Atiku says he travelled to the US to woo American investors who have abandoned Nigeria

FORMER vice president Alhaji Atiku Abubakar has revealed that his trip to the US was part of his business strategy to woo American investors back into Nigeria if he becomes president after the March 13 presidential elections.

Yesterday, Alhaji Abubakar arrived in the US as p[art of a Nigerian entourage which included senate president Senator Bukola Saraki and Senator Ben Bruce-Murray. They have met with several US congressmen and the trip has sparked off a political debate in Nigeria as the former vice president was said to be wanted in the US on corruption charges.

Designed as a public relations exercise by Alhaji Abubakar's Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the trip is being heralded as sign that he is ready to take over as president. Also, the PDP is using it to debunk the claims by the ruling All  Progressives Congress (APC) that there is a warrant out in the US for the arrest of Alhaji Abubakar over his role in the Halliburton bribery case.

Alhaji Abubakar said: "I travelled to the United States of America because I had a mission and my mission is to create the right economic atmosphere for American investments to return to Nigeria at a rate and quantum that we had before the current administration’s policies almost halted the flow of foreign direct investments to Nigeria. My reason for running for the office of president of Nigeria and even for going into public service in the first place is because I believe that Nigeria has what it takes to be the beacon of hope for the black race and a leading nation of reckoning in the international community.

"This has not materialised over the course of the last four years because, as Chinua Achebe prophetically said in his 1983 book, the trouble with Nigeria is the failure of leadership. The current Nigerian administration has allowed our relationship with our long-standing friends and partners to deteriorate and this has had unfortunate consequences for our economy.

"Foreign relations that had been meticulously and delicately built for decades were allowed to deteriorate because the incumbent administration mistook their personal interests as the interest of Nigeria and allowed short term goals to dominate their foreign policies. New friendships should not be made at the cost of old friendships and it is not an either-or situation.

"Right from independence, Nigeria has nurtured a policy of non-alignment as we borrowed from the Lincoln policy of malice toward none and charity for all. Sadly, that policy has suffered major setbacks in the last four years.

"As a leader in business, I am cognisant of the fact that both Western and Oriental nations will be making the transition from fossil fuels to electric powered vehicles and other green energies over the course of the next two decades. This means that Nigeria’s oil has a limited shelf life.

"To be forewarned is to be forearmed and we must, as a nation, begin to make the transition from an oil economy to a modern economy based on manufacturing and value-added agricultural chain. The message I took to the US business community is not a new message, it is only common sense."

He added that in 2014, the African continent as a whole earned $2.4bn from coffee grown and shipped mainly to Europe but Germany alone made $3.8bn from re-exporting Africa’s coffee that year. According to Alhaji Abubakar, situations like these will not stop unless Nigeria and Africa have leadership that thinks business instead of aid and capital instead of loans.

Alhaji Abubakar said: "For this to happen, we need US firms who have divested from Nigeria, to return. We need Procter and Gamble to reopen their $300m Nigerian plant which they shut down last year and we need General Electric to reverse their $2.7bn pullout of Nigeria.

"Nigeria has a lot to offer America via her creative industry and rich mining sectors and I am also eager to find a market in the US for some of the half a million shoes manufactured in Nigeria’s cities of Kano and Aba every day. I am certain that if I am successful in selling this Nigeria to the world, the world will come to Nigeria for business."

However, the Buhari Media Organisation (BMO) has said that specially recruited and heavily paid American lobbyists facilitated the US trip. It added that the trip would not remove the fact that Atiku was indicted by a congressional report that named him in a money laundering case.

BMO chairman Niyi Akinsiju said: “The former vice president’s eventual entry into the country after a 12-year travel ban cannot negate the US Congressional report that named him in one of four notorious cases of money laundering in the world. The 2010 report entitled Keeping foreign corruption out of the US clearly linked the convicted American Congressman Williams Jefferson to Atiku Abubakar who was described as a high-ranking official in Nigeria’s executive branch who had a spouse in Potomac, Maryland, in a bribery scheme meant to influence business contracts with African countries

“It also noted that Atiku’s fourth wife, Jennifer Douglas Abubakar helped her husband bring over $40m in suspect funds into the US including at least $1.7m in bribe payments from Siemens AG, a German corporation and over $38m from little known offshore corporations."