By the time the Abacha regime settled down to its own racketeering, many assets had slipped out of our hands.
In one of its infamous cases, that regime sold Nigeria National Shipping Line (NNSL) with its 21 sea-going vessels and all it could account for was the controversy that trailed the sale, not the funds.
We are not interested in the bogus debate that we need to sell national assets to share up our economy because if we sell them today, what do we sell tomorrow, if we have another of the sesonal financial crises?
Obviously the only'national assets' we will have to sell, will be selling our people into slavery. What interest us are not the theoretical postulations or the noise of the market place, but our practical experience; it will indeed be an unwise people who will not learn from their three-decade experience but would rather choose to be bogged down with impotent debates and infantile hypotheses.
The Nigeria Telecommunication Limited (NITEL)"was a money spinner for government. Even at it's low ebb in 2002, it collected a revenue of N49.18billion; that was when the Naira was N125 to dollar. Supposedly to raise foreign exchange, the OBJ administration sold NITEL to bogus company, the lnvestor International London (IIL) for #1.2 billion dollars.
The company paid only 10 percent and this was sourced in Nigeria especially from the First Bank. When this gambit failed, rather than reverse the process, the administration handed NITEL to another questionable group, PENTASCOPE supposedly to privately manage it.
PENTASCOPE did so well that NITEL lines fell from 553,471 to 291,009 in the two years it ran NITEL from March 2003. Also within this period, NITEL revenue fell from N53.41billion to N21 billion.
RPI......................Mission Rekindled.
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