Former Akwa Ibom State governor, Obong Victor Attah, during an interview with The Nation launched into a tirade of how his successor, Godswill Akpabio wasted the resources of the state.

"I am really very disappointed about how the airport project has been done. When my administration started the project…we have seen several other airports come up in states like Delta, Jigawa and a few other states. They are not anything compared to what we did.

"On the issue of the Science Park, we sent 72 young men and women to Canada on IT training in order to make the place the reference point of ICT in addition to having an incubation center along with it. And by the time they were ready to come back, the Park had been abandoned. So now, these first class brains have been employed by international organisations all over the world. Worse than that, when the Ministry of Science and Technology started to build incubation centers, none came to Akwa Ibom State.

"Now let me talk about the Sea Port, which my administration also initiated and have begun work on it. We had acquired the land for the project and my finance person, who interestingly is now the APC governorship candidate had paid as much as $5million to the firm that designed the project. The original fee was $10million, but we could only afford $5million as at the time I left office. I had expected that if the remaining sum had been paid, by now we would have had a sea port that would be fully functional.

"What I was made to understand is that the C of O of the project was handed over to the Ports Authority and nothing more has happened. So, that is the sad story about that project, which contrary to stories being bandied, was not conceived by the government of Godswill Akpabio. My administration conceived that project, designed it and we were ready to take off before we left office.

"Let me talk about the University of Science and Technology, because that was a great innovation in Nigeria. Two years after we were issued license for the university, the National Universities Commission (NUC) asked us why we have not started. We responded that we have started but not by their conventional method. And what we did was to acknowledge the fact that a University of Technology often suffers from lack of capable manpower, including teaching staff.

"So, what we did was to advertise and accepted every Akwa Ibom person in the relevant faculty that has a First Class or Second Class (Upper), as Post Graduate students of the university and send them abroad to get their PhDs or Masters degrees in their various fields and they would come back as Research Fellows and teaching staff of the university. Our plan was that within the two years that they would be away, we would have built all the infrastructures needed in the university. But sadly again, that plan was destroyed, because somebody wanted the university in his backyard and changed it to a conventional university with multi-campus structures, which was not the concept we had in mind.

"I feel so sad that the money the state made in the last eight years, which could have been used to execute life changing projects were frittered away. I have said this before and I would say it again. The total amount of money we got in my entire eight years in office was N542 billion and yet, I did not leave any debt by the time I left office.

"I once drew the attention of Akwa Ibom people that in one particular year, the State House of Assembly had passed a budget of over N520 billion, which was almost what I got for a whole eight years. The immediate past government received well over three trillion naira and yet left a debt of over N500 billion.

Read full interview here