Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on Monday said it was incredible for former President Goodluck Jonathan to share N150b just two week to the 2015 elections.
Osinbajo who disclosed this at the old banquet hall of the presidential villa, Abuja during the 7th presidential quarterly business forum for private sector stakeholders, described the sharing of the nation’s money as incredible, stressing that it can only happen in Nigeria.
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Hear Osinbajo: “In one single transaction a few weeks to the 2015 elections, sums of a N100 billion and $295 million were just frittered away by a few.
“When you consider that in 2014 as the minister of finance has said that oil price was an average of $110 a barrel and only N99 billion was spent on power, works and housing and when we talk about the economy we talk as if these are normal by every standard.
“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 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.
“I must ask again what was 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.
Osinbajo admitted that the government of President Muhammadu Buhari had not completely dealt with corruption in the country, but he said it had demonstrated enough political will to reverse the situation.
As at the time of filing this report no response yet from the former President Jonathan.
www.sojworld.com © March 20, 2018
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