The immediate past Minister of Power, Professor Chinedu Nebo has rated incompetence as being worse than corruption, even though he has thrown his weight behind the on-going efforts of the Muhammadu Buhari administration to recover looted funds from corrupt officials who served in previous administrations.
In an exclusive interview
on Sunday in Abuja during the week, Prof Nebo, who is widely reputed for his forthrightness stated that, “I don’t see anything wrong with trying to punish those who have defrauded the country; corruption is horrible, but I also believe that incompetence is worse than corruption”.
He also remarked that a major national dilemma is that, “we have a lot of incompetence around our nation today, and incompetent people being given jobs to do that they cannot do”.
While agreeing with the need to ferret out and punish those who are guilty of corruption, the former vice chancellor of University of Nigeria and Federal University of Technology, Oye-Ekiti, advised the Buhari administration to be more focused in its approach, rather than considering everybody who had served the nation in the past as a crook, maintaining that he would never be ashamed of the services he had rendered to his nation over the years, in different capacities.
“The government should think the future and not the past; spend more energy building the nation than looking at what has happened before, and instead of looking for alibis and excuses”, Professor Nebo advised, as according to him, “we have a broken country, a suffering economy that needs to be fixed, and you don’t fix it by beating about the bush. You fix it by doing proactive things that will get the economy repaired”.
On whether the re-injection of the looted resources into the system would not be part of that economic recovery process, in the face of the dwindling earnings by the government, the former power minister replied that he fully supports the efforts to recover money from people that had betrayed their trust and stolen money from the public. But he maintained, “what I am saying is that we need to do more than that; we have to find creative ways of creating wealth, especially for the younger generation, so that we can get them to be at peace and to love their country”. He decried a situation whereby every day, young Nigerians are making efforts to abandon the country in droves to other places that are even less endowed than Nigeria.
Prof Nebo would rather want the government to embark on creative policies that would keep the employed and busy, and so, save the nation from the types of restiveness that are mainly the result of deprivation. He pointed to Boko Haram, Biafra agitation and militancy as some of the resultant effects of keeping the youth “hungry and angry”.
In reply to the question as to whether he was not ashamed of the performance of some of key actors in the administration he served, Prof Nebo replied that rather than be ashamed of his own performance in governance, he feels that Nigeria should be ashamed that its citizens are running away because they cannot be catered for. “Is it not very worrisome that you go to every embassy, you see a string of Nigerians struggling to go to anywhere else in the world except their own country? I think that is what should make us to be ashamed of ourselves. We need to build our country.”
A very angry Prof Nebo pointed out to our reporter that it is very injurious to the society when the saints are lumped together with the villains in the system, under the guise of the fight against corruption. He said, “I think it is a wonderful thing that the present government is trying to recover from people who have defrauded the country, but sometimes too, the method can also be grievous; as some of these things are being done, some people who have done nothing at all are being embarrassed and to paint everybody black and to give an impression that everybody was a demon can’t be right.”
The former minister who seemed to have been speaking the minds of some of his colleagues who feel that they are being vilified for what is largely believed to be malicious reasons, was visibly angry when he remarked that, “some of us did our best for our country and we have always done that, and to be so vilified at every pronouncement discourages people.”
Professor Chinedu Nebo, whose transformational footprints at Nsukka and Enugu campuses of University of Nigeria still remain as the model, expressed worries that the way the government is currently carrying on has the capacity of discouraging other good Nigerians from putting themselves forward in the service of their country, as according to him, they would be afraid of what their fate would be after serving their nation diligently.
In Professor Nebo’s words,
“I can tell you that it is going to be hard for many worthy sons and daughters of Nigeria to agree to serve this country again”, and drawing attention to the implications on the political plane, he opined that, “it is going to be tough for any African leader to hand over to the opposition because of the way things are happening right now”.
Speaking on the performance of the Jonathan administration in relation to power and energy sector, Prof Nebo, who served as the Minister of Power between 4th February 2013 till the end of the administration in May this year, beat his chest in delight over what he said were the huge investments and good policies that were not allowed to be fully appreciated due to what he said were the activities of vandals and saboteurs, all through the period he superintend the Power ministry.
He said that when President Jonathan came to power, the power situation in the country was in a very low state but that his government did a lot in that sector. According to the accomplished engineer and clergyman, “we did so much in the power sector, as under President Jonathan, the power sector grew a lot, as more capacity was built”.
The former minister remarked that it was unfortunate that Nigerians were not allowed to benefit from these investments due to the unholy activities of saboteurs who were so determined to frustrate all the efforts of government. “But the gravest of my sorrows was the issue of sabotage and vandalism. There were people who decided that Nigerians would never benefit from the efforts of the previous administration,” he remarked sadly.
Continuing, he revealed that: “They fought, busted the (gas) pipes on a regular basis; we left (the) capacity of more than 5,500 megawatts and we could barely keep the capacity of about 4000 to 4500 megawatts, and maximum production; sometimes they brought us down to the level of 2000 something, so on the average, just at about 4,000.
“Yet, we had 6,000 megawatt capacity.”
He further reported that “these people busted the pipes systematically at different places and at places that it was so difficult to fix them. Each time they bust then, the gas companies said they were spending close to N100 million every month, to fix the pipelines. So, the turbines were not getting gas to be fired”.
The former minister, however, revealed that even though the pipelines were sabotaged almost on a daily basis during the Jonathan era, the situation has become different. Shaking his head in disbelief, Nebo remarked to our reporter, “Isn’t it amazing that from the first day the new government came in till today, not a single incident of vandalism has taken place? Only God knows those that decided that Nigeria would not have power. Everybody is now shouting: “we have power, we have power everywhere…, but where did the power come from?”
He added that the present government has added nothing to the power infrastructure and had not even settled down to work, yet they have achieved almost the 5,000 megawatt supply mark, adding that the current improved power situation was because saboteurs no longer bust pipelines.
According to Professor Nebo,
“if you listened to the press conference by the new Power Minister, Babatunde Fashola, you would have heard that exactly what we did were what he said he would continue doing. So, why should anybody be maligning us? If we were that bad, how come they are going to be doing exactly what we were doing? We were on the right track”
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