It took quite a while to arrange this interview. Though the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, had agreed to talk to TheNiche late last year, the scheduling became problematic. But it finally happened. A day after he led a team of top government officials that included Oyo State governor, Seyi Makinde, and Minister of State for Transportation, Gbemisola Saraki, to inspect, for the umpteenth time, the Lagos-Ibadan railway project, he sat down with IKECHUKWU AMAECHI in his Lagos hotel room to talk exclusively on not only the project which has become the signature project of the Buhari administration but also other national issues.
You toured the Lagos-Ibadan corridor of the ongoing Lagos-Kano railway project again this month. To what extent would you say the target is being met?
The target is not being strictly met, I am afraid but it is not only because of the company executing the contract, but some other problems, which stem from the fact that the seaport is congested and the contractors are unable to get their cargoes out of the ports easily and because they cannot get those equipment, they are unable to continue the construction work.
We have roofing materials, we have windows, doors and other materials trapped at the ports right now. Though they are not supposed to import these materials but this is a concessionary loan so it is to help them grow their economy. So, they manufacture there and send to us or we buy from them, whichever way. So, until those things come out, the contractors cannot fix the stations and if they can’t fix the stations, then they cannot complete the project.
You have seen that at least we can go to Ibadan from Agege and we have given them a task which is that by the time we meet again, we want to see that most of those stations are nearing completion, if not completed.
If the Chinese contractors are bringing in all these materials from their home country, then where is the much touted local content element of the project?
There is a lot of local content but that does not mean there will be no imported materials. So, there is also a lot of imported commodities. The quarry or the balast is local, cement, fuel, diesel, etc. Most of the labour, that is the workers, are Nigerians. There is quite a lot of local content and they amount to hundreds of billions of naira, don’t forget but there are other things that are imported like the iron, all the metals used on the track, we import them. We have some foreigners who are also part of the workforce, particularly the engineering crew.
Aside the problems posed by the congestion at the ports, are there other issues?
Yes, there are. The constraints are hugely on the way to the seaport. The contract is split into two. The first part is Ebute-Meta to Ibadan and the second contract is from Ebute-Meta to the seaport and we are encountering huge problems with that. We had to demolish flyovers and rebuild. We have to deal with pipes. In fact, at the seaport, there are pipes we couldn’t remove so we have to devise a technology that will help us deal with the situation. What they have not been able to explain to me is if we need to fix, replace or repair the pipes, what do we do? They need to tell us what to do. I have not asked that question and I hope I don’t forget to ask when next we meet on February 20.
By middle of February, we would have gone very far from Ebute-Meta to Ibadan. I will mount pressure on the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) to press their vessels to discharge their cargoes. If that happens, we will be able to complete some of the minor stations.
Are you considering launching the project in phases?
No, that is not possible. You can put coaches and locomotive on the tracks just to carry passengers free of charge until the project is completed but you can’t say we have finished Ebute-Meta to Ibadan and invite the president to come and launch that. No! People, even you as a journalist, you will be among those who will write to ask what about Ebute-Meta to Apapa? You will ask if we are politicizing the project. It is not possible. Even the president won’t accept to come.
The railway project seems to have become the poster project of this administration. What informed the level of attention the government is giving to it?
Two reasons. That is the directive of the president and he is funding it accordingly. The second reason is that it is a social service that will boost the economy. It will create employment. It will enhance manufacturing. Look at the basic problems that manufacturers face in Nigeria – logistics, which is transportation, power and capital. It will at least go a long way in solving the problems of those who do business between Lagos and Ibadan in terms of logistics. It will create industries around the corridors of the railways because we will have easy form of transportation.
But there is the issue of cost. What do you say to people who insist that it is costing much higher to execute these railway projects in Nigeria than in other countries, even in the continent?
Why don’t they do a comparative analysis first before they can say that? Lagos to Calabar which passes through Port Harcourt is about $5 million per kilometre and it is mostly on bridges between Benin and Port Harcourt. Kaduna to Abuja is about $4 million. They should do comparative analysis and see how much it costs elsewhere. I don’t think they are right.
Would you say the Abuja-Kaduna railway project which is now in operation is fully serving the purpose for which it was built?
No, it is not. In terms of passengers yes, but that is not the only reason for the project. It was also supposed to serve the movement of cargoes and we are not seeing the cargoes yet. That is not because we don’t have the wagons to carry cargoes but because there are no cargoes to carry. And why don’t we have cargoes to carry? It is because there is no production going on between Kaduna and Abuja and even if there is, what is produced is consumed locally because the market is there.
Some Nigerians are not too comfortable that these projects are highly skewed in favour of the North and South West with the South South, your geo-political zone, and most especially South East utterly left out. What could be the reason?
The problem we all have in Nigeria is that we always break this country into components. Why don’t we agree that first and foremost we are a nation? Whatever services we provide between Lagos and Kano is because of the quantity of cargo to be moved. Will you leave Lagos to Kano which has about 30 million tonnes of cargo per year and do Port Harcourt to Maiduguri which has about 11 million tonnes per year? We have not even determined how much cargo is between Lagos and Calabar. We have not.
But again, people are not considering the cost component of the project which is huge.
For the Port Harcourt to Maiduguri project, we are looking at $11 to $14 billion, the Lagos to Calabar will cost $11.1 billion. Where is the money? Are we that rich? I have said before that we are not a rich nation. The 2020 budget is the highest we have ever had as a nation and it is about $30 billion (N10 trillion). When we say N10 trillion, people will be screaming huge budget but nearly 80 per cent of it is recurrent expenditure. Don’t forget that. Don’t also forget that our 2020 budget is what some companies in the U.S., China and even Europe spend annually as their budget. If you see the turnover of RCC, you will scream or even CCECC, you will pity Nigeria. Their turnover is bigger than what we are doing here. So you are awarding contract to a company whose turnover is bigger than yours as a country, why do you think they won’t disrespect you? Because the managing director will be looking at you and saying, what is this man talking about? He will be asking himself that the whole of your country is managing $30 billion while he is managing more than that as the MD of his company. How will you feel?
We simply don’t have the money but we are so arrogant about our size but that population has no capacity to buy. We must put that capacity in their hands. That is when the population becomes relevant. To put that capacity we must grow our economy by creating employment and you can’t create employment without manufacturing. Because it is when you manufacture that you sell and when you sell and pay salaries, people buy. And when people buy, they create more capacity in the economy. It is simple. There is no magic. It is simple arithmetic, not complex at all. That is the same story of American economy, Chinese economy. That is why China is exporting because their economy is saturated. They have the capacity to buy. Their citizens are employed. So, they are proud of their 1.4 billion population. That is why people are saying they have a closed economy because they are not letting you in. But here, it is a different story.
Yet, the government insists that the economy is improving. Is that not a contradiction?
There is no contradiction. Before we were importing virtually everything we eat. But today, it is not so. The rice we eat is produced locally. Even if you say we are still importing but the quantity has reduced drastically. What you see now are smuggled in. We used to import eggs from South Africa. We are no longer importing eggs. We used to import chicken. Just look at those things.
What of the jobs we have created. Nobody is assessing this government the way it should be assessed. People are assessing it based on the emotion whether they like Buhari or not, whether Buhari talks or not, whether he cares or not, whether he speaks to them or not. That is not how to assess a government. Assess what we met when we came. Assess the fact that we were barely few months into the administration when we went into a recession and in less than one year we came out of the recession. What we said was that put the money in the hands of Nigerians and we will come out of the recession in one year. World Bank and IMF said three years but we came out in one year. They only thing they are telling us now is that it is shaky. That if we are not careful we will go back into recession but we have done three years and we have not gone back. And there are countries that slipped into recession with us – Brazil, South Africa, and it took them three years to come out. Yet, you people do not attribute brilliance to us.
We are fixing roads, power, before we came, power was bad. We know we have not hit the actual result Nigerians are expecting but we have left where we were before. Hunger is making us to under-appreciate what we have done.
But despite all these achievements, unemployment is getting worse, not better.
But we are creating employment. It is not as bad as it was before now. You are misled by the rent economy we had before. The whole country is misled by that. What is rent economy? You came to see Minister Amaechi for instance who has stolen money and by the time you are leaving, he gives you some that will last you for some time. So, in those days if you come and a minister gives you N10 million, you hail him but you don’t ask where he got the money from. Right now, my salary is not up to N12 million a year. My salary is N960,000 monthly. So, when you come and a minister gives you N12 million, his salary in a year and you go home and start building a house, you don’t realise that you are helping to deplete our reserves because the money is stolen from the public till. But it is shared and it trickles down but there is no production.
The difference between what we are doing now and what we used to do before is that because there is no money and even if the money is available, it has been locked in so that you can only get the money you are entitled to, which means you work for what you get. So, for the first time, Nigerians are working for what they are getting. And because of that, those who don’t have employment can be easily identified. Before, you can’t identify them easily because they were actually “employed” because someone gives them money for doing nothing. But what you don’t realise is that that money is stolen. It is like what my people say about what the monkeys do when they are cutting trees in the daytime, they will be jumping, dancing and celebrating. But in the night, they will suddenly realise that there will be no house to sleep. That is when the monkeys realise that they should not have been celebrating when people were cutting down the trees.
So, it is a change in the style of leadership and that style makes it more responsible for Nigerians to value money. Nigerians now value money. You can’t just walk into anybody’s house now and he gives you N10 million, N50 million, N1 million because he does not have it. He attaches importance to how do I feed, how do I pay my children’s school fees? So, you should praise us for being a responsible government.
Do you sincerely believe that corruption is reduced?
Of course, it is reduced. The impunity with which people were stealing before is not the same as today. We didn’t introduce anything new. TSA was an idea of President Goodluck Jonathan. But he did not implement it. Cashless policy was there before we came. We just improved on it and people are now afraid to go to the bank and put money because you can now track where the money came from. There is now value to life. You don’t like that? You want to continue with the rent culture? No, because we were getting to a point where Nigeria was going to implode.
When we came, they were borrowing money to pay salaries. It was that bad. No country was ready to lend to us anymore and the local economy could not lend to us anymore.
But we are still borrowing. In fact, this government is said to have borrowed more in four years than PDP borrowed in 16 years.
We are borrowing mostly for capital projects. The few occasions we have borrowed for recurrent expenditure is because of the pressure on oil price. That is why we are working extremely hard to diversify the economy and that informs the emphasis on infrastructure so that we don’t depend on a chaotic commodity like oil that you are not sure of and you don’t control. You are at the mercy of foreign powers.
The ministry of transportation goes way beyond the railway projects. What are you doing to ensure that the other departments don’t suffer?
Nothing is suffering. Don’t forget we have a minister of state who is helping to manage things. But that is not even the issue. Don’t forget that we are the first to construct a deep seaport in Nigeria – the Lekki Deep Seaport – which is ongoing. What we have before are river ports. The president has approved a new seaport in Warri and Bonny. We are waiting for approval to construct a railway from Bonny to the South East.
How do you feel when people say Rotimi Amaechi is the poster boy or if you like the poster minister of the Buhari administration because of the work you are doing?
My colleagues are the same. They are all doing well, they are all poster ministers. It only depends on how much you get. If the president diverts attention today from the ministry, then the story will be different. The luck we have is that the president’s attention is on infrastructure.
But the Ministry of Transportation is not the only one dealing with infrastructure. So, why are we not seeing the level of activity in other ministries that equally deal with infrastructure like the Ministry of Works and Housing?
It is the same. The only difference between that ministry and mine is that the Minister of Works and Housing, Babatubde Fashola, is getting money locally and that is not enough.
He has got a few loans here and there but that is not enough. But the Ministry of Transportation is heavily funded from outside by the Chinese government. I am sure that if Fashola gets the kind of funds we have, the story will be much different. We have got $2 billion to fix Lagos-Ibadan rail line. That is N720 billion. I am not sure he has got that. He is actually looking for N1 trillion to complete his job – all the roads abandoned in Nigeria. We got $1 billion, that is N360 billion, for Kaduna-Abuja project. If you add that to the N720 billion, that is well over N1 trillion.
We have got an approval to do a $5.3 billion rail project from Ibadan to Kano. How many of my colleagues are getting that? Everybody is a poster minister depending on how much you get.
These jumbo loans are scary. Are you confident that at the end of the day, these projects will be able to pay off these loans when they fully become operational?
There is nowhere that happens. It has never happened anywhere.
Is it just a social project for national prestige?
It is a social project but it grows the economy. So, it is the ripple effect that is important. It just grows the economy. But there is no way you can say if you just put trains on the Lagos-Ibadan rail tracks, then you will pay off the $2 billion loan. We will look for other sources of revenue and pay back as the loans fall due but the railway will contribute. We want to be frugal with the management of the railways and see how much we can pay back.
So, what do you say to Nigerians who are afraid that at the rate we are borrowing, the country is falling back into a debt trap?
We have explained to the country that we don’t have a debt crisis. We are not over-borrowed as a country. The problem we have is revenue, tax revenue. People don’t want to pay taxes.
The next issue is that oil price has crashed and we are not able to get enough revenue from sale of crude oil. We have revenue crisis and that is serious. That is why the president is harping on the diversification of the economy. The moment you are dependent on oil revenue, you will not be able to showcase how much expertise you have in the management of our national assets.
But now that there is crisis, that is when you know who is a good economist. And that is why Buhari has proved to be a better economist than most people are prepared to give him credit for. Look at what he has done. Most of the food you eat now is local. It is no longer Uncle Ben’s rice. We no longer import rice from Thailand or London. It is now Ofada rice, Lake Rice. There is one from Ebonyi and it is creating employment because a lot of people are now farming rice. Most of them farm rice and sell to the government. The ‘ke’ in Lake Rice is Kebbi. The Kebbi government mills it because they have the facilities to do that. We are building facilities all over the place now. The Federal Government gave out a lot of rice mills.
What do you say to Nigerians who are lamenting and rightly so that things are terribly difficult for them?
You have reached a conclusion already. By saying rightly so, it means you are part of those who are saying that. But people complaining are not lying. That is true. But we didn’t say it won’t be difficult. We said we will come out of the kind of economy we had. It will no longer be a rent economy. We want an economy that creates jobs. It won’t be a one-day thing. You just can’t eat an egg without breaking the shell. It will be painful at the beginning but as you go on, you will see that the pain will begin to reduce.
And the best way to know when the pain is reducing is when you start creating employment. The key to the success of Nigeria’s economy is employment because when you create employment, you put money in the hands of the poor, who in turn will buy the products that you are producing. But you cannot create employment if you don’t have production. We don’t want big men who take government money and go about buying cars not made in Nigeria. So, we are supporting those industries that will help us create employment. We are looking at the steel industry, transport industry. You can see how much investment that has been put in there. The Minister of Works and Housing is doing quite a lot in terms of rehabilitating old roads and you can see the new ones being built. But we can’t finish all because we don’t have the money. If you give Fashola N1 trillion today, he will go far, very far. We are doing a lot in the area of power but until you have light in your house, you won’t know we are doing a lot. We will get there.
