Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former
minister of finance, says there was a plan to confine her to a wheel chair and
force her out of office during the time she served under ex-President Goodluck
Jonathan.
She said some oil importers and
marketers whom the federal government owed money were behind the plot.
According to the world-renowned
financial expert, a friend to one of her brothers attended a meeting where the
discussion held.
She said the friend advised her
brother that security should be beefed up around her.
Okonjo-Iweala revealed this in
her book titled: ‘Fighting Corruption is Dangerous: The Story Behind the
Headlines’.
“My mother’s ordeal was not the
end of frightening events that occurred in late 2012 and early 2013. A few
months after my mother’s escape, I had just wrapped up a meeting late one
afternoon when my cell phone rang. It was again my brother Onyeama,”
Okonjo-Iweala wrote.
“My first thought was that
something else had gone wrong in the family. He frantically asked me, ‘where
are you, where are you?’ I was surprised and I said I was in my office. He said
I needed to immediately seek additional security and I must vary my route for
travel.
“I asked what was wrong and my
brother told me a very strange story. One of my brother’s old friend had just
called him to say he had just left a secret meeting where the subject was to
inflict maximum physical damage on me, just short of killing me. The agreement
reached in this meeting was to attack me in a way that I would end up paralysed
and bound to a wheelchair and forced to leave the finance ministry.
“The meeting was held by a group
of oil importers and marketers to whom the federal government ‘owed money’. It
was held in the house of the chair and owner of the of one of the oil marketing
companies. They were angry I was
withholding the subsidy payments that they thought were owed them for their
refined petroleum imports.
“My brother’s friend participated
in this meeting but felt what was being planned was unjust and cruel and I did
not deserve it.”
The minister said the attack on
her mother was due to her refusal to resign from office, after she had convened
a task force that audited fiscal accounts and detected “fraudulent” claims for
oil subsidy payments by oil marketers, which she refused to pay.
“Because my mother’s kidnapping
forced me to resign their next action to force me out of office was to attack
and disable me,” she wrote.
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