Privatisation as political robbery vanguardngr.com vanguardnews
MY friend and comrade, Professor Abubakar Momoh, took a sudden exit two years ago. On Wednesday, the resourceful Lagos State University, LASU, under its Vice-Chancellor, Professor Olanrewaju Adigun Fagbohun, invited me to speak on Momoh. One of my main recollections was the sustained and principled campaign he waged against privatisation.
Today, with the public always racing to the rescue of the private banks, airlines, electricity companies, etcetera, I am not sure we still have strong preachers of the false religion that the private sector is the engine room because it is a knocked engine. Three decades into this gambit with many public companies sold, the proceeds disappearing into private pockets and many of the companies going down, I do not think the hailers of privatisation still have a voice.
The triumvirate then handed over NITEL to a body called PENTASCOPE ostensibly to properly manage and make it more profitable. Handing over NITEL to PENTASCOPE was like inviting a gang of hungry cats to guard fried fish. The company wasted no time sinking its teeth deep into NITEL funds and cleaning out its treasury. PENTASCOPE managed NITEL from March 2003 to February 2005 during which the active NITEL lines fell from 553,471 to 291,000.
The BPE owed salaries, and when the staff protested, it identified the protest leaders, and victimised them, including using punitive transfer and detention in police cells. Finally, the Obasanjo government announced it had found the perfect company to buy NITEL; it turned out to be the Transnational Corporation of Nigeria, TRANSCORP, a contraption hastily put together.
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