Former Minister of Education, Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili, has waded in the fray over the right state of Nigerian economy following the article by former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Dr.Charles Soludo, which was very critical of incumbent administration.
Soludo had in his article titled Buhari vs Jonathan: Beyond election not only dismissed the management of the economy under President Goodluck Jonathan as appealing but also the economic team, which he described as weak.
The Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who incidentally was fianance minister when Soludo was both Chief Economic Adviser and later CBN governor, heads President Jonathan’s economic team.
Okonjo-Iweala, in obviously angry response to Soludo’s piece, on Wednesday 28 January, said the five-year tenure of Prof. Chukwuma Soludo as the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria was a failure to the banking sector.
The minister described Soludo’s criticism of the management of the economy under President Goodluck Jonathan as “intellectual hara-kiri.”
But Ezekwesili, who has shown variously her ill-disposition to the current administration, in her tweet indicated she had problems the government’s response.
The former education minister, who appears to be tending towards a social crusader these days, called for a public debate by all parties on the actual state of the economy. Her tweet betrayed the fact that is siding with Soludo.
A group of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum led by Governor Jonah Jang of Plateau State described Soludo’s recent article on the state of the economy as illusionary and attention-seeking.
Soludo, who was the CBN governor between May 2004 and May 2009, on Monday wrote an article in which he claimed that the Nigerian economy under Jonathan was weak.
In reaction to the article, Okonjo-Iweala through a statement issued by Mr. Paul Nwabuikwu, her Special Adviser on Communications, said not only was it littered with abusive and unbecoming language, it showed Soludo, whom she described as an “embittered loser in the Nigerian political space,” could get so derailed by misquoting economic facts and maliciously turning statistics on their head to justify a hatchet job.
Ezekwesili tweeted in her Twitter handle shortly after Okonjo-Iweala’s response was made public, that the “nation and people seem to be on an accelerated race to the bottom. So sad! Why would a statement from (the) government read like that? Gosh!”
Ezekwesili also demanded to know what had happened to the report of the forensic audit on the reported missing $20bn from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) as reported by Sanusi shortly before he was suspended from office by the President.
Okonjo-Iweala said the Federal Government had hired forensic auditors to examine the accounts of the NNPC following the controversies generated by the allegation of the missing money. But up untillnow, the report of the audit has not been made public.
In a telephone interview with Punch, Ezekwesili said that rather than resolve to abusive language over Soludo’s comments, the government and the critics of its management of the economy should go for a national dialogue where the touted achievements of the administration of the President could be subjected to deeper analysis.
In an earlier tweet, she said that with the responses the managers of the economy, have given to Soludo, “a debate is imperative”.
In a statement released in Abuja and signed by Mr. Osaro Onaiwu, the Secretary and Administrator of the Jang faction of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, stated that members of the group are at a loss as to the motive behind the Soludo’s article, adding that the “half-truths and falsehood in the article could not be a sincere attempt to contribute to the national discourse, but rather a failed attempt at self-aggrandizement”.
However it would be recalled that on Soludo had in the article, which was widely circulated in both print and online media, dismissed the claim to economic growth under President Jonathan’s administration and tasked both PDP and APC to outline clearly their plans for the dwindling Nigerian economy.
