A diva, but she deserves the epithet ‘Iron Lady’

ON THE sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Cape Town last year, I chaired a book launch with Nigeria’s formidable former and current finance minister, Ngozi OkonjoIweala. She had recently published Reforming the Unreformable, about her time as finance minister of Africa’s largest economy between 2003 and 2006. She had been the architect of the deal to pay off Nigeria’s $30bn debt and led a team of technocratic reformers seeking to tackle corruption and build efficient public and private institutions.

Without any notes, Okonjo-Iweala gave a fluent, inspiring and courageous presentation, breaking down complicated economic concepts in ways that were easy for the audience to understand. She berated Nigeria for its failure to create a system of sound planning and financial management of its oil resources; detailed Herculean efforts to fight vested interests at great personal cost; and described how she had used her impressive international network to achieve Nigeria’s debt deal. It was a virtuoso performance to a South African audience fed with stereotypes about corrupt Nigerian drug traffickers.

My impression of Nigeria’s “Iron Lady” was of an incredibly competent, courageous, and intelligent individual with a sense of public service. But I also had the impression of a diva who was aware of her own importance, enjoyed her celebrity status, and who came across as an aspirant head of state.

The 60-year-old technocrat’s economic credentials are from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she obtained a doctorate.

Okonjo-Iweala grew up in a solidly middleclass Nigerian family, with both parents being professors. Her upbringing was an idyllic one, full of ballet classes and piano lessons, until the civil war of 1967-70 forced her family back east, having lost all their savings. Living on one meal a day, seeing children die, and sleeping on the floor of a bunker were formative experiences that made Okonjo-Iweala determined to succeed, and perhaps contributed to her nearly 30-year exile in graduate school and at the World Bank, where she rose to become vice-president by 2002.

Okonjo-Iweala avoids personal details in Reforming the Unreformable and focuses on her time as finance minister. Despite the technical subject matter, this readable book is devoid of jargon. The story is well told and presents a bird’s-eye view of Nigeria’s chronically underperforming and staggeringly corrupt state. It covers the strategies of Okonjo-Iweala’s economic team; efforts to address the structural constraints to private enterprise through liberalisation, restructuring of the public service, and reform of the trade, tariffs, customs, and banking sectors; the crusade against corruption; the battle to annul Nigeria’s debt; and the lessons learnt from the reform process.

In an impressive example of south-south sharing, Okonjo-Iweala based her reform efforts on Brazil’s experiences, in stark contrast to SA’s obsession with western models. She led her reform team to develop the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), which set out to tackle poor economic management; poor governance and weak public institutions; failure to deliver public services; and a hostile environment for private-sector growth. To increase transparency, OkonjoIweala published details of the funds that state governors and local governments received in national newspapers. Another major achievement was the liberalisation of the antiquated telecommunications sector.

But Okonjo-Iweala’s NEEDS strategy was a top-down plan imposed without proper con- sultation and buy-in from critical civil society actors. These actors are nameless and faceless in her book. Their criticism of NEEDS is never explained. One does not have a sense of serious engagement with these groups. Okonjo-Iweala instead tends to lump all opponents of reform together, sometimes blurring the line between opportunistic vested interests and genuine intellectual opposition. The views of African economists are also absent, and indigenous solutions to deep-seated problems do not seem to have been taken as seriously as external advice.

After serving as a widely respected MD at the World Bank between 2007 and 2011, Okonjo-Iweala returned as Nigeria’s finance minister. But her “second coming” has not proved as messianic as the first. She unsuccessfully ran for president of the World Bank in 2012. Her impeccable integrity of the first term has been increasingly questioned, amid accusations of turning a blind eye to graft to pursue political ambitions. The marquee achievement of her first term — the debt deal — is in danger of being reversed, as Nigeria’s external debt has risen to $9.38bn.

Nigeria’s “Iron Lady”, however, should be credited for her incredible achievement in annulling the country’s external debt and for bringing some sanity to its financial management.

Adebajo is executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution.