Opinion

How the Atiku Privatization Plan Benefits You by Kunle Oshobi

Published

2 years ago

December 14, 2022

Eric

During the presidential campaign rally of the PDP held recently in Lagos, the front runner and presidential candidate of the PDP Alhaji Atiku Abubakar reiterated that if he was elected into office, he will privatize all the refineries and make the proceeds of the sales available to fund small and medium scale enterprises as part of his plans to reinvigorate the Nigerian economy. With this move, he will be able to turn assets that have become liabilities and drainpipes on the resources of the country into a pool of funds that will be available to uplift millions of Nigerians out of poverty.

As laudable as the privatization program is, a lot of Nigerians have developed misgivings about it due to politically inspired misinformation and deliberate distortion of facts by those who benefit from the rot in these government-owned enterprises.

The truth is that “government has no business in doing business” and the government’s role is primarily to take care of the security and welfare of the citizens. However, governments all over the world venture into business enterprises for strategic reasons or when certain investments are needed and the private sector doesn’t have the capacity to undertake such investments as was the case with Nigeria when the government built the refineries and many other government-owned enterprises.

As a result of the then weak capacity of our private sector, the federal government justifiably invested over $100 billion in business enterprises between 1970 and 1999. However, owing to the fact that the government is not configured to run business enterprises, most of these enterprises had been run aground before 1999 and had become a major drainpipe on the resources of the federal government.

According to the erstwhile Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) that was put in charge of the privatization program Mallam Nasiru El Rufai, Nigeria was spending (wasting) over N265 billion per annum to supplement none productive public enterprises.

With the sale of the distressed companies, not only was the government able to save billions of Naira being used to support these none productive companies, the government was able to generate revenues from the asset sales which were put into more productive use for the benefit of Nigerians.

At the tail end of the Obasanjo administration in 2007, the government was able to sell the refineries which for years had been operating far below their installed capacity to a consortium of private investors led by Alhaji Aliko Dangote who had committed to injecting the much-needed funds and managerial competencies needed to turn around the fortunes of the refineries. However, the privatization exercise was short-lived as hawks in the succeeding Yar’adua administration who felt that they would be losing a major source of sleaze if the company was left in private hands were able to convince the president to reverse the sale of the refineries.

The Yar’adua administration then promised to revamp the refineries and get them to start producing at full capacity within a couple of years. Sadly, this was never to happen as the output of the refineries that were then between 40 and 60% installed capacity dwindled regressively until a few years ago when they finally stopped production even after government had wasted billions of dollars on “Turn Around Maintenance” exercises in futile attempts to revamp the refineries. Consequently, we now have to depend on imported products for 100% of our fuel needs. For how long do we continue to use good money to chase after bad investments?

To make matters worse, the current administration now spends over N100 billion a year to maintain the refineries that are not producing any fuel.

Realistically speaking, they have become a drainpipe to the country’s resources because instead of being assets generating income and adding value, they have become liabilities through which the government is losing hundreds of billions of Naira every year.

With the Atiku plan to privatize the refineries and other rundown public enterprises, not only will we save Nigeria billions of dollars used in sustaining these liabilities, the government will be unlocking the value in them by allowing the private sector that is more equipped to run these enterprises to take over them, increase the productivity in the economy and create more jobs for the people while government raises billions of dollars from the sale of these enterprises.

By making these funds available to support the private sector along with a number of other proposed policy initiatives of the Atiku plan, the Atiku administration will be able to create 3 million jobs for Nigerians annually while lifting 10 million Nigerians out of poverty every year into the bargain.

This will also have a positive multiplier effect on those of us who are not unemployed or in the poverty trap as the increased economic activity from the millions of Nigerians now getting employed and pulled out of poverty will mean more patronage for our various businesses and our employers, and more tax revenues for government to pay civil servants even better wages.

The trick is to get our assets to start working for us while turning our liabilities into resources. We can thus empower small and medium-scale enterprises and increase productivity within the economy for the benefit of all. These were part of the policies implemented by the Atiku-led National Economic Council which resulted in Nigeria becoming the fastest-growing economy in Africa during the Obasanjo administration.

Fortunately, the man who was in charge of our economy during our golden years of economic growth is presenting himself to us and asking that we give him the opportunity to return us to the days of growth and prosperity for all. Let us follow the man who knows the way.

Kunle Oshobi is a Spokesperson for the Atiku/Okowa Campaign Organization

Opinion

The End of a Political Party

Published

6 hours ago

September 16, 2024

Eric

By Obianuju Kanu-Ogoko

It is deeply alarming and shameful to witness an elected official of an opposition party openly calling for the continuation of President Tinubu’s administration. This blatant betrayal goes against the very essence of democratic opposition and makes a mockery of the values the PDP is supposed to stand for.

Even more concerning is the deafening silence from North Central leadership. This silence comes at a price—For the funneled $3 million to buy off the courts for one of their Leaders’, the NC has compromised integrity, ensuring that any potential challenge is conveniently quashed. Such actions reveal a deeply compromised leadership, one that no longer stands for the people but for personal gain.

When a member of a political party publicly supports the ruling party, it raises the critical question: Who is truly standing for the PDP? When a Minister publicly insulted PDP and said that he is standing with the President, and you did nothing; why won’t others blatantly insult the party? Only under the Watch of this NWC has PDP been so ridiculed to the gutters. Where is the opposition we so desperately need in this time of political crisis? It is a betrayal of trust, of principles and of the party’s very foundation.

The leadership of this party has failed woefully. You have turned the PDP into a laughing stock, a hollow shell of what it once was. No political party with any credibility or integrity will even consider aligning or merging with the PDP at this rate. The decay runs deep and the shame is monumental.

WHAT A DISGRACE!

Opinion

Day Dele Momodu Made Me Live Above My Means

Published

2 weeks ago

September 1, 2024

Eric

By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

These are dangerous days of gross shamelessness in totalitarian Nigeria.
Pathetic flaunting of clannish power is all the rage, and a good number of supposedly modern-day Nigerians have thrown their brains into the primordial ring.

One pathetic character came to me the other day stressing that the only way I can prove to him that I am not an ethnic bigot is to write an article attacking Dele Momodu!

I could not make any head or tail of the bloke’s proposition because I did not understand how ethnic bigotry can come up in an issue concerning Dele Momodu and my poor self.

The dotty guy made the further elaboration that I stand accused of turning into a “philosopher of the right” instead of supporting the government of the day which belongs to the left!

A toast to Karl Marx in presidential jet and presidential yacht!

I nearly expired with laughter as I remembered how one fat kept man who spells his surname as “San” (for Senior Advocate of Nigeria – SAN) wrote a wretched piece on me as an ethnic bigot and compelled one boozy rascal that dubiously studied law in my time at Great Ife to put it on my Facebook wall!

The excited tribesmen of Nigerian democracy and their giddy slaves have been greased to use attack as the first aspect of defence by calling all dissenting voices “ethnic bigots” as balm on their rotted consciences.

The bloke urging me to attack Dele Momodu was saddened when he learnt that I regarded the Ovation publisher as “my brother”!

Even amid the strange doings in Nigeria of the moment I can still count on some famous brothers who have not denied me such as Senator Babafemi Ojudu who privileged me to read his soon-to-be-published memoir as a fellow Guerrilla Journalist, and the lionized actor Richard Mofe-Damijo (RMD) who while on a recent film project in faraway Canada made my professor cousin over there to know that “Uzor is my brother!”

It is now incumbent on me to tell the world of the day that Dele Momodu made me live above my means.

All the court jesters, toadies, fawners, bootlickers and ill-assorted jobbers and hirelings put together can never be renewed with enough palliatives to countermand my respect for Dele Momodu who once told our friend in London who was boasting that he was chased out of Nigeria by General Babangida because of his activism: “Babangida did not chase you out of Nigeria. You found love with an oyinbo woman and followed her to London. Leave Babangida out of the matter!”

Dele Momodu takes his writing seriously, and does let me have a look at his manuscripts – even the one written on his presidential campaign by his campaign manager.

Unlike most Nigerians who are given to half measures, Dele Momodu writes so well and insists on having different fresh eyes to look at his works.

It was a sunny day in Lagos that I got a call from the Ovation publisher that I should stand by to do some work on a biography he was about to publish.

He warned me that I have only one day to do the work, and I replied him that I was raring to go because I love impossible challenges.

The manuscript of the biography hit my email in fast seconds, and before I could say Bob Dee a fat alert burst my spare bank account!

Being a ragged-trousered philanthropist, a la the title of Robert Tressel’s proletarian novel, I protested to Dele that it’s only beer money I needed but, kind and ever rendering soul that he is, he would not hear of it.

I went to Lagos Country Club, Ikeja and sacked my young brother, Vitus Akudinobi, from his office in the club so that I can concentrate fully on the work.

Many phone calls came my way, and I told my friends to go to my divine watering-hole to wait for me there and eat and drink all that they wanted because “money is not my problem!”

More calls came from my guys and their groupies asking for all makes of booze, isiewu, nkwobi and the assorted lots, and I asked them to continue to have a ball in my absence, that I would join them later to pick up the bill!

The many friends of the poor poet were astonished at the new-fangled wealth and confidence of the new member of the idle rich class!

It was a beautiful read that Dele Momodu had on offer, and by late evening I had read the entire book, and done some minor editing here and there.

It was then up to me to conclude the task by doing routine editing – or adding “style” as Tom Sawyer would tell his buddy Huckleberry Finn in the eponymous adventure books of Mark Twain.

I chose the style option, and I was indeed in my elements, enjoying all aspects of the book until it was getting to ten in the night, and my partying friends were frantically calling for my appearance.

I was totally satisfied with my effort such that I felt proud pressing the “Send” button on my laptop for onward transmission to Dele Momodu’s email.

I then rushed to the restaurant where my friends were waiting for me, and I had hardly settled down when one of Dele’s assistants called to say that there were some issues with the script I sent!

I had to perforce reopen up my computer in the bar, and I could not immediately fathom which of the saved copies happened to be the real deal.

One then remembered that there were tell-tale signs when the computer kept warning that I was putting too much on the clipboard or whatever.

It’s such a downer that after feeling so high that one had done the best possible work only to be left with the words of James Hadley Chase in The Sucker Punch: “It’s only when a guy gets full of confidence that he’s wide open for the sucker punch.”
Lesson learnt: keep it simple – even if you have been made to live above your means by Dele Momodu!

To end, how can a wannabe state agent and government apologist, a hired askari, hope to get me to write an article against a brother who has done me no harm whatsoever? Mba!

I admire Dele Momodu immensely for his courage of conviction to tell truth to power.

Opinion

PDP at 26, A Time for Reflection not Celebration

Published

2 weeks ago

September 1, 2024

Eric

By Obianuju Kanu-Ogoko

At 26 years, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) should have been a pillar of strength, a beacon of hope and a testament to the enduring promise of democracy in Nigeria.*

Yet, as we stand at this milestone, it is clear that we have little, if anything, to celebrate. Instead, this anniversary marks a sobering moment of reflection, a time to confront the hard truths that have plagued our journey and to acknowledge the gap between our potential and our reality.

Twenty-six years should have seen us mature into a force for good, a party that consistently upholds the values of integrity, unity and progress for all Nigerians.

But the reality is far from this ideal. Instead of celebrating, we must face the uncomfortable truth: *at 26, the PDP has failed to live up to the promise that once inspired millions.*

We cannot celebrate when our internal divisions have weakened our ability to lead. We cannot celebrate when the very principles that should guide us: justice, fairness and accountability,have been sidelined in favor of personal ambition and short-term gains. We cannot celebrate when the Nigerian people, who once looked to the PDP for leadership, now question our relevance and our commitment to their welfare.

This is not a time for self-congratulation. It is a time for deep introspection and honest assessment. What have we truly achieved? Where did we go wrong? And most importantly, how do we rebuild the trust that has been lost? These are the questions we must ask ourselves, not just as a party, but as individuals who believe in the ideals that the PDP was founded upon.

At 26, we should be at the height of our powers, but instead, we find ourselves at a crossroads. The path forward is not easy, but it is necessary. We must return to our roots, to the values that once made the PDP a symbol of hope and possibility. We must rebuild from within, embracing transparency, unity and a renewed commitment to serving the people of Nigeria.

There is no celebration today, only the recognition that we have a long road ahead. But if we use this moment wisely, if we truly learn from our past mistakes, there is still hope for a future where the PDP can once again stand tall, not just in name, but in action and impact. The journey begins now, not with *fanfare but with resolve.