Preambles
From social media.
My late uncle Engineer Lawrence Ogbeide was Director in charge of Highways Development at the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Works and Housing in the early 90s.
I lived with him briefly in Lagos and we used to travel to Benin City every weekend by road. FMWH managed the toll booths
He used to show me evidence of fraud at those booths but he dared not confront them or reveal who he was because his life would be at risk.
Each ticket was supposed to have 3 other versions for audit purposes.
They sold the first version then sold the others and kept the cash.
They were collecting 3 times the money the government was supposed to get and pocketing it.
It was awkward for me as I knew that FMWH had received a $2 Billion loan to develop the highways but theft was still happening.
I’m asked why tech couldn’t be a solution? He said, build it
At that time, there was nothing like online payments in Nigeria and it was all cash.
I was thinking more of a solution where people could use stored value in cards to pay the same way Valucard was doing it those days.
I realized that there wasn’t going to be widespread adoption.
The problem was inside FMWH and its processes.
There was massive collusion.
My uncle said that the day he confronts them is the day he stops driving on those highways as the cartel is dangerous.
He eventually died in an accident while traveling after the booths were scrapped.
That $2B became part of our external debts but we couldn’t pay back or build more highways because people were stealing us blind.
A lot of the highways that came later were built by the PTF in the Abacha era under Buhari.
As bad as Abacha was FMWH civil servants were worse.
I remember going to an agency to talk about tech in 1999 before OBJ came into power and they were only interested in buying desktop computers.
They wanted me to send a quote. I could build each machine then profitably for 40k Naira and I added a little more to them for 60k.
They called me and asked me if what I was offering to them was fake?
I told them it wasn’t and I could support it.
They showed me invoices they had paid before for 750k per computer.
My jaw dropped.
Tech was a goldmine in government then. Another place to siphon cash.
I never got the computer supply because I was an “Obote Man” coming in to ruin things.
I decided on services and they were putting so much pressure on me to pad invoices.
One day, at 3 am, a guy called my hotel room saying he was from the SSS and told me to leave to save my life.
That week, one of the directors in the agency was assassinated.
I quietly stopped doing government projects after that.
Nigeria is a crime scene. Those who keep bleeding it don’t want progress even though the rest of us desire it. It is a total clusterfuck.
@asemota
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