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Okonjo-Iweala And
Nigeria's Future
By
Ike Okonta
culled from THISDAY, August 5 and 13,
2006
The present clamour as political
events build up towards May 2007 is for ‘power-shift.’ It is mischievous as
it is self-serving, designed to focus the debate, not on the substantive
political and economic problems millions of ordinary Nigerians are
grappling with daily, but on the antics of a certain specie of Nigerians
who thrive on selling and buying political favours to serve narrow ends.
In this two-part essay, I shall make a case for a radical break with the
politics of opportunism that emerged in our country in the heyday of the
Second Republic, the ways and means of enthroning a new issues-driven
politics, and how a new generation of well-educated and public spirited
Nigerians – for which Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the classic example - might
craft a broad political consensus to leverage enough votes to propel them to
the Presidency in 2007.
Those who call for ‘Powershift’ have so far failed to explain to Nigerians
how the transfer of the office of President from one region to another will
address the issues of mass unemployment, low productivity, and parlous
social services that have held the nation down since she attained formal
independence in 1960. On this matter, I fault the positions of Northern,
South-East, and South-South political elements who have so far hijacked the
debate.
It is significant that the leading lights of this clamour are the same
personages who have hogged political office in our country since the First
Republic. That they have done a very bad job with regard to the Nigerian
project is clearly advertised by the social and economic condition of the
average Nigerian today; the fact that Nigeria remains an underdeveloped
nation in spite of her human and material endowments; and the additional
fact that in matters concerning Africa in the international arena, it is
foreign NGO’s and such institutions as the IMF that are increasingly
listened to instead of Nigeria’s political and intellectual leaders.
Had those who clamour for power shift anchored their demand on a clear
policy programme they believe will correct the ills I have enumerated, then
perhaps they should be listened to. That they have not done so, even when
discerning analysts at home and abroad are warning that Nigeria’s political
and economic problems are now so serious that failure to address them
urgently could lead to state failure and possible disintegration, shows
clearly that the time has come to banish them from positions of leadership
and authority.
Firmly opposed to this politics of unenlightened self-interest is a new
intellectual and political movement, linked to President Obasanjo’s on-going
economic reform programme but now gradually developing a life of its own.
Led by Foreign Minister Ngozi-Okonjo Iweala, the leading actors of this
movement believe that free market reforms, coupled with a root and branch
retooling of the public service, and transparency in the conduct of
government business will help transform the country from the perennial
laggard to an African economic giant by the year 2020. A generous dose of
foreign direct investment, attracted to the country by these reforms, is
seen as the catalyst for economic regeneration.
Four years into this experiment, the verdict out on the streets is one of
mixed results. While a good percentage of Nigerians have voiced out their
support for such popular programmes as tackling the external debt problem
and putting commercial banks on a sound footing, they have also expressed
deep misgivings concerning such matters as mass retrenchments in the public
service, the sale of publicly-owned enterprises to fronts of crooked
politicians at give-away prices, and the fact that these much-touted reforms
have not yet translated to concrete benefits such as reduction in the price
of basic food items, affordable transportation costs, and access to quality
healthcare and education for their children.
There is no serious debate about the obvious shortcomings of these
neoliberal economic reforms, guided by the IMF’s Policy Support Instrument,
because alternative voices in the Social Democratic tradition in Nigeria
have either been silenced by grinding poverty or are now so sidelined that
they no longer matter in the political equation. Since serious politics
abhors a vacuum, and given the very frightening possibility that the very
elements that drove Nigeria into the ditch during the Second Republic and
since are now limbering up to replace Obasanjo in 2007, the case for a broad
political coalition, taking on aspects of the Reformists’ economic programme
but given a human face by the social policies advocated by Nigerian
Progressives, and led by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, should be seriously considered
by all those who wish post-Obasanjo Nigeria well.
Why Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, given that I have long argued that the IMF’s
neo-liberal policies will never take Nigeria to the land of economic
prosperity and social wellbeing? I argue that Okonjo-Iweala should seriously
consider running for President for the simple reason that she takes Nigeria
as an economic and social project seriously, has clearly demonstrated this
by leaving the World Bank to work directly on this project, and possesses
the critical intelligence and broad experience required to pilot this
country in a period of seismic shifts in the global balance of power,
economic transformations, and repositioning of strategic interests.
The sobering truth is that present day Nigeria is racing against time. She
has to quickly reposition in the international arena to take maximum
advantage of opportunities opened up by industrializing China and India. But
Nigeria also has to recalibrate her internal social and economic structures
to bridge the growing dangerous gap between the rich and poor, open up the
rural areas through massive infrastructural and social development
programmes, and in so doing, draw millions of impoverished people, in rural
villages as well as urban slums, into the national enterprise of wealth
creation, citizen participation in governance and sundry civic activities,
and projecting the country internationally as the giant of the African world
which, indeed she is.
These are enormous tasks, tasks that only those that have taken time to
prepare their minds for the complexities of high level policy making in a
vicious international arena where the foolish, lazy, and the corrupt are
swiftly punished, are able to shoulder. It is obvious that Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala is tailor-made for this important task, even as I emphasize
that a project such as this requires not just the talent of a single
individual no matter how accomplished, but a collection of well-educated,
creative, and patriotic doers over which she or he will superintend.
But the case of Okonjo-Iweala for President instantly begs a question. On
what platform should she run, able to draw to its capacious umbrella an
aggregation of political constituencies and beliefs large enough to propel
this Collection of Nigeria’s Brightest and Best to the Presidency in 2007?
In an essay I wrote in this
column in May 2003 following Dr. Ngozi-Okonjo’s decision to serve as
President Obasanjo’s Finance Minister I commented thus:
‘I am not a fan of the World Bank as it is presently structured and
run, as I have made clear in this column. But I am a fan of its former
Vice President. I am a fan of Dr Okonjo-Iweala because she represents
all that is accomplished and resilient in a beleaguered Africa. A
hardworking and versatile author, she had just co-written a biography of
Chinua Achebe a couple of months before she packed her bags and headed
for Abuja, heeding her nation’s call. Prior to that, she had edited a
book highlighting the magnitude of the debt crisis in Nigeria, giving
ample space to some of the finest minds in the world to point Nigeria
and Africa to the path out of the woods. She is a loving mother; and
herself the daughter of parents who are academics of global eminence.
And to crown it all, Dr Okonjo-Iweala is an African patriot who does not
suffer fools gladly... I admire courage, intelligence, hard work, and
self-sacrifice. Our new Minister of finance has all these qualities in
abundance, and that is why this column shall pay close attention to her
new career in Abuja in the coming months and years, that is if the
expert wreckers of our dreams do not force her out sooner than later.’
Two weeks ago the wreckers of
our dreams did force Okonjo-Iweala to quit as Foreign Minister, a new
portfolio she was just getting used to after a sudden cabinet reshuffle
and she was redeployed from the powerful finance ministry. These forces
are as powerful as they determined. They thrive and prosper only in an
atmosphere of chaos, corruption, and cynicism, and usually deploy
slander, bribery and outright violence to attack true reformers working
to return governance in the country to the path of sanity. They are as
old as independent Nigeria, and so deeply embedded in the sinews of
government at all levels that to displace them will require nothing
short of a surgical operation.
Dr. Okonjo-Iweala and her team were putting in place the enabling
condition for this surgical operation to take place when President
Obasanjo forced her into an impossible corner and she did the honourable
thing and resigned. Unfortunately, public comments in the media in the
wake of her decision to quit have not properly focused on the potent
forces she had had to wrestle with right from the outset; forces so
parochial and self-serving that even the modest benefits that ought to
have trickled down to the ordinary people from the economic team’s harsh
neo-liberal reforms were cornered and salted away in private bank
accounts.
Some have even argued that it was the former finance minister’s good
fortune that she took office in a period of surging oil revenue, and
that the little improvement in the nation’s economic condition that was
recorded during this time was on account of this development, not due to
any real effort on Okonjo-Iwela’s part.
These, and other commentators of similar persuasion miss the point,
even as I concede that the living condition of the ordinary people
remain parlous four years into the economic reform programme. One may
disagree with the ideological framework that drove Okonjo-Iweala’s
interventionist strategy, and I count myself as one of this party, but
no one can seriously argue with the fact that in three short years, the
former finance minister opened up Nigeria’s notoriously opaque public
exchequer to public scrutiny, zealously husbanded the recent oil revenue
windfall, made her ministry fit for the purpose it was intended, and got
Nigerians and outsiders alike talking seriously again about the ways and
means of realizing the economic possibilities of this sleeping giant.
These are important achievements for which Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala will
be remembered for years, long after the storm generated by her exit from
the Foreign Ministry last week has subsided.
The manner of her abrupt departure from service, and the murky politics
that made this inevitable, should focus minds on how a new politics of
public service might return Okonjo-Iweala to public office, but this
time as a political leader directly accountable to Nigerian voters. And
this brings us back to the question I posed in the first part of this
essay last week: On what party political platform should she run for
President in 2007?
We can quickly rule out the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The
PDP is not so much a political party as an agglomeration of narrow
political interests in pursuit of private gain. After nearly eight years
in office the PDP still has not been able to produce a party document
that can speak in a forthright and intelligent manner to Nigeria’s many
problems. The economic reform programme currently being implemented by
the Obasanjo government was conceived by Dr Okonjo-Iweala four years
after the PDP took office, was fleshed out in detail by Charles Soludo,
and its implementation strategy worked out by the former finance
minister as leader of the President’s economic team. PDP officials,
still busy looting the treasury, made no input in this important
national endeavour.
The All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) and the Alliance for Democracy
have been effectively ground into the dust by the PDP juggernaut, even
as the latter is now fighting off factional elements within its ranks.
Left of the centre political parties north and south of the country have
still not been able to register on national consciousness, weighed down
by poor finances, poor logistics, and an inability to rethink their
broad political strategy in a post-military dispensation.
The forces rooting for a politics of regeneration and public service, a
new intellectual and political movement Okonjo-Iweala should head,
should see the present parlous condition of party politics in the
country as a challenge, not an obstacle. There are several registered
political parties with neither significant membership nor ideological
content. These are empty shells waiting for new determined, willful, and
purposeful occupants. A new broad coalition, bringing together the
liberal-reformist concerns of the likes of Okonjo-Iweala, Nasir El
Ruffai, Patrick Utomi, Udo Udoma, and Obiageli Ezekwesili on the centre
right, and the pro-poor policies of noted social democrats such as Prof.
Attahiru Jega, Edwin Madunagu, Bamidele Aturu and the broad labour and
human rights collective.
While it is true that the resulting coalition will be an assortment of
strange bedfellows in the beginning, it is also the case that they will
have much on which to unite in 2007, not least the urgent need to rid
the country of the deadly grip of an uneducated, indolent and cynical
political class that has held and abused power for far too long; the
need to return rational intellectual debate to the business of
policy-making; and the need to make politics turn again on the anvil of
proper political parties animated by civic and intellectual ideas, and
that can be voted in and out of power through fair and free elections.
Ideological purity has its place, but a crisis situation calls for a
pragmatic politics broad enough to unite disparate political actors in
the immediate task of saving the nation and its people from marauders
intent on bringing the roof crashing down. It is for this singular
reason that I urge Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to throw her hat into the ring
come 2007.
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