Former minister of education Dr Oby
Ezekwesili yesterday said the squandering of $45 billion in foreign
reserve account and $22 billion in Excess Crude Account by the two
subsequent administrations after Olusegun Obasanjo’s was a clear proof
of Nigeria’s failure to make the right developmental choices.
Ezekwesili, who stated this while
delivering a convocation lecture of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka,
said Nigerians had lost dignity because of ravaging poverty arising from
poor choices of the elite, corruption and lack of investment in
education.
She recalled that Nigeria had enjoyed
five cycles of oil boom since independence, but bemoaned the failure of
governments to convert oil income to renewable assets through training
of human capital, development of other sectors or investment in foreign
assets as other resource-rich countries did with their oil income.
Ezekwesili, who was a founding
director of Transparency International, also said “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.”
The former minister of solid minerals
lamented the “squandering of the significant sum of $45 billion in
foreign reserve account and another $22 billion in Excess Crude Account
being direct savings from increased earnings from oil that the Obasanjo
administration handed over to the successor government in 2007”.
“Six years after the administration I
served handed over such humongous national wealth to another one most
Nigerians but especially the poor continue to suffer the effects of
failing public health and education systems as well as decrepit
infrastructure and battered institutions”, she said.
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