Madam has a tall CV no doubt. She has proved herself on the international scene and is arguably Nigeria’s best brain out there. I join the millions in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world to congratulate her on her recent appointment as the DG of the WTO.
Madam served Nigeria as Finance Minister in 2 terms as follows: 15 July 2003 – 21 June 2006, under President Obasanjo; and from 17 August 2011 – 29 May 2015, under President Jonathan.
She all together, served Nigeria as the Chief Economic Manager for 7 years, perhaps longer than any other office holder in our history.
Given Madam’s huge CV and pedigree working with some of the world’s most organised institutions, one would have expected much more from her. But I am constrained to say that we did not get her full strength as our Chief Economic Manager and below is my take to a debate in a WhatsApp group which I would like to share with you.
Let me give an analogy – if you have a technician of a rickety car that is not making progress and we hire a more competent engineer to take over, we need to see remarkable differences in how the engineer is going to deal with the situation. If he ends up managing the rickety car same as the technician, then what gain did we get? We will expect the engineer to, in the short term, begin changing parts in the vehicle to improve performance and in the medium term, change the vehicle all together and in the long term, begin to look for alternatives to even deliver far more!
This is where I fault Madam’s tenure as our chief economic manager. There were low hanging fruits like simply preparing the budget on time that she missed. You cannot come from a high-end organisation like the World Bank and don’t leave any legacies. If today we could reference that in her time Nigeria got budgets ready in time, then that will be a legacy that stands to her credit.
Our budgets continued to be loaded with recurrent expenditure leaving peanuts for capital expenditure when the nation was badly in need of infrastructural development to boost the economy. Budget releases continued to be delayed or never got released.
The central bank under her leadership continued to offer double digit treasury bills rates, contradicting her fiscal policies in pursuit of economic growth.
Nigeria’s economy continued to be mono-dependent on oil without diversification.
Corruption continued unhindered, especially during the Jonathan years. She did nothing to the scam called official and parallel markets of the foreign exchange regime, thereby perpetuating the biggest corruption scheme by a government in Africa, second only to the fuel subsidy scam!
Coming to fuel subsidy, again you would have expected that she put her analytical mind to better use. Instead of fighting to audit the scam called subsidy which was a monumental failure as the auditors joined in the scam, why did she not influence the government to change strategy, e.g. allow a parallel market where private importers compete with the government and allow citizens to make their economic decisions on who to patronise? With time, the private importers’ cost per litre would have crashed below the government’s as the competition became tougher with more entry and erosion of super profits. The government would have naturally gone out of business, and with it the scam that had consumed trillions of naira from us. By now the private sector would have built many modular refineries to feed the private sector run fuel sector! This is the same strategy that was used in telecoms where MTN et al were allowed to compete with NITEL, and Nigerians choose where to go, and NITEL died a natural death. Same strategy has happened in aviation, media, education, healthcare etc, where the private sector is competing with the government. If she pulled that off, today we will be saying she solved the Nigerian fuel supply issue and the subsidy scam.
Madam could have influenced the government to read the riot act, and threaten sanctions to the oil companies to stop burning Nigeria’s gas and convert it into electricity. All over the world, the oil companies fear governments because, with a stroke of a pen governments can sack the oil companies and ask them to leave and they can’t take the oil which is in the ground with them! She laughed and handled the oil companies with kid gloves, knowing that the biggest catalyst to our economic growth is electricity. If she pulled this one off, we would today be crediting her with solving our electricity problems!
I struggle to see the structural changes that she made to the economy, given the capacity of her CV. If she ended up like the technician managing what she inherited and left, I don’t think we got full value for her worth!
It is left to be seen whether the non-spectacular performance of Mrs Iweala was as result of the Nigerian system that snuffs life out of appointees, or Madam simply was overwhelmed with the challenges she faced and could not rise above them, thinking out of the box to deliver us from our economic woes.
If she pushed for reforms and was not heard or ignored, one would have expected her to walk to power, speak truth to power and give notice to quit! Obasanjo may have been a tough nut for her to crack, but in Goodluck Jonathan she would have gotten everything she wanted, and today her legacies will be there for everyone to see. As it stands, we cannot point to anything in our economy and say that’s what Mrs Iweala left for us!
I wish Madam well in her new job!
