Concerned that Nigeria might be sitting on a keg of gunpowder, former president Olusegun Obasanjo voiced his worry over the restlessness of young people brought on by unemployment.
Obasanjo stated this during an interview with the Financial Times, which was monitored by Channels Television.
He said, “Our youth are restive. And they are restive because they have no skill. They have no empowerment. They have no employment. We are all sitting on a keg of gunpowder. And my prayer is that we will do the right thing before it’s too late,” he warned.
Speaking further, Obasanjo said if Nigeria had not relied on just crude oil production, the economy would have been much better. He described the country’s reliance on crude oil as a “deadly mistake”.
“I believe we made a deadly mistake by putting all our eggs in one basket by relying on oil. We had a very important commodity, gas, but we were flaring it,” he said.
Obasanjo added that Nigeria could have invested more in Agriculture as against crude oil.
“We ignored Agriculture which could have been the centrepiece of our investment.”
The former president went on to say inspite of significant expenditures and renovation efforts, Nigeria’s four refineries have remained abandoned. He told how the International Oil Company rejected his offer to take over the country’s refineries after he convinced them that there was too much corruption in the industry.
“When I was president, I invited shell to come and take equity and run our refineries for us. They refused and said our refineries were not well maintained. We brought amateurs instead of professionals. Then there was too much corruption with the way our refineries were maintained. They didn’t want to get involved in such a mess,’ he said.
“How many times have they told us that the refineries would be fixed, and at what price? Those problems as far as the government refineries are concerned have never gone. They have even increased. And if you have such problems, and the problems have not been removed, then, it means we are not going anywhere.”
He claimed that those benefiting from the lucrative industry of fuel importation are going to make measures to frustrate the Dangote Petroleum Refinery. Obasanjo declared this in the aftermath of charges by the President of the Dangote Group, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, that some ‘mafias’ were making efforts to block the $20bn refinery.
“The former President also denounced the approach taken by President Bola Tinubu to eliminate fuel subsidies, adding that the present administration should have first considered the hardship the subsidy removal could cause people and how to ameliorate the same.
There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. Not just wake up one morning and say you removed the subsidy. Because of inflation, the subsidy that we have removed is not gone. It has come back.” the former President stated.
He concluded that there must be investor confidence in Nigeria, adding, “You have to go from transactional economy to transformational economy.”
The nation’s youth are currently protesting hunger and hardship nationwide under the hashtag #Endbadgovernance. Obasanjo’s statement follows this. Since August 1, young people all throughout the nation have been participating in protests; since then, there have been more and more reports of violence and looting nationwide.
