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$48bn looted by Jonathan can complete Nigeria’s rail projects – Amaechi
MINISTER for Transportation, Mr Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi, in this interview, talks about the challenges faced by the President Buhari administration and assures that the tide will turn for Nigerians. He also bares his mind on the issues that made him and former President Goodluck Jonathan part ways. He also tackles the Rivers State governor, Mr Nyesom Wike, over allegations levelled against him (Amaechi) while he was at the helm of affairs in the state. You have been in office as Minister of Transportation for about a year and three months. What are the challenges and what would you consider as your greatest achievements?
I don’t know about achievements but I know about challenges. There are challenges and the greatest challenge is how to get the economy moving the transport sector forward because a huge chunk of the economy depends on the transport sector. Even those who transport crude by pipe lines still need the transport sector and we have all sorts of ideas that we want to implement but basically there are no funds. When I tell people that we met recession, they would say how? Recession does not start in a day. It could not have happened in our first one year in office if the factors were not there before we came in the factors were huge. If you had listened carefully, I said as Chairman of the Governors’ Forum, the first disagreement I had with former President Goodluck Jonathan was on funds that the Presidency couldn’t account for. There wasn’t any specific reason we were fighting other than my insistence on good governance.
First battle with Jonathan I. How much did former President Olusegun Obasanjo leave behind? About $68 billion in the Excess Crude Account, not in the foreign reserves and then we fell into the economic crisis we had in 2008. To be able to battle that economic crisis, the late President Umaru Yar’Adua borrowed quite a lot of money from the Excess Crude Account. He was taking $1 billion every month from the account that was shared by federal, states and local governments to augment the budget and ensure that we didn’t feel the impact of that economic crisis.
We came out of that economic crisis in 2009 or so at a time oil price bounced back to about $110 to $150 and by that time, Yar’Adua had spent the money to $48 billion. So, Jonathan inherited, the Excess Crude Account, inherited an untouched foreign reserves and also inherited increase in price of oil. Amaechi With that money, the railway construction from Lagos to Kano, which contract was awarded at $8.7 billion by the Obasanjo administration, all Jonathan ought have done was to take $8 billion from the $48billion to do the project. Jonathan also awarded the contract for the Lagos-Calabar railway project for $11.9 billion before this government brought it down to $11.1 billion. Let us even go back to $11.9 billion; from that $48 billion, you could still take another $11.9 billion. You would have funded the Lagos-Kano and the Lagos-Calabar railway projects. So, here now as Minister for Transportation, I am battling on how to raise funds from China for these same rail projects, and like I said, they have just released $1.5 billion for the Lagos-Ibadan railway project. The most difficult aspect is the funding and security. Most people don’t know that NIMASA is in charge of water security in the coastal areas and it is huge. The coastal area is essentially the Niger Delta. So, it is a huge problem but we are confronting the challenges and trying to find solution to the problems as we approach them.
