Lunch with the FT: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
octogenarian mother kidnapped at the behest of fraudulent fuel marketers, whose initial ransom demand was, she says, for her resignation.
At the moment, however, her detractors from the new government and parts of the business community are noisier. They argue that she was at best ineffectual; at worst, by sticking with a government that was rotten, she went to the dark side herself. “Which dark side?” she says, laughing. “They [her detractors] are the ones on the dark side and I will frustrate them from morning till night . . . I am the same simple person with the same simple tastes,” she adds, now tucking into a simple chicken tagine.
The most insidious thing a corrupt person can do to someone who is fighting corruption, she continues, is to paint that person as corrupt. “It is unimaginable to most of these people looking for power that you would actually want to serve your government for reasons other than grabbing money. Because that is what they themselves want. But there are many dedicated Nigerians serving day in, day out, unsung heroes, including in our armed forces. Those are the people that make me tick.” She adds: “I am a misfit and a happy misfit. Nigeria needs more misfits.” Nevertheless, I weigh in, there is a perception at home and abroad that last year she sat on the fence over the “missing billions”, a fiasco that helped seal Jonathan’s fate. Lamido Sanusi, governor of the central bank at the time, had exposed gaping holes, allegedly worth more than $1bn a month, in revenues remitted to the federal accounts by the NNPC, the state oil company. He was suspended from his position.
“I was on top of this thing,” Okonjo-Iweala says, insisting the only disagreement between her and Sanusi was over the scale of the discrepancies and the approach he took to exposing these without first consulting her. “Month after month, we were recording the amounts . . . that fell short. We have the records. So we didn’t disagree that amounts were missing - not missing but unaccounted for,” she says, adding that she spearheaded moves to subject the allegations to an external audit.
At this point, the son of the restaurant owner stops by to check all is well. Inadvertently, he delivers a reminder of how dimly perceived Nigeria’s outgoing president was abroad. “I am very happy for you guys that you got rid of Goodluck Jonathan,” he says, with a beaming smile. As I explain that my guest is one of Jonathan’s top cabinet members, Okonjo-Iweala steps in: “Really? Hold on so I can hear him out,” she says, laughing, and launching another spirited defence.
Women tend to have more of a life outside the office. They move on rapidly. They have other lives. That is the same way I feel. I can move on and I have a life
In 2003, when Okonjo-Iweala first left her job as vice-president at the World Bank in Washington to take up a post in Obasanjo’s government, she says it was overwhelming how much there was to do. Nigeria had been run down for generations and every institution needed to be rebuilt.
“I said to myself the first day I sat in my office, ‘My God, this is crazy, you made the worst mistake.’ And I had to get a hold of myself, and say, ‘If you have all these problems, the best way to solve them is not to give in, you have to prioritise which ones to solve and which will have the biggest impact.’”
Lifting the debt overhang gave Nigeria new life, as did setting up a savings account to manage swings in the price of oil. Even so, she says, “I never planned to go back because my experience the [first] time was not a bed of roses.”
That she did so, in 2011, was out of a sense of duty and love of country - something she says her father “dinged into her head”. She says she grew up being told that education was a privilege. Her own - in Nigeria, then in the US at Harvard, and later with a doctorate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - placed her in a position to help her country.
She believes she has. The way Nigeria manages its oil - an area she had little power over - remains in need of major structural overhaul, she says. But in other areas - mortgage financing, cleaning up payrolls, reforming the pension system and setting up a Nigerian development bank - she is adamant that there has been progress. “Even those attacking me from the new government will find these are things that are good for Nigeria and they should not for personal reasons try to destroy them.”
The attacks have made her thin-skinned at times. But Okonjo-Iweala’s character was also partly forged in conflict. As mint tea arrives for her and Arabic coffee for me, she reminisces about growing up in the late 1960s during the Biafran civil war. Her father was an officer in Chukwuemeka Ojukwu’s separatist Igbo forces and the family had to move from town to town as federal soldiers closed in. “Those were some of the most difficult years,” she says. “I learnt how to eat one meal a day or no meals. We didn’t have meat. I saw children dying around me.”
In subsequent battles, her family has always supported her, she says, particularly at the World Bank, when she had to juggle a fast-developing career with the demands of motherhood. “You have just come home from some high-level meeting with G20 finance ministers, or from chairing some big meeting on some weighty project at the World Bank, and all your children want to know is, ‘Mummy, is there any food in this house? Have you cooked?’”
As for her future, she plays her cards close to her chest but believes women find it easier to move on to new things than men. When she was at the World Bank, she says, male colleagues who had left repeatedly came back to wander the corridors, in search of consulting jobs. “Their whole identity and everything is tied up with the institution.”
Women tend to have more of a life outside the office, she says. “They move on rapidly. They have other lives. That is the same way I feel. I can move on and I have a life. A rather interesting one and I am looking forward to it so much.”
Wallis writes on African affairs for London’s Financial Times