I am bent on privatising NNPC even if it costs my life – Atiku
Techno logy-dr iven economy,from my own layman point of view, is that you cannot get that achieved without introducing technology in your educational policy.it starts from education. So, if you get your education right, you are also going to get your technology right, whether it is the economy, industry, agriculture or whatever, you are going to get it right. And I have always given an example with the university that I founded because we have introduced technology right from kindergarten (because it is a community) to elementary, to junior high, to senior high college; today in a very, very small corner of North East we control more than 50 percent of the internet penetration in Nigeria. This has been confirmed by Google. When they saw the internet penetration in Africa, it was Egypt, South Africa and Nigeria. When they saw Nigeria, they said ‘No, this must be a Nigeria’s scam.we must investigate it.’
They flew all the way to Nigeria; from Lagos, they went to Abuja and their map was showing them where Boko Haram is, but it was Yola. They ended up in Yola, only to find out that our educational system right from kindergarten introduced technology.therefore, the entire students and community are on technology. So,it is fundamental. You have to imbed technology in your education before you can have a technology-driven economy that can spur you to growth.
I am going to just support what His Excellency has said. You can’t talk about technology or using it the way it should if you have not invested in the education side of it. That investment is critical. As a country, we have not invested in the future, that technology future. Unless we do the proper investment, then we can’t talk about that technology future. I think that investment is critical.i agree entirely with his take on that.
– Let me add here, I have always told people that we are more educated than the United Arab Emirate.
We are more populous. One of the ways they try as much as possible to ensure there is minimal corruption is to introduce a technology driven governance.
In other words, they try to eliminate personal contact between members of the public and government officials. Whatever you are applying for in that country, you do it online and you get your approval online.
If the United Arab Emirate can do that, what will stop Nigeria from doing it? If it is introduced here, you will virtually eliminate corruption because that corruption which is being blamed virtually on the public sector will be almost 90 percent reduced.
And if you make it mandatory and compulsory for every public official who refuses to issue an approval, or licence or anything to the private sector or anybody for that matter online, will lose his job. If you have an efficient monitoring system, you would have dealt a blow on corruption. Don’t think we cannot do it. We can do it. Well, I am happy that they did not say I would use it to enrich myself; and that I am also not going to enrich the members of my family but my friends. Are my friends not entitled to be enriched? As long as there is no element of corruption there. And there was none during our time when we privatised the banks; when we privatised institutions of the public sector; I have not heard anybody coming to say that either the president or myself took money to do that. So, the intention of course, to deregulate the economy and giving the private sector the responsibility of driving the economy is to bring about prosperity to the members of the public. So, I don’t consider that a threat or rather a disadvantage to the position we have taken as far as liberalising the economy, empowering the private sector to undertake what they know best to do; and that is to create job, to bring about prosperity. That’s why I strongly support restructuring.i would reduce the size of Federal Government completely, to make sure that I hand over the responsibilities to various components.this is because I am just too impatient to see in my lifetime a Nigeria where poverty and economic downturn are reversed and completely stamped out.
First of all, I want to reply to the study that was referred to. The issue of integrity which they mentioned; integrity is not a measure of capacity. We have someone who claims that he has integrity, but he doesn’t have capacity. The country today is more corrupt than it was yesterday. Fight against corruption is not an economic policy. No country has focused on fighting corruption or has made fight against corruption an economic policy.
If you have an economic policy that is engendering growth, then you can deal with pilfering and all of that.
For me, despite all the talk and claims about, nobody can say this is what indeed he has done. Once the principal person is not corrupt, you reduce corruption by 70 percent. Through legislation and proper application of technology in governance, corruption can be drastically reduced. You can again drastically reduce corruption by reducing the toll gates that are in government. I will give you an example; using education. We have what is called Universal Basic Education (UBE); the Federal Government gives money to this agency; this agency gives to the state government who then gives to the similar agency in the state, who passes it on to the local government and then it goes to schools. All these various toll gates, if you remove them then you achieve a lot, because in Kenya; Rwanda money goes directly from Federal Government to schools.
So, we need to remove the so many toll gates in our system. Like His Excellency has mentioned, if you remove the meeting points between individuals and money, you will remove corruption. If you throw money here, people will pick it; there are lots of meeting points between people and money; it has to be removed through technology. This is not the first policy document I have been involved in producing at the eve of any of the elections that I have participated in.
This is a document that I was personally involved in and I participated in crafting and also even the ideas that are contained therein. For instance, I want to take you back up to 2007; at that point in time, the most contentious issue was the issue of the Niger Delta. I remember I assembled some of the best academicians from Niger Delta. We met in Abuja for two months and we eventually came out with a blueprint for Niger Delta; which at the end of the day I did not have the opportunity to implement, but when the late Umaru Yar’adua became the president I handed over the document to him. It was that document that produced the Niger Delta Ministry, etc. But Umaru Yar’adua was not the one who prepared the document. The same thing in 2011; I remember that at the end of the elections in 2015, the current governor of Ekiti State, Kayode Fayemi came to my office and said, ‘Sir, we don’t have a policy document, we know you have; can you give us your document?’
That policy document was chaired by