Two-time former President, Olusegun Obasanjo has given reasons why he made a former World Bank staff, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala a Finance Minister during his administration.

In his book titled, “Making Africa Work” co-authored with Greg Mills, Director of Brenthurst Foundation; Jeffrey Herbst, President of NEWSEUM and d!ckie Davis, a retired major general, Obasanjo said some fraudulent projects and the Paris Club debt led to his “head hunt” for Okonjo-Iweala from World Bank.

According to Obasanjo, “On assumption of office as president, I discovered that the accumulated debt of Nigeria to the Paris Club was some $30 billion. Some of the projects that constituted the debt were dubious, if not outright fraudulent.

“One typical example was a turn-key project for $8 million where the money was drawn out with no site clearance let alone the foundation being la!d. And yet, there was a video of the purported commissioning of the project. This happened in Enugu state, one of the 36 states in Nigeria.

“Obviously, it involved collusion and corruption between the state government and the lender and promoter of the project. All the same, the loan was a commitment and it had to be repaid. Such had become the practice of Nigerian debt to the international community.

“I visited most Western capitals to present anew Nigeria’s case. One such visit was to Washington DC where I met President Clinton and the president of the World Bank, Jim Wolfensohn.


“I raised the issue of debt relief with both of them and asked Jim for both support and advice. He advised that Nigeria should urgently embark on a comprehensive reform to impress its creditors. If Nigeria was doing well in its economic reform and management, it would get the World Bank’s support.

“In my first term, from 1999 to 2003, I visited many countries and world leaders, some more than once, to campaign for debt relief. There I got apparently sympathetic hearings, but not much action from political leaders.

“After my first term, I realized that my talks at the highest political levels needed follow-up at the levels below. So, I head-hunted Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala from the World Bank, appointing her as Nigeria’s Minister of Finance.

“My plan was that she would manage the follow-up at a lower level. Even then, the fact that Nigeria was the sixth largest oil-producing country in the world was regularly used as the reason to deny debt relief.

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“I would then explain that Nigeria’s population of almost 150 million at the time and its stage of development should justify such relief.”