Incompetence, worse than corruption - Ex- Minister of Power, Prof Nebo

The immediate past Minister of Power, Professor Chinedu Nebo has rated incompe­tence as being worse than corruption, even though he has thrown his weight behind the on-going efforts of the Muhammadu Buhari admin­istration to recover looted funds from corrupt officials who served in previous ad­ministrations.

 

In an exclusive interview 

 on Sunday in Abuja during the week, Prof Nebo, who is widely reputed for his forth­rightness stated that, “I don’t see anything wrong with try­ing to punish those who have defrauded the country; cor­ruption is horrible, but I also believe that incompetence is worse than corruption”.

 

He also remarked that a major national dilemma is that, “we have a lot of incom­petence around our nation to­day, and incompetent people being given jobs to do that they cannot do”.

While agreeing with the need to ferret out and pun­ish those who are guilty of corruption, the former vice chancellor of University of Nigeria and Federal Univer­sity of Technology, Oye-Ekiti, advised the Buhari adminis­tration to be more focused in its approach, rather than con­sidering everybody who had served the nation in the past as a crook, maintaining that he would never be ashamed of the services he had rendered to his nation over the years, in different capacities.

“The government should think the future and not the past; spend more energy building the nation than look­ing at what has happened be­fore, and instead of looking for alibis and excuses”, Profes­sor Nebo advised, as accord­ing to him, “we have a broken country, a suffering economy that needs to be fixed, and you don’t fix it by beating about the bush. You fix it by doing proactive things that will get the economy repaired”.

On whether the re-injec­tion of the looted resources into the system would not be part of that economic re­covery process, in the face of the dwindling earnings by the government, the former power minister replied that he fully supports the efforts to recover money from people that had betrayed their trust and stolen money from the public. But he maintained, “what I am saying is that we need to do more than that; we have to find creative ways of creating wealth, especially for the younger generation, so that we can get them to be at peace and to love their country”. He decried a situation whereby every day, young Nigerians are making efforts to abandon the country in droves to other places that are even less en­dowed than Nigeria.

 

Prof Nebo would rather want the government to em­bark on creative policies that would keep the employed and busy, and so, save the na­tion from the types of restive­ness that are mainly the result of deprivation. He pointed to Boko Haram, Biafra agitation and militancy as some of the resultant effects of keeping the youth “hungry and angry”.

 

In reply to the question as to whether he was not ashamed of the performance of some of key actors in the administration he served, Prof Nebo replied that rather than be ashamed of his own performance in gover­nance, he feels that Nigeria should be ashamed that its citi­zens are running away because they cannot be catered for. “Is it not very worrisome that you go to every embassy, you see a string of Nigerians struggling to go to anywhere else in the world except their own coun­try? I think that is what should make us to be ashamed of our­selves. We need to build our country.”

 

A very angry Prof Nebo pointed out to our reporter that it is very injurious to the soci­ety when the saints are lumped together with the villains in the system, under the guise of the fight against corruption. He said, “I think it is a wonderful thing that the present govern­ment is trying to recover from people who have defrauded the country, but sometimes too, the method can also be griev­ous; as some of these things are being done, some people who have done nothing at all are being embarrassed and to paint everybody black and to give an impression that ev­erybody was a demon can’t be right.”

 

The former minister who seemed to have been speaking the minds of some of his col­leagues who feel that they are being vilified for what is large­ly believed to be malicious rea­sons, was visibly angry when he remarked that, “some of us did our best for our country and we have always done that, and to be so vilified at every pronouncement discourages people.”

 

Professor Chinedu Nebo, whose transformational foot­prints at Nsukka and Enugu campuses of University of Ni­geria still remain as the model, expressed worries that the way the government is currently carrying on has the capacity of discouraging other good Nigerians from putting them­selves forward in the service of their country, as according to him, they would be afraid of what their fate would be after serving their nation diligently.

In Professor Nebo’s words, 

 “I can tell you that it is going to be hard for many worthy sons and daughters of Nigeria to agree to serve this country again”, and drawing attention to the implications on the po­litical plane, he opined that, “it is going to be tough for any African leader to hand over to the opposition because of the way things are happening right now”.

Speaking on the perfor­mance of the Jonathan admin­istration in relation to power and energy sector, Prof Nebo, who served as the Minister of Power between 4th February 2013 till the end of the admin­istration in May this year, beat his chest in delight over what he said were the huge invest­ments and good policies that were not allowed to be fully appreciated due to what he said were the activities of van­dals and saboteurs, all through the period he superintend the Power ministry.

 

He said that when President Jonathan came to power, the power situation in the country was in a very low state but that his government did a lot in that sector. Accord­ing to the accomplished engi­neer and clergyman, “we did so much in the power sector, as under President Jonathan, the power sector grew a lot, as more capacity was built”.

 

The former minister re­marked that it was unfortu­nate that Nigerians were not allowed to benefit from these investments due to the unho­ly activities of saboteurs who were so determined to frus­trate all the efforts of govern­ment. “But the gravest of my sorrows was the issue of sabo­tage and vandalism. There were people who decided that Nigerians would never benefit from the efforts of the previous administration,” he remarked sadly.

 

Continuing, he revealed that: “They fought, busted the (gas) pipes on a regular basis; we left (the) capacity of more than 5,500 mega­watts and we could barely keep the capacity of about 4000 to 4500 megawatts, and maximum production; sometimes they brought us down to the level of 2000 something, so on the aver­age, just at about 4,000.

“Yet, we had 6,000 mega­watt capacity.”

He further reported that “these people busted the pipes systematically at dif­ferent places and at places that it was so difficult to fix them. Each time they bust then, the gas companies said they were spending close to N100 million every month, to fix the pipelines. So, the turbines were not getting gas to be fired”.

 

The former minister, however, revealed that even though the pipelines were sabotaged almost on a daily basis during the Jonathan era, the situation has be­come different. Shaking his head in disbelief, Nebo remarked to our reporter, “Isn’t it amazing that from the first day the new gov­ernment came in till today, not a single incident of vandalism has taken place? Only God knows those that decided that Nigeria would not have power. Everybody is now shouting: “we have power, we have power ev­erywhere…, but where did the power come from?”

 

He added that the pres­ent government has added nothing to the power infra­structure and had not even settled down to work, yet they have achieved almost the 5,000 megawatt supply mark, adding that the cur­rent improved power situa­tion was because saboteurs no longer bust pipelines.

 

According to Professor Nebo,  

“if you listened to the press conference by the new Power Minister, Baba­tunde Fashola, you would have heard that exactly what we did were what he said he would continue do­ing. So, why should any­body be maligning us? If we were that bad, how come they are going to be doing exactly what we were doing? We were on the right track”