Retrieve $1b Loot From Abacha Family, Obasanjo Urges Jonathan

FORMER President Olusegun Obasanjo wants President Goodluck Jonathan to do what he couldn’t do, by recovering the late Gen. Sani Abacha’s loot He acknowledged that recovering the funds was a hard task that he could not accomplish while he was in office, but he wants President Jonathan to do it. There is at least $1 bil-lion Abacha loot still lying in Swiss accounts, Obasanjo said.

Effort to retrieve funds stashed in foreign countries by Nigerians was not an easy task for him. Obasanjo spoke yesterday at a Public Lecture or ganized by the Members of the Word of Life Bible Church, Warri, Delta State, in honour of the founder of the Church, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor as he mark his 40 years in the Ministry.

The theme of the public lecture was “The Nigeria of My Dreams:Towards the Consolidation of National Unity.”

According to Obasanjo, the issue was not easy for him while he was in office as all entreaties made to unravel all those involved in looting the country'-fund did not yield the de sired result.

He said that if President Jonathan works harder, Nigeria can still get at least one billion dollars from the late Abacha’s family alone.

He said: “When I was President, I called the World Bank. I said, please give me the list of the amount  that  have  been stolen, where they are kept and who the beneficiaries are”.

“I never got anything from the World Bank thereafter. We have on our own investigated and recovered some.

“From Abacha family alone, we recovered mil-lions of dollars. I got 1.2 billion Dollars (100million Pounds) and the lawyer in Switzerland (he is still there) who was doing it for us when I was leaving, said that if we work harder, there was still at least one billion dollars that we can get from that family alone”.

Taking a swipe on the World Bank, the three-time Commander-in-Chief, said "It is the same World Bank who came to us and said 'Structural Adjustment Pro-gramme was good.' Of course, it only made us poorer.

“We said SAP would make us poorer, they said 'No.' We went for it and we are poorer today. And then they came to tell us that we did not do it the way they wanted us to do it. Many years later, they accepted that we were right and they were wrong."

Besides, he queried the inability of anti-graft bod-ies in the country to bite as it happened during his regime.

“I am not saying we are not corrupt. As a nation, we are corrupt, but are we doing something about it? I once heard people, during my regime, saying that the fear of Ribadu was the be-ginning of wisdom but today, there is no longer any wisdom," he averred.

Obasanjo also spoke on insurgency of the Boko Haram sect in the country. He said that Boko haram is an ill wind that blows no-body any good.

He urged the Federal Government to look at the best ways the problem of Boko Haram could be permanently solved. He said: “Whichever way, don’t leave any problem that is bad unattended”.

“If you say you don’t want a strong leader who can have all the characteristics of a leader, then you have a weak leader and the rest of the problem is yours.”

He said he decided to take some drastic steps dur-ing the time he was the President when there were problems in some part of the country to save the country from disintegrating even though some people blamed him for taking such actions.

He, however, charged Nigerians to stand up and work for the unity of this country.
Obasanjo, who acknowledged that leadership remains the biggest problem of Nigeria, said that it will remain so except the elec-torates decide to change the pendulum by deciding who leads them or not.

He said that doing that is the beauty of democracy.

He enumerated the characteristics of leadership to include courage, knowledge, doggedness, fairness, justice and fear of God.

According to him, any leader who does not have the fear of God should not be followed.

“Within ourselves, let us see what we can do for ourselves. I didn’t say that we are not corrupt but let us do something.

“Every country must design a way on which they must strengthen their unity. I don’t see anything intrinsically wrong with Federal Character, the problem is how we have applied it”, he added.

“The beauty of democracy is that you have power as electorates. Every elected leader wants to have opportunity to come again and if you say to him you will not come, he will not come.

“Leaders’ failure is because we are shying away from our responsibilities. You have to stand out for something.

“We have a saying in my place that if you say some-thing you will die, if you don’t say you will die. Say something and die.”

The former president said he sees Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor’s forty (40) years in the ministry like the biblical Moses preparation towards the liberation of the Israelites in the hands of their Egyptian slave masters.

He charged him no to re-lent in his advocacy for what is right, saying “I pray that those flocks who love you and those of your friends who believe in you will be with you all along the way.”

Speaking, the guest speaker, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi lampooned the political elite, who held sway in early post independence era, blaming them for not making efforts to "reach a broad consensus on the fundamental values that should be the overriding principles of governance in order to make life more abundant for all, cater for the poor, increase opportunities for all, provide safety net for the widow and the orphan and reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, between the south and the north and between the haves and the have notes," which, he said if done, would have laid a solid foundation for the stability of the nation.

According to the diplomat, leaders after leaders have refused to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors thereby trivializing public offices.

Source: Compass