Scams beset not only big projects like the ones described in chapter 5 but also the day-to-day expenses and payments of the Nigerian government. One of my top priorities when I became Finance Minister again in 2011 was to manage the recurrent budget (the costs of operating the government), which I heard had become so large that it was squeezing out expenditures for capital items such as roads, rail, health centers, and water supply. But it was precisely these types of expenditures that were needed to underpin the country’s growth and development drive. I needed to understand why operating costs had increased so much since we worked hard to reduce these costs during my first term as Finance Minister (2003 to 2006).
During my briefing with the Director General of the Budget Office and his staff, I learned that the situation was much worse than expected. In 2006, the cost of running the government had been brought down to about 65 percent of the total budget—a number I considered to still be on the high side. Our goal had been eventually to drive down the recurrent budget to 40 to 50 percent of the total budget. Now it appeared that recurrent costs in 2011 had jumped to 74 percent of the total federal government budget, leaving only about one-quarter of the budget for capital expenditures. This would not be acceptable in light of the administration’s plans to transform the economy and provide better infrastructure and other services to Nigerians.
So, I needed to know why the reforms we had earlier brought to the structure of the recurrent budget had now been reversed. The Director General of the Budget Office explained that there were two main reasons for the larger operating cost budget. The biggest factor was salary increases for civil and public servants. The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) demanded and received a 92 percent increase in salaries for academic staff of universities. A similar increase was granted to employees in the health sector. This led civil servants to agitate for their own increase, and they were awarded an unprecedented across-the-board salary increase of 53 percent by the Umaru Yar’Adua administration in 2010. To make matters worse, the courts ordered the recall of thousands of civil servants who had been let go under the civil service reforms of the Olusegun Obasanjo administration in 2004 and 2005. To pay for these salary increases, the Yar’Adua government borrowed heavily on the domestic capital markets. In addition, the associated rise in pensions costs had not yet been factored in or paid, so recurrent costs were bound to rise even further.
Compounding all of these salary increases were the slowdown in and lack of completion of certain institutional reforms we had launched in 2004 under the second Obasanjo administration to curb corruption in the civil service and pensions payrolls and prevent revenue leakages.
Essentially, several institutional weaknesses that had existed in the early and mid-2000s in the management of our finances were still not resolved, thereby enabling corrupt civil servants to bloat the payroll and divert government resources away from designated uses and into their own pockets.
As Finance Minister for the first time in 2003, I was shocked to discover some very important gaps in our finance and expenditure systems. First, no one quite knew how many workers we had in the civil service or in the larger public service sector that included the government parastatal agencies. There were no reliable databases or headcounts for salary payments or pensions.
Second, the Budget Office, the Treasury, and the ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs) were not connected electronically. Transactions between them were manual, and transfers were all cash based. For salaries and benefits, for instance, MDAs typically submitted their payrolls each month, and cash sufficient to meet these obligations was transferred to their accounts in commercial banks. They were then responsible for paying their staff from these monies. Resources from the capital budget for investment in infrastructure and other capital projects also were transferred on a cash basis into relevant MDA accounts.
The finance regulations stipulated that only the Accountant General of the Federation had the authority to approve the opening of bank accounts by ministries, departments, and agencies or other governmental authorities, which ostensibly would give the Accountant General’s office oversight of all fiscal accounts in operation. In reality, many agencies operated accounts without the authorization of the Accountant General’s office. They opened new accounts on more financially favorable terms—with higher interest rates—and transferred monies into them from the officially approved accounts. In the process, they collected the interest paid on deposits for their personal use. This was often done with the connivance of banks or bank officials, some of whom shared in the interest proceeds. The situation got so bad that senior civil servants responsible for managing ministry resources delayed salary payments or made partial payments in order to collect large amounts of interest on these deposits.
Third, the Finance Minister had no overview of the myriad of government accounts that existed in the commercial banks in the country. In my view, this was a recipe for malfeasance—an open door for corruption and siphoning away of public monies. After discussion with the Economic Management Team of the time and with the support of President Obasanjo, I turned to the World Bank for help in plugging these institutional gaps and building systems and processes to solve these problems.
The World Bank was willing to assist and put in place an Economic Reform and Governance Project backed by a long-term, low-interest rate loan (concessional or soft loan) of $93.4 million. The project was approved by the Bank’s Board of Directors on December 14, 2004, and implementation began on April 25, 2005. The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) cofinanced the loan with a grant of £14.3 million, while the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) also weighed in with parallel support for strengthening the Budget Office.
The World Bank Project Information Document Report No. AB1070 describes the basis of its support as follows:
Since the appointment of a strongly reform minded economic team in July 2003, the federal government is re-orienting economic management towards tackling some of the deep-seated risks to macroeconomic and fiscal stability and key sources of economic inefficiency. It has also initiated policies to deal with governance and corruption issues, which are central to the macroeconomic and fiscal sustainability challenge and to the government’s ability to deliver key economic services to Nigerians. Nevertheless, given the extent of decay and weakness in economic management and broader governance, this is only the beginning of what will need to be a sustained economic and governance reform process.1
The Bank went on to further elaborate on the project objectives:
In line with the federal government’s goal to significantly strengthen governance and accountability, reduce corruption and enable it deliver services more effectively, the objectives of this project are two-fold: i) to improve the federal government’s economic and financial management systems and processes; and ii) to firmly establish a reform process of the federal civil service to improve professionalism and the government’s ability to deliver services. Progress towards the achievement of these objectives will be measured by a) adoption of more transparent and modern economic and financial management processes that are less prone to corruption; and b) implementation of restructuring plans in pilot MDAs and initiation of reform in other MDAs.2
To achieve these economic and financial management objectives, the project financed the implementation of an Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) that included a technology platform and a biometric identification system. Each civil servant on the payroll and each pensioner was to be verified and enrolled through this system, with salaries and benefits paid directly into their accounts and no longer through their ministries, departments, or agencies.
A second component was the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS). It provided an electronic platform for transactions from the Budget Office and Treasury (through the Accountant General’s Office) to the ministries, departments, and agencies, thus improving cash management and resource planning and limiting manual transactions. It had an important budget planning module for budget preparation and execution. Above all, it supported the implementation of a Treasury Single Account (TSA) in concert with the Central Bank of Nigeria to streamline the accounts of all government entities, bring them into the Central Bank system, and give the Finance Ministry better oversight and control of public resources. This would also provide the Central Bank with an important monetary policy tool for better managing liquidity.
There was recognition that building institutions takes time and that these kinds of reforms to enhance the transparency of systems and processes and curb corruption could meet resistance. The project was programmed for implementation over a six-year period and got off to a good start. The World Bank noted that implementation proceeded in a largely satisfactory manner. But things slowed and virtually ground to a halt toward the end of the six-year implementation period in 2011. The project was still substantially incomplete by August 17, 2011, when I returned to the Finance Ministry.
A large part of the problem was resistance to the reforms by the ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs). The military had obtained a special waiver from the President to opt out by insisting that their inclusion in such a system could jeopardize military personnel and jeopardize sensitive defense information. The police and State Security Service were about to follow suit, and various other ministries and agencies objected to both GIFMIS and IPPIS. In particular, the Health Ministry and Education Ministry, which had the largest staff contingents after the security agencies, resisted strongly, giving various reasons that were difficult to comprehend.
The Director General of the Budget Office, the Accountant General, and I were clear that in order to make progress on stopping revenue leakages, curbing corruption, and managing the recurrent budget, we needed to complete the implementation of the project. We agreed to reinvigorate the project and restarted implementation almost immediately. We also decided to ask the World Bank to restructure the project to reallocate more resources to the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System and other activities that had yet to be implemented. This would ensure that these systems were completely embedded and institutionalized. The World Bank restructured the project on August 15, 2012.
Implementation was difficult. Several MDAs continued to resist enrolling their staff in the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System. But the efforts garnered success. The International Monetary Fund’s Article IV Country Report, published in April 2014, noted: “The assumed savings in payroll expenditure will require determined implementation. Initial efforts to clean up payrolls through the implementation of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System have been very successful—about 20 percent of the federal workforce (about 200,000 civil servants) had been targeted and more than 45,000 erroneous payroll records have been corrected. However, expanding the IPPIS to the rest of the federal workforce, including the armed and security forces, health care professionals, and educators may be difficult.”3
By 2015, implementation of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System had led to the elimination of about 65,000 ghost workers, thus saving the government about $1.1 billion in fraudulent payroll costs. By the end of the Jonathan administration, not all ministries, departments, and agencies had been covered, however, so more ghost workers probably will be eliminated in the future as enrollment of all federal public servants is completed. Similarly, substantial progress was made in implementing the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System by 2014. The International Monetary Fund’s Article IV Country Report, published in March 2015, noted that “Public financial management systems have been strengthened by expanding the coverage of the Treasury Single Account (TSA), and information management systems to most Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs)” and that “the TSA now covered 551 out of 821 Federal Government entities and accounting for 75% of the FG [Federal Government] budget.”4
The fraud in the payroll system pervaded Nigeria’s old Defined Benefits Pension Scheme (DBPS). Under the second Olusegun Obasanjo administration (2003 to 2007), Nigeria’s bankrupt pension system had been completely reformed.5 A new contributory pension scheme was developed and applied to all workers in the public and private sectors, and it was working well. By the end of 2015, the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS) had accumulated resources totaling ₦5.3 trillion ($26.9 billion). The new scheme did not apply to those retiring on or before June 2007, however. People in this category would continue participating in the Defined Benefits Pension Scheme until the last recorded claim. The 2004 Pensions Law provided for the creation of a new government unit, the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD), to streamline and manage under one roof four defined benefits schemes for four groups of employees—civil service; police; customs, immigration, and prisons; and all federally funded parastatals. Resistance to the creation of the new Directorate was high because many people were illegally benefitting from these pension schemes. The Umaru Yar’Adua administration launched a Pensions Reform Task Team (PRTT) to clean up the mess. However, when the leaders of the task team mishandled their new powers, the task team became politicized and part of the problem.
A series of probes by the National Assembly, culminating in 2013, revealed a serious level of corruption in the Defined Benefits Pension Scheme, finding that at least ₦32 billion ($200 million) had been fraudulently diverted and stolen by unscrupulous civil servants and their collaborators. From 2009 on, fourteen individuals were apprehended and tried for pension fraud. For example, on March 12, 2012, six people were arraigned on a sixteen-count criminal charge of conspiracy and criminal breach of trust for the roles they played in pension fraud. They included Atiku Abubakar Kigo (a Permanent Secretary, formerly Director of the Police Pension Department) and John Yakubu Yusufu (a former Assistant Director of the Police Pension Department). Yusufu was the first to be convicted. Found guilty on two counts in January 2013, he was sentenced to two years in prison after admitting to diverting ₦2 billion (about $12.5 million) from police pension bank accounts to personal use. He was asked to forfeit property valued at ₦325 million, including thirty-two houses.6
We had to stop the pension abuses in government, the huge leakages of government funds, and the diversion of pensions of government servants who had spent their lives working for their country. But this was easier said than done. For each set of arguments we presented to the President on the need to create the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate to help correct the situation, however, pension fraud perpetrators masquerading as reformers presented him with as many counterarguments.
Nigeria is one of the difficult and complex countries where corrupt people often adopt the language of reform to confuse decision makers, donors, development experts, and observers. The pension arena was fraught with this type of deception, which delayed the reform of the system.
Finally, in August 2013—following a series of memos from my desk, intense discussions with the President, presentations to the Economic Management Team, and the strong backing of the team and of the Head of Service of the Federation, Alhaji Bukar Goni Aji, who played a crucial role in helping to convince the President, the President finally agreed on the need to act. He approved the implementation of Section 30(2)(a) of the Pension Reform Act of 2004, which led to the creation of the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD). A Nigerian-Canadian woman, Dr. Nellie Mayshak, a senior officer with a project funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), was recommended by the Head of Service to head the new entity. He saw her as someone with the courage and experience to deal with the vested interests that would attempt to thwart the functioning of the Directorate. I had met with Dr. Mayshak on a few occasions and felt she had the tenacity to do the job, so jointly we recommended her to the President, and he approved her appointment as Executive Secretary of the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate.
The establishment of the Directorate brought much needed clarity to the administration of the Defined Benefits Pension Scheme. Among its early accomplishments were the consolidation of the existing pension offices under one umbrella; the creation of a pensions database that used biometrics for an ongoing verification of pensioners; the streamlining of pension office accounts; more transparency and openness and a human face for federal government pensioners, who had been treated callously by the old pension office workers; and more timely payment of monthly pensions.
The Directorate still faced serious legacy issues, such as dealing with arrears; filling in gaps in pension rolls; and replacing unqualified pension staff employees with qualified new staff, including people who could run its technology platform. Nevertheless, by February 2015, when the Pensions Transitional Arrangement Directorate held a pension stakeholders forum that I joined, it had managed to integrate itself into the platform of the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System so that DBPS payments could be managed through there; the Directorate had eliminated 15,000 ghost pensioners from its payroll, saving about ₦2.1 billion annually; and it had enrolled an additional 1,354 pensioners from liquidated government parastatals who belonged to the pension scheme but had inadvertently been left out.
Despite these accomplishments, the defined benefit pension scheme saga is not over. Following the end of the Goodluck Jonathan administration and with the start of the Muhammadu Buhari administration, Dr. Mayshak and other senior staff members at the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate have been detained for questioning and, according to newspaper accounts, suspended on charges of irregularities in the running of the Directorate.7 While the outcome of these investigations is being awaited, many have speculated about which charges are real and documented and which are fabricated or politically motivated. For instance, Dr. Mayshak has been released with apologies and no charges.
What is not in doubt is how complicated the clean-up of Nigeria’s defined benefits pension scheme remains. I had felt the heat and veiled threats from this pensions mafia in 2012 and 2013 at the height of the push for reform and still moved ahead, based on the belief that the bloating of recurrent expenditures and the fraudulent drain of public money had to be stopped. The imperative remains, and the necessary financial and technology tools and processes have been put in place.
There is no doubt that the building of financial institutions, systems, and processes—through the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), Government Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS), and Treasury Single Account (TSA) technology platforms—has helped the federal government fight corruption and financial mismanagement and saved it substantial sums of money, especially in its recurrent budget. It has provided avenues for improved fiscal management and even helped monetary policy. Building and cementing such institutions takes time. It has taken Nigeria eleven years thus far, and the task is far from over.
In addition, Nigeria is one of the most fiscally decentralized countries in the world, and state and local governments constitutionally control 48 percent of all national revenues. Unfortunately, the thirty-six state governments have yet to implement these federal pension reforms, although some have expressed interest in them and started their own reforms. The country has benefitted greatly from the Buhari administration’s adoption of these financial management institutions, and it is critical that they remain permanently embedded in federal government institutions and be fully adopted in state and local governments.
Another scam that burdened the budget and was perpetuated by vested interests deeply lodged in the civil service was something popularly known as judgment debt. It typically arises when a government ministry, department, or agency defaults on a contract and is sued by the contractor or service provider, who often wins the case and receives the original disputed amount owed by government plus interest and a fine.
During my first term as Finance Minister (2003 to 2006), the judgment debt for ministries, departments, and agencies did not exceed about ₦8 billion ($62.5 million, at the prevailing exchange rate) at any given time. I was therefore surprised to learn at the beginning of 2012 that the accumulated bill for judgment debt totaled ₦80 billion ($500 million). It was mind boggling and somewhat implausible that agencies had become this reckless in their contract defaults. Something must be going on!
The National Assembly also seemed to believe something was amiss because it repeatedly rejected appropriating within the budget process the large sums needed to deal with this debt. In the 2011–2012 budget, only ₦10 billion to ₦12 billion was approved for repayment of judgment debt. This was administered by a committee consisting of the Attorney General’s office and the Finance Ministry. Although this committee handled genuine cases, no one could trace or document how most of that debt was incurred.
But there were plenty of stories involving dozens of people. Some had to do with connivance between contractors, ministry officials, and the courts in an unholy alliance where amounts owed by government, interest, and penalties were inflated and all parties shared in the proceeds after payment. Others had to do with genuine court proceedings that were defended less than vigorously by government lawyers, thereby leading to loss of the case, heavy fines, and again the sharing of the proceeds among the involved parties. Another set of stories had to do with arbitration and out-of-court settlements that were unfavorable for the government.
Such malpractices culminated in the large sums owed and the attendant fiscal burden on the budget. I went to the President with the stories I had heard and my suspicions. I suggested that we discuss the problem in a cabinet meeting, followed by a letter to each ministry, department, and agency, underscoring that we would not honor the judgment debt outstanding and thenceforth that any judgment debt incurred would have to be paid by the responsible MDA through its budget. There would no longer be a line item in the federal budget for judgment debt.
The President concurred and gave his strong support to this proposal. Letters were written to the ministries, departments, and agencies, and we waited for protests from those involved in genuine cases. There were some complaints and between 2012 and 2014, judgment debts amounting to ₦11.6 billion were verified and certified for payment. The balance of ₦68.4 billion (about $425 million) that would have gone out of the Treasury was thus saved by the Finance Ministry.
This new approach to judgment debt was not welcome in several quarters. The Finance Minister and her team had blocked yet another avenue for fraudulent self-enrichment at the expense of the state.
Nigeria’s port infrastructure, like that of many developing countries, is grossly inadequate. Despite a first wave of port reforms in President Obasanjo’s second administration that successfully concessioned the ports to private operators, problems like congestion, convoluted cargo clearance procedures, and corruption seemed to recur. The port of Lagos (Apapa) was Nigeria’s busiest and most congested.
During my second month in office in September 2011, the issue of port congestion was brought to the attention of the Economic Management Team by members of Nigeria’s organized private sector, especially the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), as a serious impediment to doing business. They complained of inordinate delays in clearing cargo at the ports, inefficient administrative processes in several government agencies, and demands for bribes—which all added to the cost of doing business. It could be a quick win for the government if it could resolve these complaints.
The EMT debated the issue and the private sector members confirmed that the situation was a difficult one. The President decided to form a Presidential Task Force to examine the issues and find solutions to the problems and named the Minister of Transport, Senator Idris Umar, and me as co-chairs. Also named to the task force were another Economic Management Team member, Prof. Sylvester Monye, Adviser to the President on Performance Monitoring, and officials from the private sector and various other government agencies.
The Minister of Transport and I convened the task force quickly and set up a technical/implementation committee chaired by Prof. Sylvester Monye to address the technical nature and difficulty of some issues. In September and October 2011, the presidential task force held meetings with port users and other stakeholders and found that it took on average thirty-nine days to clear cargo from Nigerian ports in an era when other countries were implementing twenty-four- to forty-eight-hour cargo clearance. This discrepancy was clearly not acceptable.
We set an objective of achieving a seven-day clearance within three to twelve months and forty-eight hours in the longer term. We listed the problems and categorized them into short-, medium- and long-term issues. We devised practical solutions, identified agencies or bodies with lead responsibility for implementation, and proposed timelines for implementation.
The short-term problems with solutions that could be quick wins centered on several issues. One was the multiplicity of government agencies at the ports, each one constituting a checkpoint, so we recommended that the agencies be reduced from thirteen to seven. Second, a Nigerian Customs Service task force that was posted outside the port gates reportedly reinspected cargo leaving on trucks and harassed cargo owners and truck drivers for bribes, so we recommended that the task force be disbanded immediately. Third, operating hours were very short (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.) for two key agencies at the ports, the Nigerian Customs Service and the Shipping and Terminal Line Operations, which caused delays for port users needing to conduct business with these agencies outside these hours, so we recommended that the agencies commence twenty-four-hour operations immediately as is done in other countries.
Fourth, importers were particularly irate about a Cargo Tracking Note (CTN) regime that they argued added costs to them for duplicate services. They said that their cargos were already being tracked by the Nigerian Customs Service from origin to destination so there was no reason for the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) to collect this charge. Upon enquiry, we learned that charges totaled about $6 million a year, so this was consequential. I had never seen this money remitted to the Treasury and in fact had not known of the existence of the Cargo Tracking Note. We recommended that the CTN be abolished immediately.
On October 14, 2011, the Minister of Transport and I sent a memo to the President that outlined the short-, medium-, and long-term problems of Nigeria’s ports, proposed solutions, and requested approval for implementation. The President approved our request on October 18, and we announced the measures for immediate implementation shortly thereafter.
Then the problems began. I received an anonymous text telling me the reforms were bad and harmful and I should rescind them. I learned that some agencies—such as the Standards Organization of Nigeria (SON) and others that had been told to develop alternative collaborative arrangements with the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) to take care of their responsibilities while staying out of the ports—were not happy and were lobbying to be let back into the ports.
Numerous unhappy vested interests saw me as the arrowhead of the reforms and blamed me. Various House committees interested in port and maritime issues held hearings on the matter. They never invited me to appear at these hearings, but I heard that particular unhappiness was triggered by the abolition of the Nigerian Ports Authority’s Cargo Tracking Note. Some members of these House committees castigated me on radio and television for my actions in the port reforms. The pressure continued on the Presidential Task Force to dial back the reforms, but we stood our ground, and the technical/implementation committee under Sylvester Monye’s leadership continued its work.
About six weeks into implementation, in early December 2011, I received a message that a top-ranking presidential aide wanted me to stop by his office anytime I was in the Villa. This official was one of the most important in the Villa, so I went to his office the next day.
The presidential aide told me that he wanted to convey a message to me that there were people not happy with the port reforms, especially the abolishment of the CTN, and he asked me—indeed, advised me—to reinstate it. I was dismayed because the fact that the matter had been brought to his attention meant that whoever the unhappy people were, they were influential. I explained the genesis of the port reforms, the creation of the Presidential Task Force, and the approvals for action given by the President. By implementing the reform measures, we were carrying out presidential approvals. He said he understood but that I should nevertheless find a way to reinstate the CTN.
I left his office very troubled. Being on the wrong side of people who had this kind of top-level influence made me uneasy. I knew there could be consequences, but I also knew there was no going back on this important reform. Clearly the $6 million from the Nigerian Ports Authority’s CTN, which had not been remitted to the Treasury, must be going into some influential pockets.
The morning after meeting with the presidential aide, the consequences began to become clear. I was privileged that part of my daily routine was to join the President, his family, and a few close friends for Christian fellowship and morning prayers in the residential complex of the Villa. It was a way to gain strength for each difficult day. The prayers normally began at 6 a.m., so by 5:45 a.m. I arrived at the Villa gates and routinely was waved in.
That morning, the gates remained firmly shut as I drove up, and I was told I could not go in. Taken aback, I asked why. All I could get as a response was that the gatekeepers had received instructions not to let me in for morning prayer. I began to argue but realized it was fruitless and turned to return home. At that point, I felt a mistake had occurred and thought no more about it.
But for the next three days, I was blocked from entry for the early morning prayer meeting at the Villa. On the third day, the security officers at the gate—all of whom knew me well—told me, “Honorable Minister ma, I think you need to talk to [the presidential aide who had asked me to restore the Cargo Tracking Note].” Then I understood. When I phoned one of my prayer fellowship friends, Mr. John Kennedy Opara, and told him about the situation, he said that he would discuss it with the Villa pastor and they would intercede with the aide on my behalf.
After going to the gate and not being allowed in for the fourth time, I pushed the situation to the back of my mind and turned to the preparations for the upcoming visit to Nigeria of the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Madame Christine Lagarde, on December 18 to 20, 2011. My biggest preoccupation was to ensure that, in the raging national debate about the phaseout of oil subsidies, Madame Lagarde’s visit was not miscast by the media or antigovernment forces as the IMF telling the government what to do on energy subsidies. Madame Lagarde was equally concerned that her objective should be clearly understood as reviewing our macroeconomic and growth reforms and offering encouragement and support.
The visit proceeded smoothly as Madame Lagarde met with members of the Economic Management Team, the Central Bank, and other important government officials. She was scheduled to meet with the President on the final day of her visit, December 20.
There are usually many protocols and conventions to observe on high-level visits, especially when the visitor is accorded Head of State status, as Christine Lagarde was. One of these is for such dignitaries to enter the Villa for a meeting with the President through a gate designated for Heads of State only. Because Madame Lagarde was to use this gate, I had asked my staff to double check that all was in order and was reassured this was the case.
But when the motorcade reached this gate, it was denied entry. Embarrassed, I tried to find out from the security guards what was going on. They said they had no instructions for her to use that gate, and that we should proceed to the entrance reserved for state governors, certain designated ministers, and other dignitaries. We were already running late so I apologized to Madame Lagarde, told her there must be a mix up, and asked the drivers to proceed to the other gate. When we got there, we were again denied entry. By this time, it was clear to me there was no misunderstanding, but this was deliberate. We were told to go back to the regular entrance used by everyone, park there, and walk the five minutes down the Villa corridors needed to get to the President’s meeting room. Such treatment of a dignitary at the level of Head of State was unheard of!
Christine, clever as she is, had figured out something was wrong but did not know what. She handled it all with wit and elegance, telling me that she did not really care which gate she went through or how far she had to walk as long as we met with the President. By this time, we were about ten minutes late. We eventually made it to the meeting. When the President inquired if everything was alright, she replied wittily, “Mr. President, there was a bit of a mix up about gates and we had to walk here, but it gave me the chance to see your beautiful Villa and its lovely gardens.” The President looked puzzled but smiled and started the meeting. I never shared with him or with Christine Lagarde what I knew had happened that day.
It shocks me to this day that the “gate saga”—as I later described it to John Kennedy, my prayer meeting friend—was part of the fallout of eliminating the Cargo Tracking Note. It still seems unbelievable that people were prepared to put at risk such a high-level and important visit for the country’s economy because of personal interests. John Kennedy and the Villa pastor eventually persuaded the top presidential aide to drop these tactics by explaining to him that such tactics could backfire if I was prevented from entering the Villa at a critical moment when the President needed me. Eventually, the pressure from the abolition of the Cargo Tracking Note died down, but I remained uneasy about it till the end of the administration.