less what critics said about him or his book.
Obasanjo
said people were often quick to form opinions about him without taking time to
know him, making reference to a lawyer, Mr. Tunji Braithwaite; and the
Publicity Secretary of the Afenifere, Yinka Odumakin, who had written a
rejoinder to his book. The rejoinder is titled, Watch
the Watcher.
He
said, “When I wrote a book, Braithwaite, it was My
Command, he condemned
my writing the book and they asked, have you read the book? He said ‘No. Once
it is written by Obasanjo, it cannot be a good book. Now what do you say to
that?
“People
have invariably made up their minds (on) what they would do and what they would
say. Why should that worry me? Why should I allow your own opinion, which you
have formed, advertently or inadvertently, and wrongly to worry me? Your
opinion which you have formed because you are being paid to write to castigate
a book that you virtually didn’t read. So, why should I allow that to worry me?
“If I
would read all the criticisms people write about me, most of which are not
true, then I would not have time to do anything really useful and good for
humanity. If I can be sent to jail wrongly, then anybody can do anything to me
wrongly and I could jolly well have been killed wrongly.”
Obasanjo
again took a swipe at Yar’Adua successor, ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, for
rehabilitating the railway system with locomotive engines.
He
said, “Where I made (a) mistake, which I know is (a) mistake, I own up. But the
point is this, in government we need to have all the facts that led to a person
making a particular decision before your criticism can be right. Take the
railway for instance, for what reason should anybody in his right senses in
Nigeria of today believe that rehabilitating the railway system, which was
completed in 1903 to carry three million tonnes of goods, is what we need today?
“There
is no earthly reason by which a rehabilitated railway system of Nigeria today
can serve our purpose, there is no way.”
Obasanjo
said that before he left office as President, his administration had concluded
the design of a modern rail system to cost $8.3bn that would make a trip of
about 120 kilometers in 45 minutes.
He
said, “Part of the design criteria is 150km per hour. You will leave Lagos and
in 45 minutes you will be in Ibadan, and you don’t understand that if we are
going to achieve Vision 20 2020, we will need a first class land, water and air
transportation.
“Your
land transportation can only be railway and road and if you don’t think this
way and don’t think one generation ahead, how can you make progress? Will you
say that a man who wants to rehabilitate the Nigerian railway system of 1903 is
one generation ahead (in his thinking)?”
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