There
is a telling anecdote in the epilogue of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s account of her
second stint presiding over the mercurial finances of Africa’s largest economy.
After she had left Nigeria and office, police acting on the tip of a supposed
whistleblower raided her house in Abuja in search of cash hoards. When they
found some bags in the basement, they thought they had hit the jackpot. Only
the bags turned out to contain four years’ worth of newspaper clippings. No
money.
One
of the most insidious tactics deployed by vested interests against those
obstructing corruption is to spread malicious rumours that cast doubts on the
integrity of their target. Long before US president Donald Trump had
popularised the terms “fake news” and “alternative facts”, Nigeria’s gangster
politicians and profiteers had honed that dark art.
Mrs
Okonjo-Iweala, a former managing director of the World Bank who paved the way
for the writedown of Nigeria’s historic debts as finance minister between 2003
and 2006 — and served again under the hapless administration of Goodluck
Jonathan between 2011 and 2015 — has been relentlessly targeted: a sure sign
that she trod on powerful toes.
Her
second book is partly a bid to set the record straight in the wake of venomous
allegations that trailed her out of office when Mr Jonathan lost elections in
2015 and the government changed hands. It is also a courageous account of the
battle against graft in Nigeria. Between the lines, the book also serves as a
diagnosis of what is wrong and a prescription for how it could be put right.
There
are tragicomic moments. One is when Mrs Okonjo-Iweala puts paid to a duplicate
cargo tracking system at the ports tailored to line pockets. This act rebounds
on her when she finds she can no longer enter the president’s residence via the
VIP entrances. Even in the company of the visiting IMF chief, Christine
Lagarde, she is forced to make detours through the gardens.
Often,
the counter-attacks were far more sinister. Mrs Okonjo-Iweala’s 83-year-old
mother was kidnapped and bound for days at the suspected behest of oil
marketers, whose fraudulent subsidy claims the minister had blocked. Their
ransom demand was that she resign on television. She did not. Soon after, she was
warned of a plot to attack her personally. She recalls one meeting that the
president asked her to attend with a group of businessmen from Abu Dhabi, who
promised $2bn in loans dressed up as an investment in ship building.
“The
presidential adviser had the I-told-you-so look, as though once you get this
woman involved, then this won’t work.” The adviser was right. She blocked what
looked to her like an attempt to replicate a 2013 fiasco that had seen the
state of Mozambique saddled with hundreds of millions of dollars of odious debt
in return for a redundant tuna fishing fleet.
The
book may be a self-defence, but it is not self-congratulatory. Much of it
describes the relentless task reformers take on when they seek to plug the
leaks springing from the state. There are ghost workers and pension scams,
collusion between contractors and civil servants in bogus debt, and near
constant arm wrestling with legislators and state governors to prevent waste.
All
the time, income to the Treasury, most of which comes from oil, was being
squeezed — on one side, by industrial scale theft from pipelines and state
company accounts; on the other, by multibillion-dollar fraud in the allocation
of fuel subsidies.
As
a result, one of the world’s foremost development experts spent most of her
time mounting rearguard actions to prevent Africa’s leading crude producer
going bankrupt in an oil boom. “The government’s stance against corruption
delivered mixed messages,” she writes with considerable understatement.
Friends
warned her not to work for Mr Jonathan, fearing she would lend credibility to a
government that did not merit it and sacrifice her own hard-won reputation. She
still has her own misgivings, mostly about the dangers faced by her family.
Nevertheless
she believes it was worth it. Billions went missing. But by her own estimation,
finance ministry interventions saved the country around $9bn directly. As
another Nigerian reformer put it to me once: “Had she not been there, it would
have been much, much worse.”
Available
at Timbooktoo tel 4494345
