• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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I am bent on privatising NNPC even if it costs my life – Atiku

Atiku takes swipe at “mafia” NNPC

Last Wednesday, Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president and the presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and his running mate, Peter Obi, a former governor of Anambra State, stormed Lagos. They jointly had an interactive session with the business community in the City of Excellence, the commercial hub of Nigeria. ZEBULON AGOMUO, Editor, was there and now brings excerpts of their thoughts on the issues raised.

How are you going to drive the technology demands of the country? Nigerian government and firms keep investing in building of broad bands, etc, but not doing anything to stimulate demands. How do you intend to go about the technology, at least, to widen the market and increase the number of people who patronise those investments that the country makes in that regard?

Technology-driven economy,from my own layman point of view, is that you cannot get that achieved without introducing technology in your educational policy.It starts from education. So, if you get your education right, you are also going to get your technology right, whether it is the economy, industry, agriculture or whatever, you are going to get it right. And I have always given an example with the university that I founded because we have introduced technology right from kindergarten (because it is a community) to elementary, to junior high, to senior high college; today in a very, very small corner of North East we control more than 50 percent of the internet penetration in Nigeria. This has been confirmed by Google. When they saw the internet penetration in Africa, it was Egypt, South Africa and Nigeria. When they saw Nigeria, they said ‘No, this must be a Nigeria’s scam.We must investigate it.’

They flew all the way to Nigeria; from Lagos, they went to Abuja and their map was showing them where Boko Haram is, but it was Yola. They ended up in Yola, only to find out that our educational system right from kindergarten introduced technology.Therefore, the entire students and community are on technology. So,it is fundamental. You have to imbed technology in your education before you can have a technology-driven economy that can spur you to growth.

(Peter Obi’s contribution)

I am going to just support what His Excellency has said. You can’t talk about technology or using it the way it should if you have not invested in the education side of it. That investment is critical. As a country, we have not invested in the future, that technology future. Unless we do the proper investment, then we can’t talk about that technology future. I think that investment is critical.I agree entirely with his take on that.

(Atiku comes in again) – Let me add here, I have always told people that we are more educated than the United Arab Emirate.

We are more populous. One of the ways they try as much as possible to ensure there is minimal corruption is to introduce a technology driven governance.

In other words, they try to eliminate personal contact between members of the public and government officials. Whatever you are applying for in that country, you do it online and you get your approval online.

If the United Arab Emirate can do that, what will stop Nigeria from doing it? If it is introduced here, you will virtually eliminate corruption because that corruption which is being blamed virtually on the public sector will be almost 90 percent reduced.

And if you make it mandatory and compulsory for every public official who refuses to issue an approval, or licence or anything to the private sector or anybody for that matter online, will lose his job. If you have an efficient monitoring system, you would have dealt a blow on corruption. Don’t think we cannot do it. We can do it.

Still on that corruption; Your Excellency you may have heard about one international research company that did a recent analysis on yourself and your main opponent. They concluded that your opponent has integrity but lacked capacity on economic issues, but they said you were most likely to enrich your friends.What message do you have for the people and your audience? What assurances can you give them on this?

Well, I am happy that they did not say I would use it to enrich myself; and that I am also not going to enrich the members of my family but my friends. Are my friends not entitled to be enriched? As long as there is no element of corruption there. And there was none during our time when we privatised the banks; when we privatised institutions of the public sector; I have not heard anybody coming to say that either the president or myself took money to do that. So, the intention of course, to deregulate the economy and giving the private sector the responsibility of driving the economy is to bring about prosperity to the members of the public. So, I don’t consider that a threat or rather a disadvantage to the position we have taken as far as liberalising the economy, empowering the private sector to undertake what they know best to do; and that is to create job, to bring about prosperity. That’s why I strongly support restructuring.I would reduce the size of Federal Government completely, to make sure that I hand over the responsibilities to various components.This is because I am just too impatient to see in my lifetime a Nigeria where poverty and economic downturn are reversed and completely stamped out.

 (Peter Obi)

First of all, I want to reply to the study that was referred to. The issue of integrity which they mentioned; integrity is not a measure of capacity. We have someone who claims that he has integrity, but he doesn’t have capacity. The country today is more corrupt than it was yesterday. Fight against corruption is not an economic policy. No country has focused on fighting corruption or has made fight against corruption an economic policy.

If you have an economic policy that is engendering growth, then you can deal with pilfering and all of that.

For me, despite all the talk and claims about, nobody can say this is what indeed he has done. Once the principal person is not corrupt, you reduce corruption by 70 percent. Through legislation and proper application of technology in governance, corruption can be drastically reduced. You can again drastically reduce corruption by reducing the toll gates that are in government. I will give you an example; using education. We have what is called Universal Basic Education (UBE); the Federal Government gives money to this agency; this agency gives to the state government who then gives to the similar agency in the state, who passes it on to the local government and then it goes to schools. All these various toll gates, if you remove them then you achieve a lot, because in Kenya; Rwanda money goes directly from Federal Government to schools.

 So, we need to remove the so many toll gates in our system. Like His Excellency has mentioned, if you remove the meeting points between individuals and money, you will remove corruption. If you throw money here, people will pick it; there are lots of meeting points between people and money; it has to be removed through technology.

Anybody who believes in free market, deregulation will agree that your document is a properly put together plan. Now, the question is, how involved were you in the process of putting together the document; is it a document that some consultants came up with; or some members of your party put together that you are not aware of as we have seen before or it is a document that you own and totally subscribed to?

This is not the first policy document I have been involved in producing at the eve of any of the elections that I have participated in.

This is a document that I was personally involved in and I participated in crafting and also even the ideas that are contained therein. For instance, I want to take you back up to 2007; at that point in time, the most contentious issue was the issue of the Niger Delta. I remember I assembled some of the best academicians from Niger Delta. We met in Abuja for two months and we eventually came out with a blueprint for Niger Delta; which at the end of the day I did not have the opportunity to implement, but when the late Umaru Yar’Adua became the president I handed over the document to him. It was that document that produced the Niger Delta Ministry, etc. But Umaru Yar’Adua was not the one who prepared the document. The same thing in 2011; I remember that at the end of the elections in 2015, the current governor of Ekiti State, Kayode Fayemi came to my office and said, ‘Sir, we don’t have a policy document, we know you have; can you give us your document?’

That policy document was chaired by the late Professor Borishade.

I called Borishade and said to him, hand over the document to Kayode and he handed it over to him; but I don’t believe they even read it; because that’s not what they are doing now.

For this document, Dr. Umar is here, we used to meet where they listened to my input, my experience in government and eventually they came out with this document; so, I can assure you that it is my own document.

One thing you should not forget is that we are in this together. I am an employer of labour and have companies because in the last three-and-half years, I have not been able to pay one single kobo as dividend in any of my companies, simply because they are not making profits.

I want your participation as I said because this document is not a final document; I need your input so that together we can implement this document. I believe that most of you will remember that when we were in office, we used to have regular interactive sessions with the business community where we asked them their problems; and their challenges.

When they tell us, we ask them what they want us to do and they recommend; that’s why we achieved up to 70 percent. So, I am one of you and we will continue to interact together even when we are in office so that we can do this thing together.

What is the solution to the infrastructure challenges in the country? It is said that Nigeria is not in a position to borrow extensively to fix the infrastructure problem. What is the solution?

(Peter Obi)

Fixing Nigeria’s infrastructure problem must be private sector-led. All that the government should be involved in is to ensure it provides a guarantee for the private sector to be able to fix the infrastructure. There is no way government will have the capacity to deliver the infrastructure that is needed today.

More so, you can see the level of debt, that debt they claim was supposed to be used for infrastructure. You can see that with over N13 trillion, nobody can see anything. So, we just have to change that by removing the corruption side of it and ensure delivery of it.

Again, I want to go back to the question whether His Excellency was involved in the formulation of this policy document. Not only was he involved, this is the first time a presidential candidate is presenting us with something that we can even go and look at. The present government, it took them three years to come out with ERGP (Economic Recovery and Growth Plan) document, of which if you read any section of that document, including their target, they are not even meeting 20 percent of it.

What would you do to lift the SMEs? It appears that round pegs are being put into square holes to drive the SMEs sub-sector and it has not worked. What is your administration going to do differently to make that sector work and really contribute to the prosperity of the country?

Well, I don’t believe in putting people in jobs they don’t know how to do. That again goes to explain the choice for my vice president. When I was setting up my office; I hired about seven Ph.D holders and then the President called me and said, ‘what are you doing with all these doctor, doctor everywhere?’ I said Sir, I cannot hire anybody that I cannot learn from. And it turned out that my office became the think-tank of that administration. Of course, when we had misunderstanding, he fired all of them and I said to them, don’t worry I will keep all of you. I got them an office in Abuja. I can give you that guarantee that whoever that cannot fit into a job cannot be hired. I don’t have as many relatives as the present president has. I am the only child of my parents. He has children and I have; and of all my children only one of them is working in government; the rest are in the private sector. So, don’t bother yourself.

What are you going to do differently in the petroleum industry (oil and gas sector) of the economy? Operators in that sector will be interested to hear what your plans are for the sector?

Again, let me go back to my experience. When we came into office; I walked up to my boss and said ‘Sir; there are two mafia organisations of the government; one, NNPC, the other one is NEPA. I said unless we dismantle these two mafia organisations we cannot make progress. Let privatise them. The long and short story is that I am committed to privatising NNPC, I have said it. Even if they are going to kill me, I will do it. You might recollect that we started the draft of the petroleum industry bill (PIB) from our own administration. Up till now, they can’t agree to pass it. We are going to do a different thing in that sector. If you have oil in your house, I will tax you to run the Federal Government. Somebody said; ‘this is too radical; we will have problem with some parts of the country’. I said no; nobody is going to be disadvantaged at the end of the day. Privatising NNPC is going to be to our own advantage because you are not going to lose anything. So, I still stand on what I have said. If you come to the issue of electricity – the power sector – it is the same thing. As chairman of privatisation council, I had asked someone to conduct a feasibility study and recommend to me which is the fastest way I can get self-sufficiency in power generation in Nigeria. They came back with the feasibility study on how we should decentralise generation and diversify it.

We could have been self-sufficient in power generation by 2005. It was in 2002 that I gave them the assignment. By 2005, Nigeria would have been OK. The President then preferred a gas policy-driven electricity. I told him it is a long term solution; let’s implement short-to-medium term solution before we go to long term. By now we would have been OK as far as generation of power is concerned. Now, we have come back to the same issue of decentralisation of generation. We don’t have to have a centralised transmission system. When you centralise the entire generation in one location, you also have to upgrade transmission and that is very, very important. So, I still believe we will get there. We will be Ok.

Can you please comment on this big emergency around jobs? We have about 23.1% unemployment; so we have a national emergency on our hand (both economic and socio-political) because of the consequences of large number of unemployed young men. What are your thoughts on this; if voted into power, how does the PDP government hope to reduce unemployment?

(Peter Obi)

If you listened to the comment by His Excellency that he cannot employ a person he cannot learn from; what it means is that you should be willing to learn from somebody who has something interesting to pass across; in this case, nations that are doing better. For me, when it comes to the issue of jobs, and tackling it aggressively, we should look at other nations we can compare ourselves with; study has shown clearly between the BRIC and the MINT nations that we can borrow a leaf from. If they can do what they have done to reach where they are, we can do it. If you look at the best performing nation among the BRIC nations, it is China. How did China solve the problem of unemployment when they have a population of over one billion? Theirs is about seven times Nigeria’s population. If they can solve their unemployment problem; the question is, what did they do? It is very simple. It is about using the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). This particular segment of the economy guarantees today almost about 60 percent of employment in China- 60 percent of their industrial output and 60 percent of their export GDP. China has about 800 million people employed. So when we talk about 60 percent, we are talking about over 500 million which is more than twice Nigeria’s population. What did they do? They supported MSMEs. But here they say they have a programme but they don’t implement it. Today, to show you that it is not working; look at the loans; in Nigeria, 350 companies or persons control 80 percent of the entire loan portfolio. SMEs which is 37 million control 5 percent, only N1billion; if you divide it, each of them is about N27, 000 (twenty seven thousand naira). I think it is the population that you need to pull out of poverty that you need to give more money? I think what we need to do is to change that pattern, and see that this sector controls 50 percent of loan portfolio; because that is what they do in other countries.

If you come to the MINT nations, for instance, in Indonesia today, 90 percent of people employed in Indonesia is MSME.

Let me just give you a final example, for every N1 million you give to a young person, he employs two others. So, imagine if you give 37 million people an average of N1million each, and they employ two others; would you have a problem?