Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo again, on Monday, lashed out at the administration of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, saying it was mirred in grand corruption and impunity.<\/p>\n
Osinbajo said he was taken aback, on assumption of office, at the kind of grand corruption that took place under the previous government.<\/p>\n
The VP said, for instance, he was shocked to find that in one day $292m (about N70bn) was moved out from the Central Bank of Nigeria, \u201cwithout any contract or any real explanation\u201d.<\/p>\n
According to him, that dollar haul from the CBN left the apex bank dollar broke for two weeks.<\/p>\n
He said it was unimaginable that despite\u00a0earning $381bn from crude sale between 2010 and 2014 \u2013 the highest that the country had ever earned \u2013 the nation\u2019s external reserves fell to $30bn by 2014 and the Jonathan administration left behind a debt of $63.806bn.<\/span><\/p>\n Osinbajo said this on Monday in Lagos in a lecture titled, \u201cRestructuring and the Nigerian federation,\u201d which he delivered as part activities marking the 40th<\/sup>\u00a0anniversary of Association of Friends.<\/span><\/p>\n He noted that between 2010 and 2015, Nigeria\u2019s debt jumped from $35,093.10bn to $63,806.53bn.<\/span><\/p>\n He said,\u00a0<\/span>\u201cWhat do these figures show? They show that when oil prices were at the highest between 2010 and 2014 the government was borrowing heavily.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cFrom 2010 to 2014, debts moved from $35bn to $63bn. When we assumed office in 2015, the debt that the previous government left was $63bn.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>\u201cToday, three and half years later,\u00a0 the debt is $73bn.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThere are two reasons why despite high earnings we are poorer \u2013 the first is grand corruption and mismanagement of resources. And there is a difference between grand corruption and ordinary corruption.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cGrand corruption is directly stealing from the CBN, directly taking money from the treasury without any contract, no pretences; there\u2019s no caution, you just take money. That was going on and I will give you several examples.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>\u201cWhen I got to the office as Vice-President, I couldn\u2019t believe it. In one day, $292m was signed out and it disappeared. After that period, for two weeks, the Central Bank of Nigeria did not have cash dollar \u2013 $292m without any real explanation! We later discovered what became of the money.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>\u201cOn another occasion, N60bn was moved out ostensibly for security purposes; but we know what happened.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhen you have a corrupt government, large sums of money which can be used for development is simply taken. If you are the President of Nigeria, you can literally say, \u2018Go and bring money\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>\u201cLook at a sum of N60bn; when someone can take N60bn; and $292m, that\u2019s almost N70bn. Today, our TraderMoni scheme is costing us N20bn, where we\u2019re giving to petty traders a loan of N10,000 and when they pay back, we give them N15,000 and when they pay back, we give them, N20,000. But somebody will take $292m, almost N70bn. If you have N70bn, you will solve the problem of seven million of those petty traders. That\u2019s the kind of thing we are talking about and the kind of contrast that we\u2019re trying to draw.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo again, on Monday, lashed out at the administration of ex-President Goodluck Jonathan, saying it was mirred in grand corruption and impunity. Osinbajo said he was taken aback, on assumption of office, at the kind of grand corruption that took place under the previous government. The VP said, for instance, he was shocked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2607,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1912,313,1911,547],"class_list":["post-2606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-central-bank","tag-goodluck-jonathan","tag-vice-president","tag-yemi-osinbajo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2606"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2606"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2608,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2606\/revisions\/2608"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}