Obasanjo’s Mistake Was Failing To Jail Buhari For Looting PTF – Ex-Minister

A former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, has weighed in on the verbal exchange between President Muhammadu Buhari and former President Olusegun Obasanjo over the $16 billion electricity fund allegedly misspent under the latter’s administration.

President Buhari, at the State House on Tuesday, had suggested that the said sum was spent on the power sector under Obasanjo’s administration with no resultant impact in that sector of Nigeria’s economy.

But Fani-Kayode, who served as aviation minister under Obasanjo, said the former president made a mistake of not jailing President Buhari while he was in power.

The former minister claimed that President Buhari looted funds while serving as the head of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) under the military government of late Head of State, General Sani Abacha, in 1995.

“The greatest mistake that President Obasanjo made was not to prosecute and jail President Buhari for looting PTF funds. I saw the report and it was shocking. Billions of dollars had vanished. Obasanjo summoned him and showed him the damning report. Buhari begged like a baby. Sadly Obasanjo let him off the hook,” said Fani-Kayode.

Meanwhile, President Buhari, while hosting members of the Buhari Support Organisation at the Presidential Villa yesterday, had praised Abacha for contributing to the infrastructural development of the country.

“No matter what opinion you have about Abacha, I agreed to work with him and the roads we did from PTF exist from here to Port Harcourt, to Onitsha, to Benin and so on,” Buhari said at the State House.

THE WHISTLER, however, recalls that the $322.5 million recently recovered from the Swiss government by the Buhari administration was a loot of the Abacha regime.