The Vice-President of Nigeria, Prof. 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% 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. .
“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.
