Ngozi Okonjo Iweala-The Economic-Hit-Woman on the Prowl

Omoyele Sowore/New York

If any new dimension was introduced to the arrogance of power in Nigeria in recent times, it must have been the strongly worded rebuttal written by Nigeria’s expatriate finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo –Iweala. In a hastily written diatribe, she sought out, Simon Kolawole, a popular newspaper columnist with Thisday newspaper trying very hard to taint his position against “debt relief” that she and the President had told Nigerians would change their lives overnight. A member of the Obasanjo’s economic hack-pack, Prof. Charles Soludo was grinning to himself and also bragging that they would turn Nigeria into China while they leave South Africa to be the "Japan" of Africa. By Ngozi Iweala’s outburst, you can now understand what sort of “China” Professor Soludo was talking about. It must be the China which makes family members pay the state for bullets expended to kill people who dare dissent, it must be the China at the Tiananmen Square where students were mauled down in their thousands for daring to exercise “freedom of _expression” carelessly!

Mrs. Iweala titled her rebuttal “Debt Relief, Outdated Ideology and Common Sense”, nothing could be more appropriate except that the title of the rebuttal was exactly a description of her government’s stock in trade, she was pertinently and patently guilty of the same things she accused Simon Kolawole of, her first beef was that Kolawole had misinformed and misled the public through his article, that is a charge that Ngozi was guilty of, it was she and the president who have been ‘miseducating’, misleading and misinforming Nigerians about the real truth about the Paris Club  debt deal, the most glaring of which is the fact that Nigeria will cough out $12 billion  before the end of the year to a “Paris Club” loan shack, an amount of money that is coming from excess crude savings , money almost four times the annual budget of Nigeria which she and her co-travelers had refused to implement fully since she became the finance minister. As per her misrepresentation of facts about “sovereign debts”, let Ngozi go ask Professor Jeffrey Sachs, (a top economist who taught many years at Harvard University from where she graduated) why he too was complaining that Nigeria was shortchanged in the deal or ask Charles Soludo why he was Joseph Stiglitz disciple for so many years (Joseph Stiglitz was also VP of the World Bank) while he preached that countries should repudiate debts sovereign or not since they were unjust.

At the level of literary facts, the finance minister was very wrong about Nigeria’s problems, it is a well known fact that Nigeria’s problem is the incompetence, and heartlessness of its so-called leaders, in her own company a bunch of misorginistic hacks who principally believe that the only way to reform any economy is to inflict pain on its citizens at the pleasure a hotage -taking international agency  and not the size of our debt. I make bold to say anywhere that debt does not keep countries down otherwise the US, which erected a “debt counter” at the Union Square in New York should never have made any progress, according to what that counter tells the public, the US is the biggest debtor nation in the world, yet they have a vibrant economy. US owe both “sovereign and commercial” debts, as a matter of fact any type of debt you can think of, the US owes.

There was also deliberate falsehood in her assertions about what Kolawole was advocating, which was that Nigeria should negotiate its debts to $15 billion and then start to pay gradually over 15 years with a proviso for zero interest and zero penalty in case of a slight default.

 

 It was misleading and slanderous to lie against Kolawole the way she did,  the requests he made are not the same as was claimed and that cannot be the same thing as throwing all our savings to the Paris Club, which common sense tell me  will lead back to where we departed in the first instance- a revolving door of debt accumulation!

 

The most disturbing piece about her rebuttal is her key reference to freedom of _expression as though it something that is conditionally given to journalists or citizens by the government in Nigeria, it is appalling that a Harvard graduate thinks of freedom of _expression as a right that is abused when someone exercises it. As though, the Nigerian public were suppose to rejoice that there is some of it that the government had permitted, she was also sounding as though it could be taken away anytime soon. Well, Ma’am I have some information for you, Nigerian journalists and many citizens have always demonstrated that they have that freedom, you cannot lend it to them, it cannot be negotiated, or rescheduled, it is not a debt any Nigerian owes their rulers.

 

On the issue of “debt relief” ,  the real winners are the Paris Club and the rest of the Western economic mafia that set up the debt in the first place, it is on record that we have paid more than the origin debt over and now over again, it is because of this debt that our economic lives were taken over by the World Bank and the IMF, of course they got our back against the wall to the extent that they could lord Ngozi Iwealla over us and force us to pay her in a currency of a country ten thousand miles away from us and the debt deal “brokered” by her, the reason why she thinks everybody else is stupid and must be shut down, is the returns on the “investment” made by shoving her down Nigeria’s throat. Now, she got the Paris Club the best payday in debt repayment history. We are paying back a debt we never owed and out of the windows go our freedom of _expression with it.