Tag: Okonjo-Iweala

MINISTER of Finance Ngozi Onkojo-Iweala said yesterday that she is not scared of President Muhammadu Buhari probing her.

Okonjo-Iweala spoke in a statement while responding to what she considered an attack on her by Edo state Governor Adams Oshiomhole.

She said: “There is no substance in the wild allegations that any money is missing from the account or that finances of the country under Okonjo-Iweala’s watch have not been well managed.”

The minister added that she “has no reason to fear Buhari. Those who cannot adequately explain what they did with the resources of their states and are begging for bailout are those who should to be scared.”

Okonjo-Iweala denied claims by Oshiomhole that she has been speaking out lately because of the “fear of Buhari”.

According to her, “if there is any minister whose voice has been strong on the right issues over the past four years, it is Okonjo-Iweala.”

She said has no apologies for insisting that a claim of N159 billion for Forex differentials by the marketers out of a total bill of N200 billion should go through an additional verification process.

“When 80 per cent of a subsidy claim is made up of Forex differentials and not the value of the amount of fuel supplied, the right and proper thing to do is to take extra steps to ensure that the country is not being cheated. That is what Okonjo-Iweala did,” she said.

On Oshiomhole’s statement that she “must disclose to the nation the full details of subsidy payments made to oil marketers in the last four years”, Okonjo-Iweala described the statement as “astonishing given the fact that every payment made to the marketers has been published in the media and widely disseminated through all news channels.”

She stressed that apart from the monthly publication of allocations to the federal, state and local governments, the Federal Ministry of Finance also published SURE-P receipts and distribution to different tiers, details of payments to oil marketers and other information.

 She queried if the governor has demonstrated the same level of openness in his management of the affairs of Edo State.

The country’s sordid economic realities should be an embarrassment  to any finance minister and an international bureaucrat in the mould of Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole feels the former World Bank Managing Director has a lot of explanations to make as Coordinating Minister under whose watch the economy “collapsed”.

AS  the country transits from one democratic dispensation to another, there is no gainsaying that the state of the nation’s economy is the focal point, especially with the unending fuel scarcity which is gradually grinding the nation to a halt.

No doubt, the best person to explain the state of the economy today is Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy (CME), whose management of the nation’s resources, in these past four years, has elicited different reactions from Nigerians.

As a member of the National Economic Council (NEC), I had spoken out at different times at NEC meetings and even in public on the way the economy is managed under Dr. Okonjo-Iweala. Again, I want to share my views with the public on some of the issues affecting the nation.

Recently, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala, as the CME, has been all over the place, pointing in the wrong directions and blaming everybody but herself for the parlous state of the economy.  Coming after her deafening silence on the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) audit of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) crude oil sales and receipts, which revealed massive abuse of public trust and stealing of our common patrimony in high places under her watch and the government she serves. It is quite intriguing that with barely few days left in office, she has suddenly woken up from her slumber to realise that oil marketers have been all along falsifying subsidy claims and defrauding the nation of billions of naira and dollars.

This latter day “policy activism” on her part deserves closer scrutiny and interrogation. Perhaps for fear of the incoming President, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, come tomorrow, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala is now compelled to disclose to Nigerians that a cabal is holding the country and the government to ransom.  Beside the abuse of the subsidy regime, we will insist that Dr. Okonjo-Iweala also comes clean on some other critical issues that demand accountability from her and her office.

According to the minister, after paying N156 billion to the oil marketers, the marketers came with another claim of N200 billion, which includes a N159 billion coming not from actual supply of fuel but from exchange rate differentials.  This resulted in a prolonged bickering that led to the current nation-wide fuel scarcity and total black-out.

The question to ask is: how come that it is now, for the first time, that we are hearing from the CME about fraudulent claims by the oil marketers amounting to billions of naira? At what point did the CME realise that these fraudulent and similar claims are going on? When did it start? Is it just recently or it has been going on all along? These questions are pertinent because we know that if the Petroleum Products Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) were doing its work diligently, all claims by oil marketers would be vetted on a daily basis before their payments are processed by the Ministry of Finance. Hence, there should be no dispute about the amount due to oil marketers at any point in time.

What the foregoing, therefore, suggests is that all along, the PPPRA, the Ministry of Finance and the oil marketers have been involved in an unholy alliance, in the mismanagement of the fuel subsidy regime and in the process defrauding the nation of its revenues.

The Minister of Finance cannot stop at simply shedding crocodile tears about fraudulent claims by oil marketers. Having found her voice, thanks to the fear of Gen. Buhari, it is very necessary that Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala takes one more crucial step at full disclosure. She must disclose to the nation the full details of subsidy payments made to oil marketers in the last four years, including the parameters used to calculate the subsidies. This also must include how much of the subsidy was paid to the NNPC since the NNPC is also being accused of making the same fraudulent claims. In other words, the minister of finance should be prepared to provide more information and make more explanations regarding the management or mismanagement of subsidy payments in the last four years.

The squandering of the Excess Crude Account (ECA) is another area in which the minister of finance should come out, shed more light and put all the cards on the table. During several meetings of the NEC, which has all the governors as members and with the vice president as chairman, I had cause to observe that the state governments, who are joint owners of the ECA, with the Federal Government, were not being adequately briefed on the status of the account.

Accordingly, I had consistently demanded from the minister a transparent and periodic disclosure of accruals to the ECA, at least on monthly basis. I had argued that even village associations do make available their financial statements from time to time, and as NEC, I see no reason we will not even do better.

All these years, my pleas fell on deaf ears. The minister consistently failed to apprise the NEC with critical information on the management and operations of the ECA in black and white, when she eventually got to do that, it was usually verbal and casual, and hardly meaningful enough for decision-making.

 The CME also developed the penchant for deliberately avoiding NEC’s crucial meetings, which many saw as a ploy to keep the governors in the dark. And when she is not around, no one gets any information, as if she was running a one-man show.

Coming to the specifics, it is interesting to note that by December 2012, the ECA had a balance of over $10 billion. This has been depleted to $2.07 billion by May 2015, according to the minister. Between January 2013 and May 2015, not more than $4 billion was shared from the ECA. Indeed, the last time any money was shared from the ECA was in May 2013.

For six clear months in 2013, the
NEC did not meet, an act many
believed was contrived to conceal information on the operations of the ECA. When eventually the NEC met after those six months, the minister reported that the ECA had dropped to $4 billion. This prompted me to ask a very pertinent question: if the closing balance of the ECA as at December 2012 was over $10 billion and that for three years running Nigeria’s budget have been based on the average of between $77 and $79 benchmark while the average price of Nigeria’s crude has been $108 per barrel, suggesting an average of about $30 per barrel, how come that there was no accretion to the ECA? Indeed, based on a rough estimate, we should be expecting not less than $30 billion accretion based on the official oil exports of 2.3 million barrels per day. The question which Dr. Okonjo-Iweala should answer, therefore, is why did Nigeria not make any savings during the unprecedented boom years from 2011 to August 2014?

The explanation offered by the minister, which was as usual, oral, and of course, far from satisfactory, was hinged on three factors, namely: (a) because of oil theft not much accrued to the ECA; (b) part of ECA was also used to fund petroleum subsidy and SURE-P (Subsidy Reinvestment Programme (SURE-P); and (c) part of the ECA was also shared to the three tiers of government at the request of the state governments.

Her claims in my view are untenable, fraudulent, illegal, unconstitutional and clear breach of extant financial regulations.

In the first place, ECA is not an exclusive preserve of the Federal Government. It belongs to all the tiers of government: federal, state and local governments. Moreover, the minister has no power whatsoever to spend monies without the express consent and approval of the state governments. Until questions were asked as to the status of the ECA, no state government was put in the picture about the fact that money was taken from the ECA, why it was; and for what purpose.

It is also a fact known to all that under the 1999 Constitution (as amended), only the National Assembly (NASS) has the power to appropriate monies for subsidy. Similarly, nobody spends money that is not appropriated or in excess of what was appropriated without recourse to the NASS.

And with regards to funding subsidies and SURE-P from ECA, there was no indication anywhere that NASS authorised the use of ECA for that purpose.  The amount in question is also evidently far in excess of what the country can consume of petroleum products, even if every Nigerian is a consumer of petroleum products. In this regard, therefore, the minister has a lot of explanation to make, particularly in the manner she knowingly enriched oil marketers and condoned abuse of due process in the operations of ECA.

Regarding the funding of SURE-P, the understanding from the outset was that SURE-P would be funded from the difference between new and old prices of petroleum products, after the partial removal of the subsidies in 2012. Why the minister should fund SURE-P from the ECA is inexplicable, because it is a complete violation of the law and due process. In this regard, it is necessary that Dr. Okonjo-Iweala makes available to the nation SURE-P’s financial statements, indicating clearly the sources and uses of funds.

The minister also made allusion to the sharing of the ECA as requested by the state governments. This is obviously one-sided and being economical with the truth. What Nigerians are asking is not what was shared but the whole story about the operations of the ECA itself. At any rate, considering that not more than $4 billion was shared, this is not adequate to explain how the country went from $22 billion at the end of 2007 to the current paltry $2.07 billion balance in the ECA in 2015, bearing in mind, the oil boom period from 2011 to 2014.

For the sake of transparency and accountability, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala has a duty to herself, to the nation and the international community to account for what transpired in the ECA by giving full disclosure of how much accrued to ECA on a month-by-month basis and the subsequent outflows.

On the question of oil theft, I can proudly say I was among those whose probing questions compelled NEC to set up a committee to investigate the problem of crude oil theft. It became quite apparent in our interaction with security agencies that crude oil theft has indeed, become official.

Some of the military officers confessed that whenever they apprehend oil thieves on the high sea, a telephone call from ‘above’ will compromise all their efforts. When we suggested that any ship caught in the act be immediately destroyed, we were told that that will pollute the waters. Hence, till date not a single person was caught or prosecuted on account of this heinous crime against the nation.

I recall during one of NEC’s meetings with the vice president presiding, one of the governors was on record, as having expressed concerns that the inability of the government to deal with oil theft might be because the proceeds of such a crime flow into political coffers as one of the means to compromise the 2015 election. Still, under her watch, the problem persisted; the country keeps hemorrhaging and all we get are banal excuses and obfuscation of our concrete realities.

The recent nationwide fuel and
energy crisis, adjudged the
worst in the economic history of Nigeria, is merely a reflection of the gross mismanagement of the economy which characterised Dr. Okonjo-Iweala’s tenure since 2011.  As we speak, there is a widespread and popular feeling that she has presided over the wanton mismanagement of the Nigerian economy since the inauguration of the democratic order in 1999. Aspects of this could be seen from the reckless borrowing and debt accumulation since 2011, as well as the manner in which government’s recurrent budget has been continuously funded through borrowings, while about a quarter of the national budget is allocated to debt servicing.

 Under Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, government borrowings were programmed to support wasteful expenditures. In the same vein, budgets were so poorly formulated and skewed towards consumption such that 90 per cent of budgetary releases were meant for recurrent expenditures, which is injurious to the economy.

There is the urgent need to launch an audit trail of the sources and uses of the borrowed funds we have accumulated in the last five years amounting to over N8 trillion. It does not make sense to accumulate such huge debts without a tangible infrastructure project that we can point to as evidence of fund utilisation.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala was quick to blame state governments for not paying salaries but the situation with the Federal Government employees is even worse. Things have gone so bad that even salaries of federal employees have to be paid by recourse to irresponsible borrowing from the capital markets.

Let me state for the record at this juncture that while Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, as Minister of Finance is borrowing recklessly to pay salaries of federal employees, in Edo State, we are paying salaries as and when due, including teachers employed by local government areas without recourse to borrowing.

 The implication of this reckless borrowing on the part of the minister is that the future of workers’ savings in the form of pensions is clearly at stake. It means that there is no guarantee that workers and pensioners will have value for their hard-earned savings in the future.

In the first place, she has effectively withdrawn the entire savings of workers meant for pensions through issuance of bonds to fund payment of workers’ salaries and other wasteful spending.

Secondly, excessive borrowing has devalued the naira. At the time Dr. Okonjo-Iweala assumed duty, the exchange rate was within the region of N100/N116 to $1, now it has been officially devalued to about N200 to one dollar. This has done incalculable damage to the value of savings of the pensioners, and when inflation is factored in, it is clear that by the time the Nigerian pensioner accesses his savings, the value will have been drastically reduced, no thanks to the gross mismanagement of the Nigerian economy by the minister.

In this regard, the minister
should swallow her pride and
admit that her tenure as minister of finance and CME is a total disaster and colossal failure as far as economic management is concerned. In the same vein, given her so-called background as an international bureaucrat with the World Bank, our present sordid economic realities present a huge embarrassment to the country, particularly her penchant for violating financial regulations and all tenets of fiscal responsibility.

Finally, I will like to briefly touch on the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF). It is understood from the law establishing the SWF that the state governments are part of the decision-making regarding the operations of the Fund. However, till date, no state government has any idea about how the Fund operates or how it is managed. Like the ECA, its management is opaque.

The only information we stumbled upon as state governments is that the minister of finance had unilaterally and without recourse to NEC and the state governments, withdrawn money from the SWF to fund consultancy services in the name of the Second Niger Bridge.

 In this regard, I wish to remind the minister that before she leaves the stage, she is duty bound to inform the state governments, as critical stakeholders about the financial status of the SWF backed up by convincing evidence.

There is too much of secrecy surrounding the management of our public finance. The earlier the minister comes clean on the management of our financial resources, the better for all of us, so that the incoming government will derive the baseline from which to launch its economic recovery strategies to combat our present morass. This is the irreducible minimum that is expected of any minister of finance worth his/her salt. Otherwise, for now, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala’s tenure is a bile in the dish.

• Adams Aliyu Oshiomhole is, a frontline unionist is Governor of Edo State.

  •Calls N159bn subsidy payment claim fraudulent

The federal government is spoiling for a fresh showdown with oil importers over subsidy payment.

This is coming as there is no end in sight yet for the current face off between the two sides that has grounded the nation for several days now.

Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala yesterday accused them of submitting to government suspicious payment claims to the tune of N159billion in exchange rate differentials.

The payment claims, according to her, reeked of fraud.

She told reporters at a farewell meeting in Abuja that she would not approve payment of the claims unless verified by the relevant authorities.

“Marketers were asking for N159 billion for exchange rate differentials from the outstanding N200 billion. There has been so much fraud and scam so I have refused to sign for that money but have agreed that a committee be set up involving the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to verify marketers’ claims,” she said.

”Marketers just want to make Nigerians suffer,” she added.

The minister also slammed the marketers for allegedly blackmailing Nigerians and asked the people to resist.

Insisting that the current fuel scarcity has nothing to do with paying the marketers, she said: “They are making a lot of money from black market activities, people should rise up against the blackmail of oil marketers.

“I will not pay the N159 billion without verification, Nigerians should not allow themselves to be blackmailed.”

The minister said there was something curious about the supply of and payment for Premium Motor Spirit (PMS).

Her words: “I cannot say that the problem is due to not paying marketers, the process of paying marketers is always a rolling process and there has never been a time government reduced its financial obligation to marketers to zero.

“In a year where so much effort has been made to pay marketers including prioritizing their payment as subsidy claims in favour of other financial obligation like paying contractors, yet fuel scarcity still persists at this  particular point in time suggests that something suspicious is happening.”

She responded to the claim by Vice President-elect, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, that the Jonathan administration will be leaving a $60 billion debt burden for   the in-coming government.

She said that Nigeria’s total debt indeed stands at $63.7 billion but it is the totality  of all the debts incurred by successive  governments since 1960.

“No $60 billion was accumulated under the Jonathan administration,” she said.

She added: “Current debt stock includes both federal and state governments debts made up of $9.7 billion external debt or 15 per cent of total debt stock and $54 billion or 85 per cent domestic debt stock.

“Nigeria is still repaying the multilateral loans it collected on concessionary terms with as long as 40 years maturity periods.”

The breakdown of the accumulated domestic stock is  $18.575 billion outstanding by 2007, $17.3 billion accumulated between 2008 and 2011 and $18 billion accumulated between 2012 and 2015.

“This is so because of something that happened in 2010 because of the salary increment under Yar’Adua administration which increased civil servants salaries by 53 per cent.

“Those bonds have been rolled over and government had to weather the difficulties because resources to fund such increase were not there,” she said.

She described Nigeria’s debt to GDP ratio as one of the lowest in the world.

On the domestic debt stock, she said 20 per cent is owed by state governments with Lagos state having an external debt burden of N1.169 trillion while the balance of 80 per cent belongs to the federal government.

Reviewing her tenure, Okonjo-Iweala said she has no regrets in serving the country and declared that anyone called upon to serve Nigeria should consider it a privilege.

“Some people criticise from afar but some came home in spite of challenges to serve,” she said.

She faulted suggestions that the economy was mismanaged, saying: “The economy is reacting to the forces of demand and supply but there is hope for the country. Only that people will have to make sacrifices.

“The out-going government, she said, achieved a lot but she lamented that “there are very serious attempts to rewrite history.”

Meanwhile, there is still no respite for motorists and commuters across the country as the fuel scarcity persisted yesterday.

Most filling stations remained shut and only a few managed to sell but at exorbitant prices.

On the other hand black markets continue to thrive with operators charging as much as N350 per litre in parts of Lagos.

 

She was invited to put the country on a sound economic footing as Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy. But, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s cure has been worse than the malady. In this analysis, Assistant Editor  NDUKA CHIEJINA describes the ex-World Bank Managing Director as a heroine abroad and a villain at home.

UNDER Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s two terms as Finance Minister, the economy witnessed boom and burst. As a member of the Federal Executive Council, she has been applauded and vilified, both locally and internationally.

In April 2014, Fitch Ratings affirmed its robust ‘BB’ sovereign rating of Nigeria with a stable outlook to demonstrate that the country was on the right economic trajectory.

It cited some positive features of the economy to support its position. These included: improving stability in the economy after the suspension of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi as Central Bank of Nigeria Governor (CBN), the perceived boost of the Excess Crude Account (ECA); rising oil production and improved efforts to tackle pipeline vandalism.

However, by March 2015, the same Fitch Ratings reversed the country’s outlook from stable to negative over what it described as political uncertainty in keenly contested elections and other issues expected to follow the polls, including  falling oil prices at the international market.

Fitch cautioned that the economic performance could be weakened partly due to the erosion of fiscal and external buffers and over-dependence on oil revenue.

Nigeria’s ratings, Fitch said, “are constrained by weak governance, as measured by the World Bank, low per capita income, even after the 89 per cent uplift to 2013 GDP due to rebasing and vulnerability of public finances and reserves to oil price volatility.”

A step forward, two backward

Under the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, she successfully used her connection with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to secure debt relief for the country. But, it was like pulling down the house she built because  in her second coming, Nigeria is being weighed down by the N12 trillion owed local and foreign creditors.

Each time that Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala and her team get foreign loan, they tell Nigerians the facility is secured under concessionary terms with long moratorium. The team is always quick to add that the repayment period is convenient and at single-digit interest rate.

That is where it all ends. The finance minister and her team have never for once advertised the details for public debate to ascertain if the terms are actually favourable.

Perceived outside the country as a reform-minded economist, back at home, her reforms and policies have left much to be desired.

One of such reforms was the attempt to rid the civil service of ghost workers. Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala promoted treasury reforms to improve efficiency in public sector accounting and finance.

Reforms without result

Some of these included: the Treasury Single Accounts (TSA); the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS); the Government Integrated and Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) and the adoption of the International Public Sector Accounting System (IPSAS).

The measures were said to have blocked the leakage of over N60 billion from the treasury that would have been paid to ghost workers. Nobody   was fingered and sanctioned as culprit. So, the reform was at best, sweeping the dust under the rug.

At the height of the crude oil price slump, the minister listed the areas where fresh revenue would be generated to include taxes on luxury items; stoppage of abuses of investments incentives such as exemptions and waivers and diversification of the economy.

The stoppage of waivers, which she defended at the TEDxEuston as a government policy “where we give incentives to industries or business people to spur them to invest in the economy” was described as “a bunch of corruption” because they only favoured individuals, rather than a sector.

It is certain that President Goodluck Jonathan will bequeath the controversial waiver granted to Indian traders on rice importation to the incoming Muhammadu Buhari administration.

The Indians hide under the duty relief to import above the approved quantity and bring in other goods not covered by the waiver.

The waiver scandal has pitted the Nigerian Customs Service against the finance minister following claims that the nation is being robbed of the much-needed revenue through these waivers.

Going by the claims of the Agriculture Minister, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, those who imported rice above their approved quotas  are owing the Federal Government N36 billion.

But, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala was always quick to say that the economy was in good shape whenever critics warned that the economy was nose-diving.

Subsidy controversy

In 2012, an attempt by the Federal Government to remove petrol subsidy was resisted by Nigerians.

Today, the Federal Government and Major Oil Marketers Association of Nigeria (MOMAN) are locked in a subsidy controversy that has disrupted the fuel supply chain for more than a month. The parties cannot agree on the actual outstanding figures. The minister says it is N130 billion, but MOMAN insists it is N200 billion.

Nigerians may live with the lingering fuel shortage beyond the May 29 handover date as stakeholders in the distribution network have predicted that the scarcity will not end in two weeks.

Lack of faith

What the current fuel scarcity has exposed is that MOMAN has little or no faith in the Sovereign Debt Note (SDN) that the minister purportedly directed the Debt Management Office (DMO) to issue to them as against the hard cash they have been used to.

After a four-hour talk penultimate Monday, a meeting between the minister and MOMAN ended in a deadlock.

The implication of MONAN’s lack of faith in the SDN is that other holders of government bonds and notes may have second thoughts on these instruments,  further denting the fragile credibility of the notes.

For four years, the President Jonathan administration paid lip service to the provision of affordable housing. After saying that the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN) as having failed in its mandate to deliver on mass housing through mortgage financing, with a national housing deficit of 17 million, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala engineered the creation of the Nigerian Mortgage Refinancing Company (NMRC) to provide affordable housing for Nigerians.

After the first 10,000 selected for the scheme, the minister said about 2,000 have been able to secure mortgages to own their houses, the dream of owning a house through affordable mortgage financing  is now fast disappearing.

The reason for this is that the government fixed the interest rates for mortgage. It believed that the Primary Mortgage Institutions (PMIs) will tag along without due consideration to market variables. It also tried to play  on the fact that business owners are short-term investors, who are eager to recoup their investments at the shortest time. Most of the 10,000 NMRC potential house owners are still searching for PMIs to fund their house ownership dreams.

Failing to plan

One legacy that haunts Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala as the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy is the fall of the naira. For two years, the world new that the United States (U.S.) was going to unleash its shale oil into the market, a development  that would compel America  to shelve further purchase of crude from its less strategic crude oil sellers in favour of its oil.

Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala has never shied away from hitting governors for mounting pressure on the Federal Government to share the Excess Crude Account (ECA). In her argument, the monies should be left for the rainy day.

The rainy day is here but the Federal Government which got the lion’s share of the ECA has nothing to fall back on. Many thought a wise manager of the economy would have kept the federal share of the funds to justify her position.

Other components of the foreign reserve were squandered and when the inevitable happened, the CBN was left to scramble to save the naira by using the foreign reserve. Nigerians from all walks of life lost humongous amounts of money to this recklessness.

At the January 2015 Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) meeting, it was disclosed that a paltry $2 billion was left in the ECA and since then, the government has been silent on the exact amount in the ECA. The foreign reserve is in the neighbourhood of $30 billion which might finance six months of imports.

Scathing remarks

Recently, former CBN Governor Prof. Charles Chukwuma Soludo took Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala to the cleaners, with his analysis of the economy under her stewardship.

 Soludo said: “Under you as Minister of Finance and Coordinator for the Economy, the basket of our national treasury is leaking profusely from all sides. Just a few illustrations! First, you admit that ‘oil theft’ has reduced oil output from the average 2.3 – 2.4 million barrels per day (mpd) to 1.95mpd (meaning that at least 350,000 to 450,000 barrels per day are being ‘stolen’.

“On the average of 400,000 per day and the oil prices over the past four years, it comes to about $60 billion ‘stolen’ in just four years. In today’s exchange rate, that is about N12.6 trillion. This is at a time of cessation of crisis in the Niger Delta and amnesty programme.

“Can you tell Nigerians how much the amnesty programme costs and also the annual cost for ‘protecting’ the pipelines and security of oil wells? And the ‘thieves’ are spirits?”

The former CBN chief added that the minimum foreign exchange reserves should have been at least $90 billion by now and you did not challenge it. Rather it is about $30 billion, meaning that gross mismanagement has denied the country some $60 billion or another N12.6 trillion.

He said: “Now add the ‘missing’ $20 billion from the NNPC… how many trillions of naira were paid for oil subsidy (unappropriated?). How many trillions (in actual fact) have been ‘lost’ through customs duty waivers over the last four years? As coordinator of the economy, can you tell Nigerians why the price of automotive gas oil (AGO), popularly called diesel, has still not come down despite the crash in global crude oil prices, and how much is being appropriated by friends in the process?

“Do you really know (as coordinator and minister of finance) how many trillions of naira, self- financing government agencies earn and spend? I have a long list but let me wait for now. I do not want to talk about other ‘black pots’ that impinge on national security.

“My estimate, Madam, is that probably more than N30 trillion has either been stolen or lost or unaccounted for or simply mismanaged under your watchful eyes in the past four years. Soon, you will start asking the citizens to pay this or that tax, while some faceless ‘thieves’ were pocketing over $40 million per day from oil alone.”

Record of failed policies

Despite the launch of the employment creation initiatives like YouWin and Graduate Internship Scheme (GIS) to depopulate the unemployment market, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) recently released a data that Nigeria has 6.8 per cent unemployment rate.

Despite the falling prices of oil at the international market, the minister used $65 per barrel to prepare the 2015 Appropriation Bill at a time a barrel of crude was below $40 at the international market.

Nigerians lost all hope in the economy and its managers when the minister announced during her 2015 Budget analysis that the government had borrowed N473 billion to pay workers salaries in the first quarter of this year.

In her characteristic manner, she quipped that Nigeria was still not broke.

Overwhelmed by allegations of missing funds by the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Sanusi Lamido and the enlarged Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF), the minister, through her spokesman Paul Nwabuikwu said it was strange for the NGF to allege that $20 billion was missing from the ECA.

In a chat with The Financial Times, Sanusi insisted that more than $18 billion remained unaccounted for.

The Yale varsity award

But in the wake of these controversies at home, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala was on Monday honoured by Yale University, one of America’s most prestigious institutions, with a Doctor of Humane Letters at its Commencement Ceremony in New Haven, Connecticut.

Giving her the award, university’s President Prof Peter Salovey described Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala as “a briiliant reformer and dedicated public servant who has spearheaded efforts to stabilise and grow Nigeria’s economy, battling widespread government corruption and creating greater fiscal transparency and discipline.”

It is on record that lack of the political will to tackle corruption and provide security accounted for fall the Jonathan administration.

Yesterday, President-elect Prof Yemi Osinbajo said the outgoing administration will leave behind a $60 billion debt, the worst-ever debt portfolio to be inherited in the country’s history.

Osinbajo spoke in Abuja at the opening of a two-day policy dialogue on the implementation of the agenda for change.

His words: “We are concerned that our economy is currently in perhaps its worst moment in history.  Local and international debt stands at $60 billion. Our debt servicing bill for 2015 is N953.6 billion, 21 per cent of our budget. On account of severely dwindled resources, over two-thirds of the states in Nigeria owe salaries. Federal institutions are not in much better shape.  Today, the nation borrows to fund recurrent expenditure.

“The figures of extreme poverty in our society – 110 million by current estimates – makes it clear that our biggest national problem is the extreme poverty of the majority. “

Was Yale University right in its rating of the former World Bank Managing Director? Time will tell.