Earlier on this week, Nigeria’s Minister of Finance Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour , CNN’s chief international correspondent and anchor of Amanpour, a nightly foreign affairs program on CNN International.
The interview was on Tuesday 16th April,
2013 and the Nigerian minister answered questions on corruption, oil
theft and the un-ending power sector problems.
Speaking on the issue of corruption, Iweala explained that, “Nigeria
does have a problem with corruption, and so do many other countries,
including developed countries. I don’t like the fact that when people
mention the name Nigeria, the next thing they say is corruption…this
is a country of 170 million people; 99.9 percent of them are honest,
hard-working citizens who just want to get on with their lives and they
want a government that delivers for them”
here is the transcript of the interview:
AMANPOUR – DR OKONJO-IWEALA
Welcome back to the program. Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, is
full of promise. But fulfilling that promise is sometimes a struggle.
Plagued by corruption and mismanagement, the resource-rich country has a
poverty rate of over 50 percent. Maternal mortality is shockingly high.
And more than half of Nigerians don’t have access to electricity.
Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan,
can’t even escape the power problem himself. Here he is on Easter
Sunday, delivering a speech to his people only to have it disrupted by a
blackout. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala says that she and her president want more
for the country. She’s Nigeria’s finance minister and she’s been lauded
as just the kind of reformer that Nigeria needs. She was a runner-up to
lead the World Bank and “Forbes” ranked her as one of the world’s most
powerful women.
But even she isn’t immune from Nigeria’s
problems. Her own mother was kidnapped for a terrifying five days
before being released. I spoke to her and I asked her about her
country’s uphill struggle to transform Nigeria’s resources into a better
life for all the people. We talked when she was here in New York for
the Women in the World Summit.
And as you watch, we look forward to your tweets using #amanpour.
AMANPOUR: Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, welcome to the program.
NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA, NIGERIAN FINANCE MINISTER: Thank you for having me.
AMANPOUR: Great to have you.
OKONJO-IWEALA: Thank you.
AMANPOUR: Nigeria is a
huge and important country. We have many, many viewers from Nigeria,
always very active and very interested. So it’s great to have you here.
OKONJO-IWEALA: Thank you.
AMANPOUR: You have said
and others have said, that 2013 is going to be a real game-changing
year, a turning point year for Nigeria, particularly in your area of
finance and economics.
How?
OKONJO-IWEALA: Well,
it’s going to be a game-changer and a turning point, because this is the
year we are going to produce results. And we’re already producing
results within the administration.
First, on the economic side, I just want
to say that macroeconomic stability has been restored. Now, nobody
should minimize that. Remember, there were two lost decades in Africa,
in the ’80s and ’90s, where there was so much macro instability that
people could not even focus on sectors that could create jobs.
Now things have gone right. We’ve got
growth that is at 6.5 percent last year and we’re projecting for 2013,
also, around the same number compared to average 5 percent on the
African continent.
Now, I just want to say that when you
mention GDP growth, people immediately say we can — in my country, they
say we can’t eat growth; because we have unemployment challenges, we
need to create more jobs. We have a challenge of inclusion. We have
problems of inequality.
All those are challenges we face.
AMANPOUR: You are
obviously a passionate defender of your country. You are a person who
calls for transparency and honesty and best practices. There is a huge
problem with corruption in your country. The president promised to
address this stuff. And the latest is that an ally of his, a former
governor who was convicted of stealing millions of dollars, has been
pardoned, embezzling $55 million in public funds. Now, the U.S. calls
that a setback for the fight against corruption. I mean how do you
answer that?
OKONJO-IWEALA: How do I
answer that question? OK, listen to what I have to say on corruption.
And I think I have quite a bit to say. I wrote a book recently where I
also had a whole chapter on that issue called, “Reforming the
Unreformable.”
Nigeria does have a problem with
corruption. And so do many other countries, including developed
countries. I don’t like the fact that when people mention the name
Nigeria, the next thing they say is corruption.
This is a country of 170 million people;
99.9 percent of them are honest, hard-working citizens who just want to
get on with their lives and they want a government that delivers for
them.
What we’ve said is that in order to help
block any leakages and help to, you know, stop any attempts at
corruption or taking monies, we must build electronic platforms. We must
distance people from the money.
These things were recommended by the World Bank and the IMF. I used to work at the World Bank. We are doing them.
And I strongly believe that we lack institutions. We lack processes.
Now, what President Goodluck Jonathan
has done now is to call the judiciary, the legislature and the executive
arm for the first time to meet together on this issue and say, this is
not just about government, this is about all of us coming together,
because even if you catch somebody, they go to the courts and they are
let off lightly.
The president can’t do anything about that. The judicial system also has to be strengthened.
Legislators also have to crack down. They themselves have to work at also being transparent and helping the executive.
But for me, also, in addition to doing
that, we need to stop talking and identify the specifics, like you
mentioned oil leakages. Let me mention two things quickly.
The first one is the oil theft that is 150,000 barrels a day –
AMANPOUR: Which is huge.
OKONJO-IWEALA: — a
month — which is huge. Yes. I admit that. And we can’t afford — I’ll
tell you; my thesis on corruption is we are still a poor country. We
cannot afford any leakage.
We also need the international community
to weigh in. We have — Mexico and Nigeria are suffering from this
problem, you can check. Mexico has (inaudible) losing 25,000 barrels a
day. And they found (inaudible).
In our case, we have international
people who also buy that stolen oil. We need them to treat this stolen
oil like stolen diamonds, the blood diamonds. Make it blood oil. Help us
so that those people don’t have a market to sell this stuff.
That’s one. And we ourselves should commit to fighting — and we are fighting that.
AMANPOUR: Let me ask
you about that, because you also have challenges with electricity. You
mentioned you’re very rich in oil and people just simply don’t
understand why there still seem to be so many problems with electricity.
And it might seem, you know, weird to
pick on that one thing, but it is very prevalent. I asked your president
about this during an interview I did by satellite when he was at the
World Economic Forum in Davos.
Let’s just see what he had to say to me.
*video clip*
GOODLUCK JONATHAN, PREISDENT OF NIGERIA:
That is one area that Nigerians are quite pleased with the government,
that’s a commitment to improve power. It’s working. So if you are saying
something different, I’m really surprised. That is one area, one area
that we will — civil society members agree that government has kept
faith with its promise.
*end of video clip*
AMANPOUR: Now, that
interview caused a bit of a hullabaloo, as I think you know, in Nigeria.
And yet, the World Bank has said that half — more than half the
Nigerian population doesn’t have any access to the power grid.
OKONJO-IWEALA: As you
know, Nigeria became a democracy again when President Obasanjo came into
power in 1999. Two decades prior to that, there was hardly any
investment in electricity. If you’ve neglected a sector for that long,
you’ve not invested, you’ve not even maintained your basic facilities,
it’s not going to happen that fast. It takes time. That month, when you
interviewed the president, the polls showed, independently,
scientifically (inaudible) that they are in technical partnership with
dialogue. That 54 percent of Nigerians felt there was some improvement.
They do it monthly. Now this month, they’ve surveyed and they’ve showed
this going down, because 800 megawatts has been taken off the grid,
which is while they are maintaining the grid.
AMANPOUR: Well, let me
ask you, because businesses apparently say that this problem with
electricity is causing them to, you know, be reluctant to invest.
*cross talk*
AMANPOUR: They need this investment…
OKONJO-IWEALA: Nigeria
is not the only country. Almost every developing country has a problem
with power, as you know. India has it. South Africa has it. South Africa
is far better off because they’ve invested much more.
But many developing countries, even China, they are struggling with keeping up with infrastructure.
Now, what we are doing in Nigeria? We
have accepted that the government is not the best place to run the power
sector, that if we want this country and this economy to do better, we
just have to get out. And Nigeria is pursuing one of the most sweeping
privatization programs in any country in the world. We are selling off
everything. The generation capacity, the distribution capacity in the
country, government is only retaining one thing — transmission.
AMANPOUR: Well, on that note, Madam Minister, thank you for joining me.
OKONJO-IWEALA: Thank you, Christiane, for having me.
