Yar’Adua, Jonathan squandered N10.6trn

By Tony Edike & Chinenye Ozoh ENUGU— FORMER Vice President (Africa) at the World Bank and Minister under former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, yesterday said that both the late President Umaru Yar’Adua and his successor, Goodluck Jonathan’s regimes ‘’squandered’’ $67 billion (about N11 trillion) oil money left in two separate accounts by Obasanjo. Ezekwesili said that the two administrations squandered $45 billion (N7.065 trillion) left in the Foreign Reserve and another $22 billion (about N3.454 trillion) left in the Excess Crude Account, bringing the total amount of money squandered to about $67 billion or N10.619 trillion.

President Goodluck Jonathan and late president, Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar’Adua Ezekwesili spoke while delivering the Convocation Lecture of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, UNN. She noted that Nigerians had lost dignity because of ravaging poverty arising from poor choices of the elite, corruption and lack of investment in education. Recalling that Nigeria had enjoyed five cycles of oil boom since independence, Ezekwesili decried the failure by the leadership to convert oil income to renewable assets through the development of human capital and other sectors through investment in foreign assets as other resource-rich countries did with their oil income. Her words: “The present cycle of boom of the 2010s is, however, much more vexing than the other four that happened in the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s. This is because we are still caught up in it and it is more egregious than the other periods in revealing that we learned absolutely nothing from the previous massive failures.