Nigeria’s former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, has remarked that Africa’s largest nation is a complex state but easily manageable. Obasanjo made the comments on Wednesday at the maiden memorial lecture in honour of the late legal icon, Akintola Williams, themed, ‘Leadership Dynamics: Current Realities and Way Forward,’ organized by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria in Lagos State.
He said, “I always say Nigeria is a complex country, you must understand that, but Nigeria is not a difficult country to manage. You have to be honest with yourself, Nigeria and your God.”
Obasanjo who became the first military ruler to be democratically elected in 1999 and went on to lead the country for 8 years enumerated some of the challenges and notable wins of his second stint in office, including getting the nation a huge foreign debt relief.
When I was there, I did everything I should do for Nigeria, and I can beat my chest and say that.
“I took over the affairs of Nigeria as elected president with ₦3.7 billion in reserves and we were spending ₦3.5 billion to service debt, So, I decided we must seek debt relief, and I went out for it, even though we were the fifth country in all exporting in the world and we got debt relief.
“Not only did we get relief from a quantum debt of ₦3.36 billion, but we also came to a quantum debt of ₦3.6 billion and I left with over ₦25 billion in what we call excess crude, that is, the money we saved from the budget and what we actually received, and we had a reserve of over ₦45 billion,” he said.
The elder statesman also lauded the late Akintola for serving Nigeria with all his will, saying, “He deserves every honour that we can confer posthumously not for what he did for this country but what he did politically, socially and economically.”
In his remarks, the ICAN president, Davidson Alaribe, urged the members of the association to follow in the footsteps of the late legal icon.
“Let us honour him not just with plaques and statues, but through our daily commitment to uphold the standards he set, transforming every challenge into a steppingstone towards excellence,” he noted.
