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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The Rise and Fall of Okonjo-Iweala
Without doubt the big news last week was the resignation of Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala from President Olusegun Obasanjo’s cabinet. Her resignation on August 3 after barely two months as Minister of Foreign Affairs followed the announcement of her removal as the head of President Obasanjo’s much-acclaimed Economic Team while she was in London on official duty.
For Okonjo-Iweala this removal must have been the final straw. Probably the first was her “demotion” in June from the Ministry of Finance without notice and at a time her star, as the minister that got Nigeria out of its biggest foreign debt, i.e. the Paris Club debt, was at its brightest. The minister reportedly cried over this somewhat pointed slight.
She suffered the second slight barely a month old in her new ministry. Testifying before a Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs last month, she spoke about discovering a sleaze in the ministry on the payment of Nigeria’s membership fees to some foreign organization. A few days after her testimony, she received a slap on the wrist from her boss through the Secretary of the Government of the Federation, Obong Uffot Ekaete. The sleaze she had announced to the Senate with apparent fanfare, the SGF said, was no sleaze at all but a faux pass which was already being rectified long before she moved to the Foreign Affairs Ministry.
Predictably the lady blamed the media for misrepresenting what she told the Senate. But whether the media was blameworthy or not, her rebuke by the SGF could hardly have enhanced her credibility in her new job.
After her removal as head of the president’s economic team last week especially when she was abroad on official duty, it became pretty obvious that there was no longer any love lost between her and the boss. Very wisely she decided to take the cue and take a bow.
In the wake of the minister’s resignation, the media, at least the press, seem to have been kind to her. Most of the newspapers have portrayed her as an innocent victim of palace intrigue and envy. “The political intrigues in the presidency in recent times had become unbearable for her” said a front page story in The Guardian of August 5, for example.
The newspapers have also compared her favourably with her cabinet colleagues especially given her crucial role in getting the Paris Club to cancel her debt to Nigeria, albeit at a cost that many critics, including this writer, have said were rather onerous.
Perhaps Okonjo-Iweala was a victim of palace intrigue. If she was, I am not so sure that she was innocent. Rather she needlessly attracted envy to herself by claiming too much credit for herself for a job which, as I will show presently, was not so well done but which she herself and her spin doctors painted in the most superlative terms.
“I believe,” last Sunday’s Thisday quoted her as saying in her letter of resignation to the president, “we were able to create a strong reform programme and implement this to worldwide acclaim and to the benefit of Nigerians. The results speak for themselves and need not be repeated here.”
First, Okonjo-Iweala was patently wrong to have claimed the original and primary authorship of President Obasanjo’s economic reform programme. Her resignation letter spoke only in collective terms about this authorship. Elsewhere, however, the minister had displayed little or no modesty about her own role in the matter.
Three months ago, she gave a very extensive, and possibly her most definitive, interview to The Daily Independent of London in which she virtually claimed credit for just about every aspect of Obasanjo’s economic reform. She it was, she said, who first persuaded her boss that to move the country forward, he needed an economic team. “I had this idea,” she said, “from Amaury Bier, the former finance minister of Brazil before the Lula government.” I may be wrong but I had always thought the idea of an economic team was that of Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, whose nominees, in any case, formed the majority of the members of the team.
On the authorship of the reform programme, Okonjo-Iweala said, “I put together with my team – Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili on anti-corruption and Mr. Al-Rufi (sic) on public sector issues – a 17 page paper that became the basis of many of the reforms.”
Among her many other claims she also said she got Obasanjo “(to) sign up to an international scheme called Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.” Before she made this claim, I had always thought that the credit for this belonged to Dr. Ezekwesili whose sobriquet has been “Madam Due Process”.
All told that interview, published in the Daily Independent of London of May 16, was a most immodest exercise in self-promotion, an exercise in which the newspaper was an enthusiastic collaborator, gauging alone from the headline it cast for, and its introduction to, the story. “The woman who has power to change Africa,” exclaimed the newspaper in its headline. It then went on to introduce Okonjo-Iweala as “a heroine not just of Nigeria, where she is Finance Minister, but of the entire continent. Her crusade against corruption has put her life at risk.” After that interview, possibly even before, word began to spread in Western circles and gradually at home that the lady was the one to watch in the future of her country’s politics.
This clearly was the kind of self-promotion that could only invite envy, even if the self-promotion was justified, which in Okonjo-Iweala’s case, it wasn’t.
As I said earlier, Okonjo-Iweala’s claim of the original and primary authorship of Obasanjo’s economic reform programme was patently false. As minister of finance she must obviously have played an important role in the formulation of the programme but to claim original and principal authorship was altogether a different thing.
The official document of the programme is the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategies (NEEDS). It is common knowledge that the principal author of that document is Professor Charles Soludo, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and before then the Economic Adviser to the president.
Even then NEEDS itself, no matter what government officials claim, is hardly original thinking. NEEDS, as I have argued repeatedly on these pages, is no more than a fancy acronym for a rehashed version of the so-called Washington Consensus, namely the one-size-fits-all economic prescription imposed on Third-World countries by the trio of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the American Treasury, all three of them based in Washington DC.
Stripped of its fancy acronym and its even more fanciful language, what the NEEDS document seeks to promote is privatization, deregulation, withdrawal of subsidies, rationalization of public sector staff and all such similar stuff that the World Bank and Company always try to impose on developing countries as the cure-all for their poverty and underdevelopment.
As most citizens of poor countries are painfully aware, this supposed cure-all has consistently and persistently failed to work. More than two years after Obasanjo formally launched NEEDS in March 2004, things have only become worse for ordinary Nigerians, not better. Unemployment, the main litmus test of an economy’s performance, has plunged even further down. Only the other day the Federal Government threatened to throw a whopping 33,000 civil servants out of their jobs. It backed down only possibly because of strike threats by the labour unions. Even then it is a matter of time before it still goes ahead.
Not only has unemployment become worse, the rot in the country’s infrastructure – electricity, roads, hospitals, schools, etc – has also deepened. Above all insecurity has become even more pervasive.
Today, NEEDS remains essentially a paper reform that has disrespected its own internal logic and has failed to meet its objectives. For example, to date the government has presented to the National Assembly only a fraction of the executive bills necessary for its proper implementation. Several of those presented, including the crucial Fiscal Responsibility Bill, have either been voted down or are still languishing in the legislative house.
In the circumstance it sounded strange that Okonjo-Iweala could claim in her resignation letter to her boss that the reform programme she has implemented in her three years as minister of finance has received universal acclaim and has benefited Nigerians.
All the same it is a great pity that someone who has laboured so hard to get Nigeria out of its debt trap, as Okonjo-Iweala has, would be treated so shabbily by a government she has served so diligently even if the programmes she sought to implement were unoriginal and wrong-headed. But sad as it is, it seems, to me at least, that the lady was as much a victim of her own efforts at self-promotion as she was a probable victim of political envy by colleagues and probably by even her boss who sees red in the slightest sign in friends and foes alike of any interest in the top job in this country.
Clearly, the big lesson of it all is that no one is immune from the capricious tendency of a president who has demonstrated, in the last seven years at least, that he does not know when to let go.
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