Atiku Abubakar, the Presidential candidate of the morally bankrupt PDP glibly talks about reclaiming Nigeria.
What is the dictionary meaning of the word " Reclaim"?
It means to retrieve or recover (something previously lost, given, or paid).
It can also mean bringing (wasteland or land formerly under water) under cultivation.
However, some of us know that somebody like Atiku Abubakar is grossly incapable to reclaim Nigeria taking into account his record and antecedence in public office especially when he was Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria between 1999 to 2007.
As Vice President, Atiku Abubakar was appointed the Chairman of the National Council on Privatization.
Nigeria in the 1950s-1990s practiced an economic model that saw a massive investment of the Federal Government into the development of public enterprises and businesses.
However, due to the failure and mismanagement of these public enterprises and businesses, the International Monetary Fund advised the Federal Government as part of a structural adjustment package to privatize these businesses to turn them around.
In 1999, the administration of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo when taking over decided that the privatization of these businesses would be a major plank of its agenda to turn the economy around.
The National Council of Privatization was a body that was established to manage and supervise the privatization of more than five hundred public enterprises and businesses belonging to the Federal Government of Nigeria.
Atiku Abubakar was chosen by President Olusegun Obasanjo to head this very important body.
However, the entire privatization scheme was badly managed, supervised, and indeed bungled, and it woefully failed.
I want to use the defunct Nigeria Airways as an example to illustrate the failure of Atiku Abubakar's leadership of the privatization scheme.
The defunct Nigeria Airways was established by an Act of the Nigeria Parliament passed in 1958.
It was a successor to the defunct West African Airways Corporation (WAAC).
The WAAC was an airline that operated from 1946 to 1958.
It was jointly owned by the governments of Britain's four West African colonies, namely The Gambia, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.
The headquarters of the WAAC
at the Airways House in Ikeja, Nigeria, operated from its hub in Lagos Airport .
It was dissolved on 30 September 1958 and replaced by the defunct Nigeria Airways.
In its heyday in the mid-1970s, Nigerua Airways was well-managed and efficiently run.
The workforce was 2,400 strong and the fleet consisted of two Boeing 707-320Cs, two Boeing 737-200s, three Fokker F28s, five Fokker F27s, and one Piper Aztec, while five F28-2000s were on order.
Nigeria Airways was liquidated by Atiku Abubakar in 2003 and consigned into the dustbin of history.
How can somebody who managed and supervised the death of hundreds of public enterprises and businesses that would have added value to Nigeria's economy, and provided an avenue for the employment of young people today claim, he wants to reclaim Nigeria?
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