Many of my detractors and attackers were corrupt politicians and civil servants and other vested interests comfortable with the old-fashioned, opaque ways of doing business in Nigeria, as I illustrate in previous chapters. But there were also those—a small minority of the elite, to be sure—who genuinely did not like who I was or what I represented. There were antifeminists uncomfortable with the idea of a woman “wielding undue power” through oversight and control of the country’s finances. There were ethnic jingoists who disliked the idea of someone from my Igbo ethnic group holding what they perceived as a powerful position that they believed “belonged” to their own ethnic group. And there were political and economic ideologues for whom my background with the World Bank was anathema. These critics often got mixed up with the corrupt attackers, thus amplifying the noise, but my account would be incomplete if I did not examine the role that these critics played during my tenure as Finance Minister.
Where the issue of women and gender is concerned, Nigeria presents a paradox. The country has many well-educated and accomplished women, as documented in Prof. Bolanle Awe’s Nigerian Women Pioneers and Icons.1 Nigeria also has a long history of female activism, starting in the late eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. This history includes Nana Asmau, the Fulani poet who was daughter of Shehu Uthman Dan Fodio, founder of the Sokoto Caliphate and leader of the Fulani jihad in Nigeria; Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Nigeria’s legendary amazon, educator, and champion of women’s rights, as well as mother of one of Africa’s foremost activist musicians, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti; Flora Nwapa Nwakuche, a prominent novelist and champion of women’s rights and a contemporary of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka; Lady Kofoworola Ademola, born in 1913 and the first African woman to be admitted to Oxford University; my own mother, Prof. Kamene Okonjo, and her contemporaries like Prof. Bolanle Awe and Prof. Grace Alele-Williams, who were born in the 1930s and reached the highest levels of educational attainment, obtaining their PhDs and becoming tenured university professors, heads of departments, and even a university president (Prof. Alele-Williams); and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, award-winning, world-acclaimed novelist, writer, and political commentator.
Nigeria’s women are entrepreneurial. Many start and own businesses, including micro businesses in the informal sector. Over half of the estimated 32 million formal and informal small and medium enterprises in the country are owned by women, and women make up more than 60 percent of the agricultural labor force.
Yet despite years of investment in human development and some improvements, Nigeria also has some of the most dismal statistics when it comes to women. Nigeria has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. At an estimated 814 deaths per 100,000 live births, it is almost four times the global average of 216 per 100,000 live births and significantly higher than the Sub-Saharan African average of 547 per 100,000.2 This means that in Nigeria 158 women die each day—nearly one woman every nine minutes—from conditions associated with childbirth.
The female illiteracy rate in the country is 50.3 percent, compared to 30.8 percent for men. In this, there is a clear north-south divide. The female illiteracy rate in the north is 69.3 percent, and in the south, 32.1 percent.3 In a state like Borno in northeastern Nigeria, where the terror group Boko Haram is active and has singled out women to prevent them from being educated, the dismal figure is a startling 90 percent illiteracy rate for females! The kidnapping of 276 girls from the Chibok school by Boko Haram in April 2014 (see appendix C) focused international attention on the dangers faced by girls and women seeking education in certain parts of the country. Yet girls’ education is fundamental if we are to improve the lives and health of poor people and their families and lift them out of poverty. With many studies showing that the education of girls and women greatly improves the well-being and behavior of their children, it is imperative to tackle the high female illiteracy rate in Borno state to improve the chances that young people will be able to say no to militancy and radicalization.
Gender disparities mean that 52 percent of the nearly 10 million children and youth who are not attending school in Nigeria are girls. And the north-south divide on this issue is stark. Most out-of-school girls are concentrated in the north. A paper commissioned by the UN Special Envoy for Education, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, shows that 34 percent of girls are out of school in the rural north, compared to 25 percent of boys, and that in the rural south, only 4 percent of girls are out of school, compared to 3 percent of boys.4
These grim education statistics go hand in hand with a frame of mind among men that allows (indeed, among some ethnic groups, like the Igbo and Yoruba, encourages and even expects) women to be economically active and contribute financially to their households but at the same time resists equality of opportunity for women or powerful or influential roles for women in the political or public space. In the first cabinet I served in as finance minister (2003 to 2007), President Olusegun Obasanjo made news and raised hackles when he doubled the percentage of women in the cabinet from 8 percent under his first administration (1999 to 2002) to 16 percent in his second administration. He also gave women important posts for the first time in the country’s history when he appointed me to head the Ministry of Finance and other women to lead the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.
Part of the angry resistance to President Goodluck Jonathan among some segments of the elite had to do with his support and promotion of women. President Jonathan went much further than President Obasanjo. He again doubled the percentage of women in cabinet (to 32 percent)—an unprecedented feat—and gave them what were perceived as powerful portfolios within government. Women headed the Ministries of Finance, Petroleum Resources, Defense, Aviation, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and Water Resources. He appointed the first-ever female Chief Justice of the Nigerian Federation, Justice Aloma Mariam Mukhtar. Male politicians and commentators often claimed that women had too much control, and unfortunately, not all female ministers exercised their power well or wisely. The feeling that too much female bias existed was directly expressed in the National Assembly when the President presented the 2013 budget. I had, with the President’s support, begun a gender-based budgeting approach by including a special, small budget allocation equivalent to $21 million to encourage ministries, on a voluntary basis, to include or expand programs or projects in their portfolios that would particularly benefit women. Male parliamentarians booed the President when he announced this pilot program in his budget speech, while the few female parliamentarians cheered.
Some of the anger was directed at me because not only did I have “control” over the allocation of the budget but I also had the additional designation of Coordinating Minister for the Economy (CME), a designation no cabinet member had ever held in the country’s history. The President’s idea in supporting this title was to have someone who could help plug the gap that often occurred in economic issues that crossed sectors, where ministers needed to work together to achieve results but often failed to do so. In an increasingly complex governance environment, coordination was needed at the working ministerial level to achieve impact.
As the title caught on, and the President and others began calling me “CME,” some people read this designation to mean that extra powers had been conferred on me to superintend the other ministers, which was definitely not the case. Coordinating was vastly different from superintending. Those who did not like me played this up in the press, calling me “Prime Minister” and stirring up resentment, even among some of my colleagues. This negative coverage was captured in an article written by a civil servant and part-time journalist, Yushau Shuaib:
I still wonder how the Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Honorable Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, is in the eye of the storm. Her grandiose title is not a mere tautology as some people will assume. Being the first holder of that title in Nigeria’s history, her position could be seen as equivalent to Prime Minister, which gave her the mandate to oversee and superintend over every other ministry, department and agency of government including their budgetary allocations and revenue expenditures. She is invariably the next most powerful cabinet member after President Jonathan and Vice President Namadi Sambo.5
Following the loss of the election by the Goodluck Jonathan administration, women were put back in their “place.” The percentage of cabinet positions held by women is back down to 16 percent. The percentage of women in the National Assembly has fallen to 5.6 percent from an already dismal 7 percent under the previous administration—at a time when female representation in Africa’s parliaments is at 24 percent, exceeding the world average of 21 percent.6
Nigeria is an extremely complex country to govern—something much of the world may not realize. The country has over 350 different languages (and ethnic groups) among its 190 million people. These languages are not mutually understandable. So the common language of communication across ethnic groups is English or Pidgin English, the common version of the language. Three language and ethnic groups dominate and make up slightly more than two-thirds of the population—the Hausa-Fulani in the north and the Igbos and Yorubas in the south. To further complicate matters, although there are significant populations of Christians in the north and Muslims in the south, the north of the country is predominantly Muslim, and the south mainly has followers of Christian and animist religions.
Except for during the presidency of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, who comes from an ethnic minority, speakers of the three major ethnic language groups have run the country for the fifty-seven years of its existence since independence from Britain in 1960. Since that time, coexistence has built what might be termed a “Nigerian.” But this sense of being Nigerian is constantly being challenged and undermined by friction and mistrust among ethnic and religious groups.
The fault lines are also constantly manipulated by politicians for their own ends. The Nigeria-Biafra civil war (1967 to 1970) and numerous military coups followed by decades of military rule have not helped build social capital. The decision by the military to end its hegemony over the country and bring in retired military General Olusegun Obasanjo as a civilian to be voted in as President in 1999 seemed to usher in a new era. When I served as President Obasanjo’s economic adviser in 2000 and subsequently as Finance Minister in his second administration (2003 to 2007), I sensed that the country was beginning to come together and that there existed men and women called Nigerians.
However, this sense of unity was shattered all too soon by the suspicions of northerners and some southerners about the alleged bid of President Obasanjo for a third term, which he denied. It was further frayed by the secrecy surrounding the illness and subsequent death of President Umaru Yar’Adua (a northerner) and attempts by a coterie around the ailing president to block his Vice President, Goodluck Jonathan (a southerner and member of a minority ethnic group), from succeeding him and taking office. Southerners and some northerners were up in arms.
When Goodluck Jonathan finally became interim President in 2010 and won the presidential election in 2011 after a great deal of national drama, some from the north and southwest of the country viewed him as a usurper and opposed his presidency. Serving in his administration from 2011 to 2015, I had the sense of a fractured Nigeria, with fault lines running along ethnic groups and no social compact binding the country together.
Throughout the country’s history, any group not in power has always claimed to be marginalized by those in power, but under the Jonathan administration, the sense of marginalization seemed to reach hysterical heights. Even when statistics were presented showing that the government was largely abiding by the provisions of the Constitution that called for Federal Character (balanced) representation of all groups, this evidence was never accepted, and accusations of marginalization of other groups was rife. Against this background, some found me unacceptable in my job because I was Igbo and felt that the finance minister’s job should be in the hands of another ethnic group. To many critics, I, too, was a usurper.
In addition, there was the feeling that Igbos had too many jobs in the finance field and were crowding out others. To compound matters, we had agreed in the Economic Management Team that the government should recruit certain jobs in the administration on merit and persuaded President Jonathan that recruitment should follow international good practices of advertising, interviewing, and selecting the best candidates, regardless of ethnic group, to create centers of excellence in government.
For example, we advertised the job of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Nigeria’s newly created Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority. The winner of the competitive process was an Igbo and a diaspora Nigerian, Uche Orji, Managing Director at UBS, whom I had never met. During my tenure as finance minister, this was the only job that I was instrumental in vetting that went to an Igbo.
The next job advertised and filled was CEO of the newly created public-private partnership institution, the Nigerian Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC). After a competitive process, another diaspora Nigerian, Prof. Charles Inyangete, an Ibibio from Akwa Ibom state, won the job.
A third position advertised, Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Nigeria’s tax and revenue authority, was again competitively won by a diasporan, a Nigerian woman also from Akwa Ibom state, but she was never allowed to take office. Her job confirmation was successfully blocked in the National Assembly by a group who felt that southerners were winning too many positions. The blockage allowed the Acting Chairman, Alhaji Kabir Mashi from the north (Katsina state), to continue holding the position until virtually the end of the Jonathan administration.
I was accused of foisting an Igbo agenda on the nation—even though only one position that I vetted was filled by an Igbo! These accusations are best captured in the article quoted earlier by the northern civil servant and part-time journalist Yushau Shuaib, who in the guise of passing me “friendly” warnings, made damning and false accusations and helped perpetuate blatant untruths:
One of the major reasons some of us believe strongly in the ability of Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was the way and manner she carried major players both from the North and South along while she was Minister of Finance between 2003–2006. She was never accused of discrimination or bias against any of the diverse groups of the ethnically charged and religiously polarized nation. The same will be said of her then Principal Olusegun Obasanjo, who despite some of his shortcomings, will never be accused of tribalism. He is a detribalized leader and a nationalist to the core who believes strongly in the Nigeria project.
With these as background, it was not surprising that when she was re-appointed by President Jonathan as Finance Minister and when she was shortlisted for the position of President of the World Bank in 2012, she received overwhelming support from all Nigerians. An online publication even claimed that some Northern Mallams were praying for her success in the mosques. Everyone at that period believed she was a detribalized Nigerian with real world experience of policy making. The reason for this write-up is to alert her to some disturbing trends as regards some recent appointments to top public offices in Nigeria in view of their economic and political implications. As the most powerful minister and an Igbo Princess from the Niger Delta by virtue of being a daughter of Obi of Ogwashi-Uku community in Delta state, I believe she should continue to live above board. Recently, the Yoruba Unity Forum (YUF) made some disturbing allegations of ethnic cleansing of Yoruba in federal appointments by the Administration of President Goodluck Jonathan. Wife of the sage Chief HID Awolowo and the retired Bishop of Akure Rt Rev Bolanle Gbonigi in Ikenne after the meeting of the Forum accused the administration of systematically excluding the Yoruba nation from the federation from appointments without justification. They called on the government to redress the “systematic discrimination” against the Yoruba nationality in federal appointive positions without delay, saying the Yoruba have been getting “crumbs” from the administration.
No sooner than the Yoruba allegation was made that the Northern Senators Forum (NSF) also publicly lamented gaping marginalisation against the North over appointments and promotions in the military. According to these distinguished Nigerians there is lopsidedness in employment and posting in the Nigerian Army in favor of the Igbos, which is clearly in the breach of the principle of Federal Character. She should be aware that many Nigerians are referring to a book, Chinua Achebe: Teacher of Light, which she co-authored where she expressed bitterness about how her tribe was dealt with before, during and after the civil war and insinuating that now she is in authority, she is determined to correct all that she perceived as injustice against her people. Some even insist that what she is doing now is promoting regional and ethnic agenda to the detriment of other groupings in Nigeria by manipulating appointments. To drive the point home, her name has been lately mentioned as collaborating with another top Igbo ranking appointee in government to ensure the re-installation of Ms Arunma Oteh as Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) despite the glaring allegations against her and consistent calls by the national Assembly for her removal. Okonjo-Iweala stood her ground, damning all, and today Oteh remains in the position.
While the debate on Oteh’s saga was yet to subside, a coalition of youths led by human rights activist and President of Civil Rights Congress Shehu Sani queried the rationale behind the appointment of a new Chairman for the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), when a northerner, Kabir Mashi, was already in the position and improving the revenue base for the agency. The group claimed that the committee that Okonjo-Iweala set up was a smokescreen just to give a semblance of due process and fairness whereas it was populated mainly by her Igbo kinsmen. They added that “we don’t believe there is transparency in the process, and we caution the President against the excessive ceding of his own power to the finance minister.” They publicly criticized her for playing an ethnic game with many of the appointments made in the country since she returned to the saddle. Some of the other positions they alleged, which were created and filled during this period, include those of the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON), Sovereign Wealth Fund, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), and even the recent appointment of a 40 year old lady as Director General of the National Pension Commission (PENCOM). People are wondering at the coincidence of only Igbos beating every other person at competitive interviews conducted by her nominated international consulting groups. The only semblance of Federal Character principle in some of these institutions is the appointment of ceremonious, but temporary chairmen, who are mainly figure heads, with mandates for mere advisory roles. The use of catchy phrases such as “best brains,” “foreign trained” and “foreign based” to deprive qualified, competent and experienced Nigerians to aspire to top positions is quite inimical to the progress of our nation. The erroneous impression that some competitive and sensitive positions can only be filled by unique intelligent tribes must be corrected. Experiences have shown that in practical situations, some so-called foreign trained and bookish first class graduates could do no better than other Nigerians who have the competence and experience to prove their worth in most difficult terrains.
Dr Okonjo-Iweala should also note that blatant disregard to the sensitivities and sensibilities of others while arrogantly promoting only people from her tribe may expose them to hatred with potentially explosive consequences, such as those experienced in the 1960s when most federal positions were occupied by a particular tribal group. For those of us who still respect the Hon Minister of Finance and Economic Development, we strongly believe she should dissociate herself from current allegations of “biafranization” of top public offices in Nigeria. We are in democratic government where policy issues should not be done in dictatorial manner of we-are-now-in-power. I therefore urge her to ensure that appointments into important positions should be done in a credible and transparent manner that can withstand public scrutiny. I believe strongly that only those that mean well will dare to tell the truth on the general feeling in the country.7
Shuaib’s article was divisive, explosive, and full of tribal prejudice and hatred, creating what are now known as “alt-facts.” Recruitments into the civil service and into various parastatals are handled by the respective ministers for those agencies and parastatals and the relevant civil and public service bodies set up for that purpose. Ascribing responsibility to me for all public-service recruitments was nothing short of malicious and the writer knew it.
As discussed earlier, several of the positions that Shuaib referred to were either competitively won or occupied not by Igbos but by other southerners. The three that were competitively recruited that I was involved in were handled through a transparent process presided over not by Igbos, as he said, but by a diverse group of eminent Nigerians whose names were published in the newspapers.
The consulting agencies that won the bids to handle the process worked through their Nigerian offices. The process was run by very competent Nigerians—like Kunle Elebute, Managing Partner of KPMG in Nigeria, Dotun Philips of Philips Consulting, and Joseph Olofinsola of Akintola Williams Deloitte—who were Yoruba. Some of the positions cited—such as the CEO of Amcon and Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission—had been recruited before I joined government. In fact, after seeing the article, the former Governor of the Central Bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, confirmed publicly that he had recruited the Amcon CEO, Mustapha Chike-Obi, before I arrived.
These facts were easily checked by any objective observer or writer. But it was clear from the article that the attempt (by a civil servant) to link me to military appointments and promotions when I was not the commander-in-chief and had nothing to do with military administration was borne out of malice and designed to incite the northern military establishment against me at a time when the military was battling Boko Haram in the North East.
Despite my denial and vigorous defense with clear evidence, social media allowed Shuaib’s piece to be widely disseminated and to gain currency in Nigeria’s deeply riven ethnic divides. It provided the basis for other false accusations of tribalism against me. This was typified a year later on September 8, 2014, when Dr. Temitope Oshikoya, a Yoruba from the southwest of the country, wrote a highly critical piece against me alleging, among other things, that I influenced public appointments in favor of people from my region. I quote a small section to illustrate the point:
The fourth sign of the Icarus paradox: complacency. NOI (Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala) spent too much time hobnobbing with the ultra-rich oligarchs, who have no business being on Nigeria’s Economic Management Team, except to further their own interest, and to ensure that key appointments to government economic agencies are to their favor. This particular disturbing trend has already been observed by some public analysts noting that NOI appears to think that the best economic policy and regulatory managers are bred from her geo-ethnic circles. This is self-evident from the headships of key economic and financial related agencies: AMCON, CBN, SEC, NSE, DMO, BPE, NSIA, NMRC, FRC, Pension, Budget, Procurement Regulation, Performance Monitoring, and Chief Economic Adviser to mention a few.
The fifth sign of the Icarus paradox: arrogance and lack of respect for others. One of the tactics NOI has deployed is to pretend that she is using professional search firms to recruit for some of these positions. But discerning Nigerians have seen through the smokescreen and her systematic efforts to favor only people within her regional circle.8
Oshikoya, then a manager at one of Africa’s premier banks, Ecobank, neglected to tell readers that he had applied for and competed unsuccessfully for the job of CEO of the newly created Nigerian Mortgage Refinance Company—one of the jobs that the government had decided to put to competition. The job went to Prof. Charles Inyangete, an Ibibio from Akwa Ibom state. Dr. Oshikoya deliberately classified an Ibibio as Igbo and blamed me for his own failure in the job competition.
A rejoinder was published in the Nigerian Guardian a few days later from my Special Adviser on media, Paul Nwabuikwu. He noted that Dr. Oshikoya’s article is
a commentary on the ongoing recruitment process for CEO of NMRC. For the sake of transparency, Dr. Oshikoya should have let the world know that he was a candidate for this position but unfortunately did not make it. The fact that he neglected to mention this is very instructive, and demonstrates that he is nothing but a disappointed bitter person who is not man enough to take responsibility for his own performance. It is quite disheartening when people like Oshikoya, who is expected to know better, impugn efforts to institutionalize a merit-based approach to recruitment for key positions in the country simply because the results did not favor him. Some of us need to learn to put the collective good ahead of individual selfish interest.9
Unfortunately, ethnic divisions are alive and well in Nigeria today. The flames are fanned by politicians who encourage them for their own purposes and by other irresponsible Nigerians who use them to attack any results not in their favor. Just about any policy that affects Nigerians is analyzed from the ethnic angle. Foreign leaders and their policies are assessed from the point of view of whether they seem to favor one part of the country or one religion over another. Each government policy or pronouncement is similarly analyzed. Nigeria is desperately in need of leaders with a broad and inclusive vision of the country who seek to bring people together and heal the country, not leaders who continue to sow divisiveness.
Nigeria has a small core of ideologues who are steeped in communist and socialist ideology or who simply oppose capitalism. They are to be found in academia and civil society and among political and social commentators. For members of this group, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are the temples of a neoliberal Washington Consensus and symbolize everything they dislike about the market economy. Anyone who “worships” at these temples is therefore to be despised.
Among these people, some could see no good in any of the economic policies we implemented in the Goodluck Jonathan administration simply because I had held various positions at the World Bank. Despite implementing sound macroeconomic policies that provided the basis for real sector nonoil growth and robust overall GDP growth from 2011 to 2015 (as illustrated in appendix B, table B7.1), these people were not convinced of the soundness of those policies. We brought inflation down from double to single digits over the administration’s four-year term. The exchange rate was stable and largely market determined, foreign exchange reserves were reasonable at $34.3 billion by the end of 2014, the fiscal deficit was well below 3 percent of GDP, debt ratios were in reasonable territory, and because debt service to revenue was becoming a concern, we began to retire some of our debt (₦75 billion was retired in 2013). We successfully rebased the GDP in 2014 after twenty-four years of neglecting this. With these accounting changes, which recognized Nigeria’s extensive service economy, Nigeria replaced South Africa as the largest economy in Africa, with a 2013 GDP of $514.0 billion compared to South Africa’s $372 billion.
In mid-2014, the commodity price boom ended as oil prices began a steep decline. The economy came under increasing strain, but we deployed revenue and expenditure measures that kept the economy in positive growth territory in 2014 and the first quarter of 2015, when we left office. The quality of growth was not entirely satisfactory and was not inclusive enough. Unemployment and underemployment were serious problems, especially for young people. But we worked hard to create jobs. We needed to create 2 million jobs a year just to keep pace with the numbers of young people who were joining the job market and were creating up to 1.4 million jobs a year by 2014. And we were planning measures to tackle the existing pool of unemployed and underemployed youth before the Goodluck Jonathan government lost the election and left office in May 2015.
In contrast, as oil prices continued their downward trend in 2015 and 2016, economic policy responses were inadequate or outright wrong, and the economy went in to a recession for the first time in two decades. Not much has been heard from the ideologues on this issue.
The attack on so-called neoliberal Washington Consensus economics and its proponents is typified by two opinion pieces in the Nigerian press. One by Is’haq Modibbo Kawu comments on the attacks on me by Governor Adams Oshiomole, taking Oshiomole’s side:
The protagonists are remarkable representatives of the two sides of the Nigerian coin. Adams Oshiomole, governor of Edo state is pitted against Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Jonathan presidency’s Minister of Finance, whose over-bloated ego had to be thoroughly massaged with the additional title of Coordinating Minister for the Economy. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a poster girl of neo-liberal capitalism and archetypal expression of surrender to imperialism and its diktats in neo-colonial Nigeria. Okonjo-Iweala saw herself as a kind of “God’s gift” to the Nigerian ruling class, having served imperialism at its home base in Washington and the World Bank. She is the ultimate “technocrat,” chosen to administer the one-size-fits-all poison of neoliberal reforms in Nigeria. Technocrats of this hue are exceedingly arrogant and cannot brook any interference with what they assume is the best cure for the economic woes of a neo-colonial society.10
The second article, by Odilim Enwegbara, continues in the same vein:
Keynesian economic principles have been the secret behind the developed countries unending economic growth and job creation. But while western economic powers continue to pursue pro-growth and pro-investment economic policies, they always mobilize neo-liberal prudent economists to developing countries who insist that developing countries shouldn’t also pursue the same stimulus economic development principles. The hidden agenda here is the fear that allowing these developing countries to pursue the same pro-Keynesian policies would make them become industrial powers too. This should spell competitive doom for developed economies who have to rely on both developing countries’ industrial raw materials and huge consumer markets to continue to promote and protect developed countries growth and jobs. So, imposing anti-Keynesian tight monetary policy together with anti-deficit fiscal spending agenda on developing countries has remained a matter of life-and-death for western economic powers especially in an effort to constantly keep developing economies as their economic slaves in perpetuity. Who else could promote anti-Keynesian macroeconomic policies across developing countries than local neoliberal economists and those educated and nurtured in western controlled multilateral imperialist institutions like IMF and the World Bank? In developing countries, they are falsely nicknamed technocrats even though in reality they are economic hit men and women, sent to these countries to do the bidding of the West. During her last four years in Nigeria, the former Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, without apology had led the country’s economy on the principles of neoliberalism. And as someone whose education and career life took place in the US, should she be opposed to what she has lived and practiced all her life? Should it therefore be surprising that she has always insisted on Nigeria adopting a macroeconomic austerity stance being professed by Washington for developing countries like ours?11
These critics ignore the fact that the so-called neoliberal policies that they pilloried, though far from perfect, delivered growth, created jobs, created wealth, and lifted some people out of poverty. Nigerians were, on average, better able to eat, work, and access foreign exchange and credit for their businesses and personal needs without a need for special access and the corruption that it breeds from May 2011 to May 2015 than they were after June 2015, when the economy fell into a recession and contracted for the first time in two decades. This success in the economy was due to good economic management, higher commodity prices in the earlier years, and responsive and appropriate macroeconomic policies in 2014 and early 2015 when oil prices seriously began to tank. Sadly, Nigeria’s ideologues have remained largely silent about facts that do not reflect their preconceptions.
The existence of these various groups of detractors, who were part of “politics as usual,” together with the hard-core defenders of a corrupt status quo, sometimes made me feel like I was swimming in a tank of sharks every day. Avoiding being fatally bitten or drowned in that shark tank was a daily reality that my long-suffering Finance Ministry team and I had to learn to navigate.