₦airaland Forum

Please this should be treated as an academic discuss and not the usual Nairaland rants where ethnically bigoted miscreants throw ethnic jibes when they dont have any superior arguments.

NOI CV

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (born 13 June 1954) is a Nigerian economist and its first female minister of Finance.

She served two terms as Finance Minister of Nigeria (2003-2006, 2011-2015) and was previously Managing Director of the World Bank (2007-2011). She currently chairs the Board of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) and the African Risk Capacity (ARC).

In July 2017, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, was named an independent non-executive director at Standard Chartered Plc in the United Kingdom.

She is also a Senior Adviser at Lazard.
Okonjo-Iweala is from Ogwashi-Ukwu, Delta State, where her father Professor Chukwuka Okonjo is the Eze (King) from the Obahai Royal Family of Ogwashi-Ukwu.

Okonjo-Iweala was educated at St. Anne's School, Molete, Ibadan, the International School Ibadan and Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude with an AB in Economics in 1976, and earned her PhD in regional economics and development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1981 with a thesis title Credit policy, rural financial markets, and Nigeria's agricultural development.[1] She received an International Fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) that supported her doctoral studies.[2]

She is married to Dr. Ikemba Iweala, a neurosurgeon from Umuahia, Abia State, and they have four children, including Uzodinma Iweala.[3]

Career

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, at the 2004 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group
Okonjo-Iweala served twice as Nigeria’s Finance Minister and also as Minister of Foreign Affairs. She was the first female to hold both positions. During her first term as Minister of Finance under President Obasanjo’s Administration, she spearheaded negotiations with the Paris Club of Creditors that led to the wiping out of US$30 billion of Nigeria’s debt, including the outright cancellation of US$18 billion.[4] In 2003 she led efforts to improve Nigeria’s macroeconomic management including the implementation of an oil-price based fiscal rule where revenues accruing above a reference benchmark oil price were saved in a special account, “The Excess Crude Account” which helped to reduce macroeconomic volatility.[5]

She also introduced the practice of publishing each state's monthly financial allocation from the Federal Government of Nigeria in the newspapers. This action went a long way in increasing transparency in governance.[6] With the support of the World Bank and the IMF to the Federal Government of Nigeria, she helped build an electronic financial management platform-the Government Integrated Financial Management and Information System (GIFMIS), including the Treasury Single Account (TSA) and the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), helping to curtail corruption in the process. As at 31 December 2014, the IPPIS platform for example had eliminated 62,893 ghost workers from the system and saved the Nigerian government about $1.25 billion in the process.[7]

Okonjo-Iweala was also instrumental in helping Nigeria obtain its first ever sovereign credit rating (of BB minus) from Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor's in 2006.[2]

Following her first term as Minister of Finance, she returned to the World Bank as a Managing Director in December 2007. Okonjo-Iweala had also previously spent the first 21 years of her career as a development economist at the World Bank. As Managing Director, she had oversight responsibility for the World Bank’s $81 billion operational portfolio in Africa, South Asia, Europe and Central Asia.[3]

Okonjo-Iweala spearheaded several World Bank initiatives to assist low-income countries during the 2008 – 2009 food crises and later during the financial crisis. In 2010, she was chair of the IDA replenishment, World Bank’s successful drive to raise $49.3 billion in grants and low interest credit for the poorest countries in the world.[8] During her time at the World Bank, she was also a member of the Commission on Effective Development Cooperation with Africa which was set up by the Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark and held meetings between April and October 2008.[9]

In 2011, Okonjo-Iweala was reappointed as Minister of Finance in Nigeria with the expanded portfolio of the Coordinating Minister for the Economy by President Goodluck Jonathan. Her legacy includes strengthening Nigeria’s public financial systems, stimulating the housing sector with the establishment of the Nigerian Mortgage Refinance Corporation (NMRC).[10] She also empowered Nigeria’s women and youth with the Growing Girls and Women in Nigeria Programme (GWIN); a gender responsive budgeting system[11] and the highly acclaimed Youth Enterprise with Innovation programme (YouWIN); a highly acclaimed programme to support entrepreneurs that created thousands of jobs.[12]

This program has been evaluated by the World Bank as one of the most effective programmes of its kind globally. Under her leadership, the National Bureau of Statistics carried out a rebasing exercise; the first in 24 years, which saw Nigeria emerge as the largest economy in Africa.[13] She took a lot of heat, more-so than any other government official for the fuel subsidy removal policy by the Nigerian government which led to protests in January 2012.[14] In May 2016, the new Nigerian administration eventually removed the fuel subsidy after it became apparent that it was unsustainable and inefficient.[15]

In September 2015, she joined Lazard as a Senior Advisor[16] and in January 2016 she was appointed Chair of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI).[15]

She is co-chair of the Global Commission for the Economy and Climate, with Nicholas Stern and Paul Polman.[17] In July 2017, she was named the independent non-executive director at standard Chartered PLC, which will be effective from November 1, 2017[18]

International development leadership and non-profit work
Okonjo-Iweala is Chair of the Board of the African Union's African Risk Capacity, an innovative weather based insurance mechanism for African countries.[19] She is also Chair of the Board of the Nelson Mandela Institution, an umbrella body for the African Institutes of Science and Technology and Chair of the Board of the African University of Science and Technology in Nigeria.[16] In addition, she is a member of numerous boards and advisory groups, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government’s International Advisory Board, the Harvard University Advisory Council, the University of Oxford Martin School’s Advisory Council, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank International Advisory Panel,[20] the International Commission on Financing Global Education (Chaired by Gordon Brown), the Center for Global Development,[21] the Mercy Corp Global Leadership Council, the Women’s World Banking, Results for Development Institute, the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders Foundation, the B Team (Co-chaired by Sir Richard Branson), the Commission on the New Climate Economy (co-Chaired by President Felipe Calderon and Lord Nicholas Stern) and the Global Development Network amongst others.

Previously, she served as the co-Chair of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation[22] and Chair of the World Bank’s Development Committee (2004). She was also a member of the International Monetary and Finance Committee of the IMF (2003-2006 and 2011-2015), the United Nations’ Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the Danish-Government-led Commission on Africa, the World Economic Forum Global Leadership Council on Transparency and Corruption, and the renowned Commission on World Growth, led by Nobel Prize winner Professor Michael Spence. She has served on the advisory board of the Clinton Global Initiative and the ONE Foundation.

Okonjo-Iweala is the founder of Nigeria’s first indigenous opinion-research organization, NOI-Polls.[23] She founded the Center for the Study of Economies of Africa (C-SEA),[24] a development research think tank based in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital and is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Brookings Institution.

In 2012, Okonjo-Iweala was a candidate for president of the World Bank, running against former Colombian finance minister José Antonio Ocampo and the nominee of the United States, Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim. If elected, Okonjo-Iweala would have been the first female president of the World Bank, and the first president not nominated by the U.S. Okonjo-Iweala lost to Kim.[25]

Honors and awards
Okonjo-Iweala has received recognition and a number of awards. She was named one of the "50 Greatest World Leaders" by Fortune magazine in 2015,[26] one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World" by Time magazine in 2014,[27] and one of Foreign Policy magazine's "Top 100 Global Thinkers" in 2012.[28]

Okonjo-Iweala has received honorary degrees from Yale University (2015),[29] Babcock University (2014),[30] the University of Pennsylvania (2013),[31] Amherst College (2009)[32] Trinity College, Dublin (2007)[33] Brown University (2006),[34] and Colby College (2007).[35]

Works
Reforming The Unreformable: Lessons From Nigeria – an account of Ngozi's work under Obasanjo's administration between 2003 – 2007, published by MIT Press, (2012)
Shine a Light on the Gaps – an essay on financial inclusion for African Small Holder Farmers, published by Foreign Affairs (2015), co-authored with Janeen Madan
Funding the SDGs: Licit and Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries, published by Horizons Magazine (2016)
Chinua Achebe: Teacher of Light – a biography of Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, published by Africa World Press, (2003), co-authored with Tijan Sallah
The Debt Trap in Nigeria: Towards a Sustainable Debt Strategy – an academic piece, published by Africa World Press, (2003), co-edited with Charles C. Soludo and Mansur Muhtar
Want to Help Africa? Do Business Here – A Ted Talk delivered March 2007[36]
Aid Versus Trade – A Ted Talk delivered June 2007[37]
Don’t Trivialise Corruption, Tackle It – A Tedx Euston Talk delivered January 2013[38]

Awolowo CV

Chief Obafemi Jeremiah Oyeniyi Awolowo, GCFR (Yoruba: Ọbáfẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀; 6 March 1909 – 9 May 1987), was a Nigerian nationalist and statesman who played a key role in Nigeria's independence movement, the First and Second Republics and the Civil War. He was the first premier of the Western Region and later federal commissioner for finance, and vice chairman of the Federal Executive Council during the Civil War. He was thrice a major contender for his country's highest office.[1] A native of Ikenne in Ogun State of south-western Nigeria, he started his career, like some of his well-known contemporaries, as a nationalist in the Nigerian Youth Movement in which he rose to become Western Provincial Secretary. Awolowo was responsible for much of the progressive social legislation that has made Nigeria a modern nation.[2] He was the first Leader of Government Business and Minister of Local Government and Finance, and first Premier of the Western Region under Nigeria's parliamentary system, from 1952 to 1959. He was the official Leader of the Opposition in the federal parliament to the Balewa government from 1959 to 1963. In recognition of all these, Awolowo was the first individual in the modern era to be named Leader of the Yorubas (Yoruba: Asiwaju Awon Yoruba or Asiwaju Omo Oodua).


Early life
Obafemi Awolowo was born on 6 March 1909 in Ikenne, in present-day Ogun State of Nigeria.[3] His father was a farmer and sawyer who died when Obafemi was about seven years old. [4] He attended various schools, including Baptist Boys' High School (BBHS), Abeokuta; and then became a teacher in Abeokuta, after which he qualified as a shorthand typist. Subsequently, he served as a clerk at the famous Wesley College Ibadan, as well as a correspondent for the Nigerian Times.[5] It was after this that he embarked on various business ventures to help raise funds to travel to the UK for further studies.

Following his education at Wesley College, Ibadan, in 1927, he enrolled at the University of London as an External Student and graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Commerce (Hons.). He went to the UK in 1944 to study law at the University of London and was called to the Bar by the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple on 19 November 1946.[4][6] In 1949 Awolowo founded the Nigerian Tribune, the oldest surviving private Nigerian newspaper, which he used to spread nationalist consciousness among his fellow Nigerians.[7]

Politics
Awolowo was Nigeria's foremost federalist. In his Path to Nigerian Freedom (1947) – the first systematic federalist manifesto by a Nigerian politician – he advocated federalism as the only basis for equitable national integration and, as head of the Action Group, he led demands for a federal constitution, which was introduced in the 1954 Lyttleton Constitution, following primarily the model proposed by the Western Region delegation led by him. As premier, he proved to be and was viewed as a man of vision and a dynamic administrator. Awolowo was also the country's leading social democratic politician.[1] He supported limited public ownership and limited central planning in government.[1] He believed that the state should channel Nigeria's resources into education and state-led infrastructural development.[8] Controversially, and at considerable expense, he introduced free primary education for all and free health care for children in the Western Region, established the first television service in Africa in 1959, and the Oduduwa Group, all of which were financed from the highly lucrative cocoa industry which was the mainstay of the regional economy.[9]

Crisis in Western Nigeria
From the eve of independence, he led the Action Group as the Leader of the Opposition in the federal parliament, leaving Samuel Ladoke Akintola as the Western Region Premier. Serious disagreements between Awolowo and Akintola on how to run the Western region led the latter to an alliance with the Tafawa Balewa-led NPC federal government. A constitutional crisis led to the declaration of a state of emergency in the Western Region, eventually resulting in a widespread breakdown of law and order.

Excluded from national government, Awolowo and his party faced an increasingly precarious position. Akintola's followers, angered at their exclusion from power, formed the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) under Akintola's leadership. Having previously suspended the elected Western Regional Assembly, the federal government then reconstituted the body after manoeuvres that brought Akintola's NNDP into power without an election. Shortly afterwards Awolowo and several disciples were arrested, charged, convicted (of treason),[10] and jailed for conspiring with the Ghanaian authorities under Kwame Nkrumah to overthrow the federal government.[11]

Legacy
In 1992, the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation was founded as an independent, non-profit, non-partisan organisation committed to furthering the symbiotic interaction of public policy and relevant scholarship with a view to promoting the overall development of the Nigerian nation. The Foundation was launched by the President of Nigeria at that time, General Ibrahim Babangida, at the Liberty Stadium, Ibadan.[12] However, his most important bequests (styled Awoism) are his exemplary integrity, his welfarism, his contributions to hastening the process of decolonisation and his consistent and reasoned advocacy of federalism-based on ethno-linguistic self-determination and uniting politically strong states-as the best basis for Nigerian unity. Awolowo died peacefully at his Ikenne home, the Efunyela Hall (so named after his mother), on 9 May 1987, at the age of 78 and was laid to rest in Ikenne, amid tributes across political and ethno-religious divides.

i think based on education , achievements world wide and world recognition , one of these 2 people is light years ahead

kettykings:
i think based on education , achievements world wide and world recognition , one of these 2 people is light years ahead

This low life is here again

what kind of horrible insecurity drives you so? how empty is your life that you just think its all about comparisons?

Awo was a lawyer, Ngozi is an economist. Awo was a politician, Ngozi is a career economist. Awo is long dead, Ngozi is still living. who afflicted you with this sickness?

When will you measure yourself against anything?

shukuokukobambi:
This low life is here again

what kind of horrible insecurity drives you so? how empty is your life that you just think its all about comparisons?

Awo was a lawyer, Ngozi is an economist. Awo was a politician, Ngozi is a career economist. Awo is long dead, Ngozi is still living. who afflicted you with this sickness?

When will you measure yourself against anything?

Igbo amaka

imhotep:
Igbo amaka

congratulations

what a blasphemy!

shukuokukobambi:
congratulations

Ah.
Sai babarians are here already

shukuokukobambi:
This low life is here again

what kind of horrible insecurity drives you so? how empty is your life that you just think its all about comparisons?

Awo was a lawyer, Ngozi is an economist. Awo was a politician, Ngozi is a career economist. Awo is long dead, Ngozi is still living. who afflicted you with this sickness?

When will you measure yourself against anything?

So because awolowo is dead and buried his followers can rile and rant about the blogosphere with his achievements but when it is time to compare and contrast with achievers the same Awolowo followers will come with excuses about how dead , buried and fogotten Awolowo is

Haba, Awolowo achieved the first in all things. He prosecuted a war without borrowing, without the country going broke. His brains ended the war faster than the armaments of the soldiers. His achievements in the South West hasn't been matched by any other leader. Though circumstances and peculiarities are different but Awolowo was light years ahead of his contemporaries and subsequent leaders.

Killitoff:
Lets compare Ojukwu of cursed memory and Usain Bolt. Ojukwu ran 100 meters race to Abidjan in 1 day while Usain Bolt did same in few mins. Lol

you can create a thread for Ojukwu and Usain Bolt , but i also remember Ogundipe was the first Nigerian General to run away from Office

shukuokukobambi:
Urine drinkers of the albino hunchback seek my attention always

Have the herdsmen visited you yet

Killitoff:
Ojukwu of cursed memory Vs Usain Bolt.

The newest sai babarian in town has spoken

Awolowo was a better finance minister than that ugly pig called Okonjo iwela. Nigeria began experiencing recession in 2014 when the ugly thing was still minister.
Besides, why are iboes like this? You guys need help from inferiority complex.

imhotep:
The newest sai babarian in town has spoken

Coming from a gala seller. Henry, stop making me laugh abeg. Lmao

kettykings:
i think based on education , achievements world wide and world recognition , one of these 2 people is light years ahead

Yea Mrs Iweala is far ahead in my opinion.

kettykings:
[s]So because awolowo is dead and buried his followers can rile and rant about the blogosphere with his achievements but when it is time to compare and contrast with achievers the same Awolowo followers will come with excuses about how dead , buried and fogotten Awolowo is[/s]

I knew it'll fly over your head because reason is very far from you

Awo is a lawyer who received the highest rank of his profession. Yet the man ran the finances of a war ravaged country without debt!! Even great USA coudln't manage it. A lawyer who transitioned to a successful finance manager of a war torn country is obviously a genius and showcases versatility

Why not showcase Ngozi transitioning to a lawyer and handling cases to show how versatile she is?

imhotep:
Have the herdsmen visited you yet

No they have not. have they visited you yet?

shukuokukobambi:
No they have not. have they visited you yet?

Invite them to come and shout "sai baba" in your compound

imhotep:
Invite them to come and shout "sai baba" in your compound

I will after you follow your elders to invite them while falling over themselves to endorse buhari because of a phantom 2023 promise

shukuokukobambi:
I knew it'll fly over your head because reason is very far from you

Awo is a lawyer who received the highest rank of his profession. Yet the man ran the finances of a war ravaged country without debt!! Even great USA coudln't manage it. A lawyer who transitioned to a successful finance manager of a war torn country is obviously a genius and showcases versatility

Why not showcase Ngozi transitioning to a lawyer and handling cases to show how versatile she is?

Oya, le

This is interesting , why not show case what Awolowo achieved as a lawyer before i request Ngozi Iweala to transmute to a Lawyer

kettykings:
This is interesting , why not show case what Awolowo achieved as a lawyer before i request Ngozi Iweala to transmute to a Lawyer

Ask those who made him SAN to answer you.

Machiavelli1:
Yea Mrs Iweala is far ahead in my opinion.

i like your candid and objective opinion, but do you have reasons for this opinion ?

shukuokukobambi:
I will after you follow your elders to invite them while falling over themselves to endorse buhari because of a phantom 2023 promise

Back to Daura

Killitoff:
Ojukwu of cursed memory Vs Usain Bolt.

OJUIKU is the winner.