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Edo State Governor, Adams Oshiomhole has cautioned against reported plan to sell some National Assets.
According to the Governor, the nation’s assets must not be sold to raise money and fix the economy.
In an interview with Channels Television, Oshiomhole explained that he believed the nation’s assets should not be traded in a hurry in the name of raising funds for the country.
He raised concerns that the use of the phrase, ‘sale of assets’ was offensive.
“The word itself, selling assets is offensive. But I don’t know the difference between the so called asset selling and privatisation of state’s assets or privatisation of certain sectors where government is clearly inefficient and where it is believed that private sector’s involvement will be more efficient.
“But to talk of auctioning national assets, I don’t have all the details. I am not able to readily understand that but my own position is that we must not panic as a nation and resort to quick fix which over time we might regret.
“As you can see now, we wanted privatisation of power and the government went ahead to privatise the power in a hurried manner and end up transferring the DISCOS to incompetent hands and Nigeria is worse off today in terms of power stability relative to what it was when it was under the government’s control,” the Governor said.
Mr Oshiomole advised the government to consider more viable options of bringing the country out of recession without necessarily mortgaging its future,
“My conclusion as a pragmatic is; don’t hurry, don’t rush into anything take your time to do your calculations and use words that are not offensive, improve on your communication and remove the discuss from jargon to ordinary language so that every Nigeria’s tax-payer, who is a stakeholder and shareholder of Nigeria incorporated, can understand what the issues are,” he advised.
Governor Oshiomhole further urged the government to tread softly, stressing that “we must not panic.
“We didn’t cause this problem, yet we have been voted to fix it and the task of fixing an economy in recession is not overnight”.
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