Build 6-lane expressway from Lagos to Kano, name it Abacha Loot Highway – Rep

Honourable Salam Bamidele has said that there is no end to what the Federal Government can do with the Abacha loot, this is just as he suggested that government could decide to build a six-lane express road from Lagos to Kano and call it “Abacha Loot Highway.”

The Osun State Rep member representing Ede North/Ede South/Egbedero/Ejigbo Federal Constituency also lamented the ‘politics’ involved in selecting beneficiaries of social intervention programmes.

In a bare-it-all interview with NAIJA LIVE TV reporters in Abuja, Bamidele said: “I believe strongly that the monies can be better applied in the manner that will make this generation and the generations coming to appreciate the enormity of the damage that was done to the Nigerian economy by those who looted the country and serve as a wake-up call to them to also be on their guard to the kind of person(s) they entrust the nation’s treasury too.

“Monies that come from Abacha loot or any other recovery should be paid into a dedicated account and deployed particularly into the building of specific infrastructures.

“For example, we can decide to build a six-lane express road from Lagos to Kano and call it ‘Abacha loot highway’ or whatever so that children who come in the next 20 years to 30 years will know that it is money looted by somebody that was brought back.

“Where this government got it wrong, to my own mind, was to decide to apply those funds to what is called social intervention programmes,” Bamidele said.

He added that “The process of selecting beneficiaries of some of these things is suspect. There is a lot of politics and other considerations in these things. So, it gives room for people to believe that the funds are being re-looted one way or the other.

“But if you tie them to specific infrastructures, you may want to build a world-class paediatric hospital in Kano and it is going to cost 10 billion naira and then you put it there as part of the plaque of the commissioning, ‘Being a project funded with money recovered from this person.

“But if you get such monies and then you put them into intangibles so to say, it raises a lot of questions and with the kind of money that we have recovered in the last 15-20 years, we should have done a lot in our infrastructures if we had decided that we want to put the money back into specific infrastructural projects.

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