Minister for Power, Works and Housing Babatunde Fashola was interviewed this morning by Stephen Sackur on the BBC’s Hardtalk programme.
It started well for Fashola as he tried to explain away the dashed hopes of Nigerians following President Muhammadu Buhari’s (s)election victory last year as just a case of “change being a process”.
Watch here:
But Sackur was just warming up the fire. He came well prepared to counter the pat answers that Fashola was used to giving to tricky questions. He questioned the former governor of Lagos State about the security situation in the northeast with humanitarian agencies claiming that 40% of children in the region had acute malnutrition. This they blamed on the Buhari government prosecuting a war against Boko Haram without a strategy and “total neglect and carelessness” on the part of the government. The minister retorted that the previous government was to blame for the insurgency escalating to this level in the first place.
Fashola also repeated the lie that Boko Haram were “a defeated enemy in retreat”. With Sackur seemingly losing patience, he asked Fashola to “address reality” in the country including the new security threat in the Niger Delta.
On power generation, Fashola couldn’t explain away the likely failure of his government to reach its own target of generating 6,000 megawatts.
As Fashola was floundering with power failure, Sackur sensed blood and went for the kill with corruption allegations. He told Fashola, who was trying to reheat the dubious claims about Buhari fighting corruption, that people in the current administration were “carrying on corrupt practices.” Sackur told Fashola straight up: “You are among the guys implicated”.
As Fashola squirmed and sweated on his forehead, he was informed that Nigerians no longer “trust people like you” as there were “serious questions” about him spending 70m naira ($219,000) on a website and 600m naira ($1.8m) on work by a German firm to improve his residence.
Fashola claimed that no one accused him of personally benefiting from corruption. This may be “technically” true like his government’s “technical” defeat of Boko Haram. However, there was a slew of allegations in this documentary that Fashola, as governor of Lagos State, used cronies to award himself inflated contracts.
At this point in the interview, Fashola was relieved that they were running out of time. But there was still enough time for Sackur to contrast Nigeria’s fortunes in terms of foreign investment and oil production with Ivory Coast and Angola.
