Senator Shehu Sani has said privatisation in the country is a systemic way of disposing Nigerians of their collective property and auctioning it to the elite within the corridors of power or fronts for those who are in power.
Sani made this assertion in Kaduna on Wednesday during the Law Week’s Public Lecture 2015 of the Law Students Association of Nigeria (LAWSAN), National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), Kaduna State study centre.
“Privatisation has not been able to help our country and advance us economically. All it has done is to dispossess our collective property and hand it over to a band of parasites that have benefited from Nigerians economic inequity,” he said.
The human rights activist-turned-legislator said that this was highly condemnable.
Among his observations in this regard was that “Unity schools were not established to make money; they were established to strengthen our unity as a nation and to also provide complimentary education service to the states.”
“They were not economic institutions for making money unlike someone like him who is an old-time conservative and a proponent of a mere colonialism capitalist ideas will always advocate that our properties should be sold to private individuals which is very unfortunate,” he said, in a veiled reference to Kaduna State Governor Nasir el-Rufai.
According to him, “If he wants to sell Kaduna schools, he is the governor he can go and do it but Federal Government colleges are not for sale and it is not for moneybags; moneybags should learn to build their own schools”, he said.
Speaking further, he said that most of the companies that were privatised in Nigeria for the past 15 years were either sold to those in government or their friends who were within the corridors of powers, and that was very wrong?
