Former Minister of Finance, Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala, has revealed why she wrote the new book that exposes certain
things that happened during the immediate past administration of President
Goodluck Jonathan.
Okonjo-Iweala spoke at the event
preceding the signing of the book she entitled, “Fighting Corruption is
Dangerous: The Story Behind the Headlines” held at the Politics and Prose,
Washington DC, US.
The event had in audience members
of her family, friends, colleagues, international institutions representatives.
The former Minister explained,
“When I set out to write, I knew I was going to write a book because I wanted
to write a sequel to my first book. You may not have seen it, it is also from
MIT Press called ‘Reforming the Unreformable: Lessons from Nigeria’. It
captures public policy lessons from the first time that I was in government as
finance minister and all the various reforms that were done with the economic
team that I worked with under President Obasanjo at the time. It talks about
our efforts to get debt relief etc but focused a lot on the macro economic
reforms.
“I thought after a second time in
office I will be writing a volume two which will focus on reforms in the real
sector – agriculture, telecommunications, and power. What exactly were the
reforms we did in those sectors and what were the successes and failures. So, I
actually set out to write volume two but when I sat down, what came out from my
laptop was different. I found myself putting down the story of what happened to
my mother. And that meant that somewhere deep inside … and as I was doing it I
was very emotional, very upset and I realised how upset I was at what had
happened and in many senses still I am.
“So, I wrote that chapter and I
showed it to my husband and he said, well, ‘you have to finish, why she was
kidnapped?’ And that led to the next chapter and the rest is history. So I
ended up writing a somewhat different book from what I had expected to write
and it became this book about fighting corruption.
“So, one of the reasons was a
very personal account of what happened to me and the reasons why it happened
and the stories about the different ways that people were trying to engender
leakages within the economy just came out. And that became this book. So that
was the first thing, to get out that story. As I was doing it, also all the
explanations for the personal attacks and the other attacks I suffered during
the time within and outside government, this came naturally as part of the
flow.
“Why did these things happened,
it all began to make sense. I needed to make sense of it to myself, I needed to
make sense of it to others, and I needed even to make sense of it to members of
the economic team. And I am very, very happy that today we have Dr. Nwanze Okodegbe,
right here. He was the Chief Economic Adviser to the president and he was a
member of that team. We saw a lot of odd things together. So explanation as to
why this thing happened, that is the first part.
“The second was that there is
just so much going on about corruption in emerging markets around. South Korea,
you saw what happened to the president being jailed for 24 years. Brazil, there
was so much noise about the car wash scandal. Venezuela, Mexico, Peru,
Malaysia, you name it, so many examples of emerging markets countries having
one discussion after the other about corruption. And as a development
economist, you know this is something central to the work we do, something we
worry about. And we just talked about fighting corruption and trying to make
sure that resources that should go to eradicating poverty, providing services
for poor people are not hijacked by those in society who would do that.
“The third reason was just one of
giving hope. When you hear about corruption there are rarely any success
stories action, people don’t focus on those who are fighting corruption and
what successes they made. They focus on more salacious aspects. How much people
have stolen, how much they have and what is happening to them. And the tough
fight that is really needed and the people who are doing it are not talked
about.
“In addition to that, there is
the tendency to focus as I said on the more sexy aspects in terms of who was
arrested, who did what to whom, how much did they steal and what is happening.
But the tough, tough work of really wanting to fight corruption of institution
building is not talked about. And I am very convinced as I have said to other
audiences, that the difference between people in my country and other African
countries or the US or Europe is much related. If they had the same weak
institutions that we have, people will also put their hands on the money. It is
because these countries have very strong institutions that you find fewer
leakages. There is corruption everywhere, whether it is in Europe or the US but
the degree is less with those countries with stronger institutions. That work
of building stronger institutions takes time. And that was partly what we did
in Nigeria, put down some few institutions that helped to block some leakages.
“So I also wanted to put that
down and draw people’s attention to the fact that it is the hard work that is
needed, whether it is strengthening the judiciary, whether it is putting in
place in the ministry of finance the kind of financial management systems that
are needed in order to manage your finances in modern fashion that doesn’t
allow leakages from the budget.”
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