Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala My Foot

By

Nduka Uzuakpundu

ozieni@yahoo.com

“. . . One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.” ---Thomas Osbert Mordaunt By spitting Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala from her Olympian position as the Minister of Finance, back in June, President Olusegun Obasanjo was said, by the lousy critics of his administration, to have added another feather to his cap as an unrepentant misogynist. By making her yet another recorder setter – as Nigeria’s first female Foreign Affairs Minister – the famous, professional, but worldly Cain, acting unapologetically, like a typical politician, who’s nakedly a bundle of lies, gave the Nigerian womenfolk the erroneous impression that, come 2007, their big sister, Ngozi – whose star and political profile have been inexorably on the rise – would make it to yet another record level: the first female president of Nigeria; the second in Africa, after ex-colleague, Her Excellency, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia.

But assuming that Obasanjo and his political associates meant well towards Okonjo-Iweala, her brief, but brilliant role on the political stage of the country would have been crowned meritoriously thus: FFFP – from Finance to Foreign to the Presidency. But by kicking her out from her most relevant pro-development post, as the captain of the National Economic Management Team, the widower compellingly aggravated the thought of sullenness – that there’s too much of unmitigated ingratitude and unrelieved trappiness in Nigerian politics, especially since the birth of the Fourth Republic.

By that presidential, but unfair, punt against Okonjo-Iweala, Obasanjo would appear to have given a wrong and the self-cutting impression that the Harvard graduate had ceased to be relevant to his cabinet – in spite of peerless and sterling role in pulling the country out of debt peonage. Exploit and dump, isn’t it? Now that the Ogwashi-Ukwu- born finance and development guru has been booted out, the way is visibly clear for the country to embark on yet another binge of reckless and irresponsible borrowing from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Compare that to the unprophesied first coming of sullenness in the persons of the dour duo – Generals Muhammadu Buhari and the late Babatunde Idiagbon.

The political injustice and gender-related maltreatment to which the Obasanjo administration has subjected Okonjo-Iweala is the denouement of massing conclusive evidence that the Nigerian political terrain is no quarters for the diligent, altruistic, if unsmiling, public servant. Because the dour duo – so frighteningly sullen were they that the late Chief Bola Ige – the Cicero of Esa-Oke – had to ask, rather sardonically, why Nigerian leaders don’t smile – wanted to re-make the Nigerian society, via their War Against Indiscipline (WAI), drug peddling, kleptomania by public officers, illegal dealing in the country’s oil sector, and their robust effort to settle the country’s foreign debt, which was owed the World Bank and IMF – a debt that was already unimaginably high by December 31, 1983 – they were kicked out of office. The excuse, in retrospect, was probably that everyone seemed to prefer the routine – as exemplified by the decay of the Second Republic – to the novel, however healthy. And when they had landed safely in political tundra, it was disorderliness, indiscipline, corruption, the weakening of the naira, inflationary spiral, unemployment, a false boom in the banking sector, created by fraudulent elements, who later instigated the collapse of the same banks, with the attendant loss of their customers' savings and excessive political chicanery everywhere. Might the same chart-bursting melodious songs be played back in a post-Okonjo-Iweala era? If you’re the hopelessly optimistic, you may think that there’s no telling yet; that, if experience is any guide, no ounce of altruism – as typified by the thoroughness, professionalism, diligence and abstemiousness – brought into the Nigerian political theatre by the two phases of sullenness – all decidedly for public good – lasts. And just as the snigger by mischievous cynics gave way, inevitably, to an irritatingly prolonged cachinnation – back in August 1985 – when the dour duo were kicked out of office, so is it now –on the eve of 2007 – with the sad and deplorable eclipse of their lonely, female counterpart.

Still, Okonjo-Iweala may have one good cause to cheer up – just as she once told this writer, rather exasperatedly, like a schoolmarm – on the eve of her appointment as the head of Exchequer – inside a crowded lift at the Nicon Hilton Hotel, Abuja: “Cheer up! Do you want to fight somebody here?” – to the extent that she’s left behind a clean record of rare political achievement that might be exceedingly tedious to erase, even in the next ten decades. Bring all the past finance ministers and commissioners that this country has had in the past four decades in a skull session on how better Okonjo-Iweala’s unique and efficacious economic formula, what you may get is an unworkable product. Set up a probe panel – with the malicious intent – that is ever so fixed in Nigerian politics – to damage her international reputation, you’d be crushingly disappointed to get a report of innocence: “This woman’s performance, through out her stay in office, was as bright and spotless as the top-quality, locally-made, white textile for which the industrious and enterprising people of Aniocha are famous. We have found nothing wrong with the disciplined and upright manner she conducted herself in office. We are very much persuaded that her professional approach to public service is worthy emulation by every public servant in this country. Her legacy is one of diligence and transparency, which ought to make her an asset and a source of pride to everyone who wishes this great country well. If given the chance to break the notoriously destructive male monopoly of the post of the president of our enormously endowed country, Okonjo-Iweala could very well exhibit the potential of good leadership and trigger off a new national ethos of purposive administration, which would give every Nigerian an abiding sense of belonging.” The tone and diction of this imagined probe panel report could, in practice, be a lot more dispassionately true as to compellingly disarm any vicious attempt to nail Okonjo-Iwela. The best Exchequer that Nigeria has over had, Okonjo-Iweala came, like the Messiah, to scrub the Augean stable clean. But, like Christ – and one makes this comparison with little intent to cross the vacuous sensibilities of religious fanatics and hypocrites – she’s humiliated and forced to quit the scene. The same Okonjo-Iwela, whose swarm of sires at the chest could appositely be tagged as thieves and conspirators, who, flagitiously, dragged this country into debt. But one’s honest take in the Okonjo-Iweala affair is this: Her exit from office, is part of a well-sculpted grand design to scuttle not only the political fortune of Nigerian women, but also a wicked attempt to asphyxiate the robust progress by the South-South to produce the next president come 2007. With Okonjo-Iweala’s unkind ouster, what happens to the country’s anti-poverty programme? Will there still be transparency and accountability in government? Still, whoever was party to her forced exit has, in Shakespearean parlance, smothered sleep. For the dishonour done Okonjo-Iweala, the sky over Nigeria’s quest for ever so elusive peace, security and stability shall remain sullen. If the decision to eclipse her refulgent and implacably soaring star was, indeed, actuated by malice, those whose construct it was should pray never to face the unswerving and flooring wrath of Ate, soon. Within the distance, let be recognised that "here was an Okonjo-Iweala, when comes another?" *Nduka Uzuakpundu is a Lagos-based journalist.