Nigeria’s former president,
Olusegun Obasanjo, took some time off his busy schedule to speak to a PREMIUM
TIMES team at his Abeokuta home about some of the issues he wrote about in his
book, “My Watch”.
The retired army general – in
between joking with his interviewers, and threatening to walk out of the room –
spoke at length about the reasons behind some of the key decisions he took
while in office, his relationship with some key political figures, and the
Halliburton bribery scandal.
Below is excerpt of the first
part of the interview.
PT: Thank you sir for granting
us this opportunity to talk about your book. Some people say it is selling like
hot cake, I don’t know if it is true but that’s what people say. How has it
been? What has been the financial reward from there?
Obasanjo: The book was not
written for financial reward. If it was written for financial reward, now
that…what do you call him… Kashamu had done the silly things he did, I would
have sued him for damages and I would have got damages.
But that’s not what the book was
written for. The book was written for my experience, my understanding, my
knowledge, and what you may call wisdom as a result of all these, to put it for
others to be able to learn or acquire knowledge. That’s one. Two, it was also
written to set the record right. One of the things that people don’t know,
people that I call arm chair presidents is that they don’t know what goes in
before decisions are made or what the man making decisions, what leads him to
making decisions.
Take for instance the decision
on privatising all refineries. I explained that what I met were refineries that
were not working, refineries that were given to an amateur for repairs, for
maintenance, what they call turn around maintenance to the company of Emeka
Offor – Chrome Group. Where has Emeka Offor maintained refineries before? Where
has he? That’s what we met. So the refineries were not working. I called Shell.
I said ‘come and help us, just run the refinery.’ Shell was frank with me.
It said that ‘we make our
money from upstream, downstream is more of a service. Two, your refineries are
small. Port Harcourt is 60,000 barrels a day. Refineries now go 300,000 barrels
a day. Three, your refineries have not been maintained well. Four, we don’t
want to go into the corruption that is entailed in all these’. I said ‘ok, come
and help me run it’. They refused. Now when I then saw people who agreed to
take 51 percent equity in two of the refineries; they did not promise to pay,
they paid 750 million, I was dancing and I said ‘look, this is God sent.’ My
successor came (and) they cancelled it and paid them the money back. Those
refineries today – you won’t get them because they’ve become scrap.