Ayorinde Oluokun/Abuja

Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, is bowing out of office with the economy worse than she met it

As their members battle with hunger and inability to meet up with their basic obligations as a result of backlog of unpaid wages, Nigerian labour leaders indicated last week that they may have no other option than to ask workers to stay at home. Another round of industrial crises appears to be looming.

But as harrowing as the tales of the unpaid wages, especially of civil servants, teachers, doctors and others employees in the public service whose salaries even when regularly paid can barely take them home is, it is doubtful if the resort to industrial action can force a significant change in the salary crises. For one, most of the state chief executives have indicated that the remedy for rectification of the default in the payment of salaries and other emoluments of workers is beyond their powers.

•Okonjo-Iweala: Leaving the economy in tatters

The Governors, especially those elected on the platform of the All Progressives Congress, APC repeated their incapacitation on the matter of salaries during a visit to General Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s President-elect early this month in Abuja.

“One of the issues that became of concern to all of us is the really bad shape of the Nigerian economy. We have come to notify the incoming president of the challenges ahead of him. As it stands today, most states of the federation have not been able to pay salaries and even the federal government has not paid April salaries and that is very worrisome. By May and June, the unpaid salaries will be in cumulative of three months,” Rochas Okorocha, Chairman of the Progressives Governors’ Forum, PGF who led his colleagues to the meeting with Buhari told journalists at the end of the meeting. He pleaded with the President-elect to consider implementing bailout measures that could at least, enable them meet their salary obligations to workers.

Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, the Minister of Finance and the Coordinating Minister for the Economy, did not find funny the claims by the Governors that the “bad shape” of the economy was responsible for their inability to pay wages. Indeed, going by her subsequent reactions, Okonjo-Iweala who had before now painted a rosy picture of the economy, despite all indications to the contrary, considered the claims by the Governors a direct attack on her management of the financial system in the past four years.

According to her, the claim by the APC governors-elect that they have been unable to pay salaries because the President Goodluck Jonathan administration has mismanaged the economy was wrong. Rather, she located the problem in the lack of prioritization.

The Minister also affirmed that Staff salaries at the federal level were up to date, as workers had received their April salaries. However, in the chest thumping dismissal of the claims of the governors, the Minister failed to tell Nigerians that the Federal Government itself has had to borrow from the banks to be able to pay its workers.

Okonjo-Iweala revealed later to journalists in Abuja that the Federal Government itself has been hemorrhaging in meeting salary obligations and that it has been doing so through massive borrowing. Shockingly, she revealed that more than half of the budgetary provisions for borrowing in 2015 have been used in the first four months to pay salaries and provide funds for overheads.

“Of the N882 billion budgetary provision for borrowing, the government has borrowed N473 billion to meet up with recurrent expenditure, including salaries and overheads. No capital release so far.” And like the Governors, she attributed the situation to the decline in revenues accruing to the coffers of government as a result of the fall in the price of oil.

This, according to Senator Abiola Ajimobi, the Governor of Oyo State, was unnecessary equivocation on the part of the Minister. Festus Adedayo, the special adviser (media) to the Governor said the fall in the allocation accruable to the states was responsible for the financial challenges being faced by states just as it is being experienced by the Federal Government. As he pointed out, allocations to state governments had generally reduced by 50 per cent while the Oyo State government which used to collect about N4billion now receives about N2 billion monthly, while it has salary obligation of about N5.3 billion. This, he said has made it difficult for the State to continue with its tradition of paying its workers on or before 26th of every month as it used to do.

Beyond the Federal and state governments playing ping-pong with workers, analysts pointed out that while the Federal Government has access to borrowing from banks to meet its obligations through different financial instruments, the state governments have not been availed of such opportunities. Indeed, the Federal Government has, through the minister, discouraged banks from lending to states regardless of the purpose of loan.

Analysts also posited that while the minister gleefully said the Federal Government has not released any capital budget this year, the states may not be able to go through the same route due to competing demands from their people. “What is at stake here is the reputation of the federal government’s financial managers. While states could have done much better than they have done to lessen the problem of the cash crunch on their people, the federal government has not placed the country on financial ‘war footing’ partly because their laxity has brought the country nearly to its knees,” said Idowu Akinlotan, a columnist with The Nation newspaper.

He also pointed out that beyond the drop in revenues from the sale of crude oil, the dire financial situation facing the country could be attributed to waste of national resources, mismanagement and corruption, including unlawful election spending and bizarre and unexplainable fuel subsidy payments. “The minister of course cannot offer any explanation for these. She assumed it was enough that a cash crunch problem already existed, which states should take for granted and mitigate by forsaking all other priorities,” said the columnist who also feared that with the rate of borrowing, there are no guarantees that the Federal Government will not exceeded its loan budgetary projections by the end of the year.

The financial challenge being experienced in the country has led to fresh queries on the reputation of the country’s financial managers. And no one is more under focus than Okonjo-Iweala, the World Bank ‘financial expert’.

She came into the office in 2011 promising to turn around the economy and was even named Coordinating Minister of the economy, a position that does not exist in Nigeria’s constitution.

Under her watch, Okonjo-Iweala forced Nigeria to create a Sovereign Wealth Fund of $1billion, a novelty in a country that has always consumed all its oil income, leaving nothing for the future. She also re-introduced some transparency in public finance, by publishing the monthly allocations going to all tiers of government.

However, she has been unable to tame the bigger monsters. Under her watch, the combined domestic and external debt of the Federal Government ballooned to $40 billion by the end of 2014. Abandoned capital projects also litter the country with completion costs estimated at over $50 billion. Some of the projects include the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Shagamu-Benin Expressway, the second Niger Bridge, the East-West Road and many others. Contractors in many sites have left and have sacked thousands of workers.

The woman styled as the co-ordinating minister has watched helplessly as the Federal Government indulged in a series of financial recklessness, such as the wasteful National Conference that gobbled over N10 billion and the establishment of new Federal universities when the existing ones are poorly funded. Such is the pattern of reckless expenditure that at the moment, Nigeria’s foreign reserve has dropped to $29 billion, from the $43 billion met by the Jonathan administration.

After oil prices crashed last year, there was expectedly global concerns that Nigeria was going to be seriously affected and that the national economy, rebased to be Africa’s biggest, was going to shrink. To justify public expectation, she has continued to bamboozle Nigerians about the good health of the economy, by painting a rosy picture of the economic situation, even when other experts saw a picture bleak and gloomy.

•Jonathan: Appointed Okonjo-Iweala

Despite her distorting picture, what many Nigerians, including leading members of APC who are gearing to take over power on 29 May know, is that the economy has been so mismanaged in the past four years that Major General Muhammadu Buhari, (retd), the President elect will virtually inherit an empty treasury when he assumes office.

Buhari himself knows his new government would be ranged against Mount Everest financial odds when he assumes office. He told a delegation of visiting Northern elders that his emergence as president came at “the wrong time” due to the enormous challenges his administration would face. “You can imagine what is happening in the high seas where up to 400,000 barrels of crude oil which we rely on is stolen everyday with the full cooperation of those who are supposed to protect it. The price of oil has gone down and 90 per cent of the foreign exchange we rely on comes from that. So, you have to convince your constituencies that we have virtually arrived at the wrong time and that they have to temper their expectation,” the President-elect said.

Last week, Nigeria Bureau of Statistics sounded the economic decline louder when it released new data. The data showed that the country’s real Gross Domestic Product, GDP growth rate further declined to 3.86 percent in the first quarter of 2015 compared to 5.94 percent the previous quarter. NBS also indicated that the Consumer Price Index, CPI which measures inflation rose further to 8.7 per cent in April compared to 8.5 percent in March while the country’s GDP growth rate was lower by 2.25 percent points from the preceding quarter and by 1.98 per cent from the corresponding quarter of 2014.

•Buhari: To take over a battered economy

The International Monetary Fund just before the last general elections downgraded Nigeria’s economic growth forecast for 2015, predicting that the country’s GDP will increase by just 4.8 percent, down from 6.1 percent in 2014, and Standard & Poor’s reduced the country’s rating to B+, four levels below investment grade. In the same vein, Standards & Poor estimated that Nigeria’s current account surplus would become a deficit of roughly 1.8 percent for 2015-2018 while Nigeria currently ranks 127 out of 144 countries on the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index. The indices, experts posit, will get worse in the days ahead, especially when the current petrol scarcity and worsening power supply which have crippled productive activities across the country are factored in.

The state of the economy was a major issue during the campaigns leading to the 28 March presidential election. Professor Chukwuma Soludo, former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria who was the Minister’s colleague in the Economic Management Team of former President Olusegun Obasanjo had ahead of the 2015 elections advised the Jonathan administration not to run on its economic record. Soludo actually ranked the Jonathan administration “F” on economic management, indicating that the administration is Nigeria’s worst in terms of management of the economy.

The former CBN Governor pointed out that while Nigeria has for years enjoyed oil boom and increasing budget under the Jonathan administration, poverty and unemployment has also reached unprecedented levels.

“This is the only government in our history where rapidly increasing government expenditure was associated with increasing poverty. The director general of NBS (National Bureau of Statistics) stated in his written press conference address in 2011 that about 112 million Nigerians were living in poverty. Is this the record to defend?” said Soludo.

•Soludo: Rated the Jonathan government poorly in economic management

Taken against the various promises she made when she assumed office in 2011, Okonjo Iweala’s tenure has been declared a failure by critics. For instance, there is the issue of ballooning recurrent expenditure. The Minister had promised when she was screened by the Senate for appointment into President Jonathan’s cabinet that one of her goals in office will be working to reduce Nigeria’s recurrent expenditure that then gobbled 75 per cent of the budget.

She repeated the promise in the keynote address she delivered at the 3rd Economic Policy and Fiscal Strategy Seminar, organised by the Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa, CSEA, in Abuja later that year. Okonjo Iweala had at that forum said it is shocking that previous administrations had let the level of recurrent spending to spiral against capital budgeting. “When I left the administration last time (2006), we left a recurrent expenditure level of about 66 per cent, which was even considered to be too high back then. However, upon my second coming this year, I was surprised to find that recurrent expenditure in the budget has risen to more than 74 per cent. This is unacceptable,” said the Minister. “We want to take the capital budget back on the trajectory it used to be back to 33 per cent by the end of this administration.”

Four years after, there is no better indication of how Okonjo Iweala has failed in this regard than a look at the 2015 budget she submitted to the National Assembly in late 2014. Just like in the past, the annual budget has been filled with unnecessary items year in, year out. An analysis of the previous budgets revealed that the share of recurrent expenditure as a percentage of the total budget was 74.43 per cent in 2011, but dropped to 71.47 per cent and 67.49 per cent in 2012 and 2013, respectively. However, in the 2014 budget, the share of recurrent expenditure rose up to 74 per cent. Analysis of the yet to be signed budget which was recently passed by the National Assembly after a little tinkering with the figures revealed that recurrent expenditure (salaries, overheads, statutory transfers and debt service costs) summed up to N3.97trillion or 91 per cent of the entire 2015 proposal.

The Minister had tried to deceive Nigerians during her presentation of the budget with the impression that the country will be running a capital budget of N634billion for 2015 without specifying that the estimate is inclusive of capital expenditure figure for Subsidy Reinvestment Programme, SURE-P.

“Comparing the 2015 capital vote of N387billion to N1.119trillion provision in 2014, the stark difference is very frightening,” BudgIT, an online analytics agency on public finance said in its analysis of the 2015 budget proposal.

The agency also noted that the high percentage of the budget devoted to recurrent spending, as revealed, for instance in the increase in personnel costs from N1.77trillion in 2014 to N1.84trillion in 2015 when there is no indication that the government is set on embarking on massive recruitment is an indication that the government is not living up to its promise to cut spending as result of declining price of oil. And as the Minister has confirmed, part of the recurrent component of the 2015 Appropriation Bill is being funded with borrowing.

This, noted BugdIT is against provisions of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, FRA that states that borrowings should only be used to finance capital spending. Well, the fact is that under Okonjo Iweala, Nigeria has been accumulating debts with domestic debt rising from N4.55trillion in 2010 to N7.65trillion as at September 2014.

The Ministry had embarked on a borrowing binge following the rebasing which indicated that Nigeria now has the biggest economy in Africa. This has led to humongous provision for debt servicing fees, which has risen from N828billion in 2013 to N943billion in 2015, an equivalent of 22 per cent of the total budget expenditure, as analyzed by BudgIT.

Analysts said the current financial crisis confronting the Federal and other levels of government would have been avoided, but for the unprecedented leakage under the Jonathan administration. Soludo had earlier this year indicated that over N30 trillion had been stolen since Okonjo Iweala became the Finance Minister. This amount, Soludo told the Minister “has either been stolen or lost or unaccounted for or simply mismanaged under your watchful eyes in the past four years” mostly due to oil theft, funds that ought to accrue to stock of foreign reserves, unbudgeted oil subsidy payments, customs duty waivers, leakages through the self-financing government parastatals and unremitted sums by NNPC among others. The Minister and even President Jonathan wasted no time in denying this. But various revelations in recent times have confirmed that the Nigerian treasury has indeed been leaking in the past four years with funds that are supposed to go into the national purse going into private pockets.

Just last week, a report indicated that Okonjo Iweala had finally agreed that government lost huge revenue to tax holidays fraudulently granted companies by officials of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC). The minister’s disclosure, according to the reports was contained in a recent letter to embattled Saratu Umar, NIPC Executive Secretary. “The purpose of this letter is to appraise you on apparent abuse in the grant of Pioneer Status (tax holiday) to companies in the country by the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC) leading to decline in tax revenues,” a national newspaper quoted the minister as saying in the letter which was copied the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke, and her Industries, Trade and Investment counterpart, Olusegun Aganga. The newspaper speculated that Nigeria might have lost over $20 billion to the fraudulent waivers between 2010 and 2014.

The massive fraud, the Minister was quoted to have said in the letter was committed through manipulation of taxes, especially the Pioneer status tax. Okonjo Iweala was reported to have noted in the letter that companies that were supposed to be taxed 65 per cent in accordance with the Petroleum Profit Tax Act were fraudulently listed under the Industrial Development Tax Relief Act and pioneer certificates were given to them by fraudulent NIPC officials.

The Minister noted that in egregious violation of the Act, NIPC officials granted tax holidays to some companies for five years at a go. This is contrary to the provision of Section 10 of the Act which states that “the tax relief period for a pioneer company shall commence from the production date of the company and shall continue for a period of three years in the first instance, and may be extended for a period of one year and thereafter for another one year, or for a period of two years subject to the satisfaction of Mr. President that certain requirements such as rate of expansion, standard of efficiency, level of development of company, among others, are met.”

Some fraudulent NIPC officials also granted Pioneer Status in arrears leading to beneficiaries of such demanding refund of the taxes already remitted into the Federation Account. She gave the example of Seplat, which she said was typical abuse of the Pioneer Status Policy as Seplat Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) and Nigeria Petroleum Development Company (NPDC) are operators of the same oil fields previously operated by Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC).

“While SPDC disposed of its interest to Seplat, NNPC disposed of its interest to NPDC. Seplat, thereafter, was granted a tax holiday whereas NPDC continued to pay taxes from the operation of the same field,” the Minister said.

Analysts will however wonder why the Minister waited till this time to lodge the complaints given the fact that the allegations of massive bleeding of the treasury through dubious grants of waivers under her watch have been flying around for sometimes now.

Several reports had indicated how the nation has been losing humongous sums through various dubious exploitation of fiscal and policy instruments meant to encourage investments and risk taking like tax holidays, pioneer tax status, general duty waivers, export duty grants/credits and so on. The fact, according to analysts is that the policy instruments were more or less deployed as tools for political and personal patronage with the Ministries of Petroleum Resources, Industries, Solid Minerals Development, Agriculture and the Nigerian Customs Service being the chief culprits. Ironically, the Minister had said that one of the first issues she tackled as a member of President’s Jonathan Economic Management Team related to the issues of indiscriminate granting of waivers. But that reform seemed to have turned the problems of waivers from a mild sore it was under the previous administration to gangrene under the administration of President Jonathan.

While Nigeria lost about N276.94 billion to such waivers and concessions in the eight years preceding the administration of President Jonathan, the country lost N603 billion to import duty waivers, exemptions on levies, concessions and import substitution schemes in the first nine months of 2013. Abdullahi Dikko, the Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Customs Service told a Senate joint-committee about this in November that year. He added that of the amount, N264 billion was lost to waivers on petroleum products imports and N76 billion to manufacturers and assembly plants.

The Customs boss also lamented that the policy has not achieved its intended objective of encouraging local production, investments, job creation and exports because of the abuse, which ensured that the beneficiaries are cronies of government. The House of Representatives had in January 2012 passed a resolution asking the government to halt all waivers and exemptions following allegations at a public hearing that about N380 billion was lost to dubious waivers and concessions in the previous months.

The House of Representatives Adhoc-Committee on ‘Rice Imports Quota And Duty Payments’ is at present investigating allegations of N36 billion fraudulent waivers involving some rice importers. “LCCI is of the view that waivers are detrimental to the economy in a number of ways. It creates unfair competition, giving one economic player an edge over others. It leads to huge revenue loss to the government…it results in the perpetuation of a rent economy and it weakens the moral authority of the political leadership to curb corruption since waivers are a variant of corruption. It is incredible that this is happening, as only about a year ago, the minister assured the nation that the government had put a stop to waivers; and that if it becomes inevitable, it would be sector-wide,” Muda Yusuf, Director General of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, had said of the harmful effects of waivers to local industries, citing the arbitrariness and impunity that reigned in their implementation.

Even more galling to many is the Minister’s feigning of ignorance on the abuse of pioneer status involving Seplat Petroleum, a company floated by a key supporter of President Jonathan who is also said to be related to the Minister of Petroleum. The abuse involving the indigenous oil and gas company now operating three on-shore producing oil and gas leases and listed on London and Nigeria bourse is an open secret as industry analysts have insisted that the company is not deserving of the pioneer status it was granted.

Operators in the Nigerian oil industry with an OML License are obligated to pay Petroleum Profit Tax as a royalty, which is then remitted into the federation account. But with the five-year pioneer tax status granted the company on 1, January 2013 by the NIPC, Seplat was exempted from payment of 65 per cent petroleum profits tax on crude oil profits, 30 per cent corporate income tax on natural gas profits and Education Tax of two per cent. Morgan Capital Group had in an analysis published in April last year and published by Proshare noted that there is no justification for the NIPC to grant pioneer tax status incentive to SEPLAT PLC for acquiring an already existing asset that the previous owners were already paying the PPT on, before the sale to Seplat as clearly indicated in NIPC criteria for granting pioneer status incentive. Other companies, which had acquired similar assets, were not granted the tax relief by NIPC.

Thus, Morgan Capital Group also noted that the undeserved tax waiver has put Seplat at an advantage among its peers citing the 400 per cent it recorded in its PAT between 2012 and 2013. The analyst had warned investors of the dire consequences on the company shares if a future government decided to revoke the tax incentives prior to the end of the five-year period or seek to recover taxes waived under the scheme from the company. Thus, analysts believe that the query raised by Okonjo Iweala may be a way of trying to remove her neck from complicity in the undeserved waivers granted to Seplat and others if the Buhari administration decided to institute a probe into the fraudulent dealings.

Unarguably, the biggest bleeding of the treasury under Okonjo Iweala has occurred in the guise of subsidy payments. Under the Minister, Nigeria recorded the highest payment for subsidy in 2011 when the country paid out a total of N2.19 trillion to fraudulent oil marketers and importers. The country had the previous year paid only N673 billion for the same purpose. A Committee set up by the minister to probe the payments following public outcry and an indicting probe by the House of Representatives, has indicted 21 oil firms of fraudulent activities. Indicted in the racket were children of some top chieftains of the PDP such as Alhaji Bamanga Tukur and Ahmadu Ali, both former chairmen of the ruling party. The Committee led by a banker, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede tagged Presidential Committee on Verification and Reconciliation of subsidy claims and payments had indicated that about N382billion was wrongly paid to the indicted firms.

The committee had recommended the indicted firms for prosecution. The Committee discovered that some of the importers devised different fraudulent schemes like claims of use of fictional oil vessels to transport imaginary petroleum products into the country, claims of discharge of petrol into storage depots in Nigeria at the exact time the ships were in those other countries among others.

The Committee noted that the fraudulent dealings were perpetrated with the help of officials of Petroleum Products Pricing and Regulatory Agency, the Customs, Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR), men of the Nigerian Navy, Nigeria Custom officers, banks and others involved in the various stages of fuel importation. Capital Oil and Gas, a firm owned by Ifeanyi Ubah the brain behind Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria, TAN, one of the major anchors of President Jonathan’s re-election bid, was among the companies indicted.

The Committee had alleged that the company received N43.291 billion as subsidy payments for the importation of 538.74 million litres of fuel in 26 transactions in 2011, without importing or discharging the product. But the grand larceny has continued with revelations by Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the former Governor of CBN that nearly $20 billion in oil receipts were not accounted for by NNPC and other agencies in a letter to President Jonathan in 2013, which was leaked to the media some months later. The former CBN governor said the NNPC failed to pay about $20 billion in oil revenue to the government between January 2012 and July 2013.

The Finance Minister had at a press conference following the revelations disputed the claims, as she affirmed that no money was missing. “The numbers were about $65billion exported by NNPC and about $15billion repatriated to Federation Account out of that. Now, in view with our duty as the banker of the government, we had the responsibility of alerting the President and request a thorough investigation of this matter,” Sanusi had told a Senate Committee saddled with investigations of the claim.

But Okonjo-Iweala countered in a submission to the House that $10.8 billion was yet to be accounted for out of the figures put out by the CBN Governor. The NNPC denied that any money was missing.

The revelation led to the sack of Sanusi who was soon appointed as the Emir of Kano from the CBN. However, following pressure by the public, the Federal Government was forced to conduct a “forensic audit” of NNPC accounts with the appointment of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, an accounting firm to carry out the task.

Excerpts of the report released to the public just before the 2015 elections indicated that the sum of $18.5 billion was not remitted to the national account as the minister, without lawful authorization, spent it. This sort of confirmed Sanusi’s allegation that huge money that ought to have been paid into the CBN treasury was not paid.

The report confirmed that NNPC illegally expended $18.53 billion on operational costs, kerosene and petrol subsidies, without authorisation from the National Assembly while part of the money was also withheld by an NNPC subsidiary, without National Assembly authorisation.

The auditors said NNPC and its upstream subsidiary, the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, should return about $1.48 billion arising from unsubstantiated costs, duplicated subsidy claims and computation errors to the national treasury.

The former CBN Governor however said with his removal, he was unable to conclude investigations into the transfer of oil assets belonging to the federation to the NPDC. He noted that though the NPDC paid about $100 million for the assets, from which it had extracted crude valued at $6.8 billion, it had only paid about $1.7 billion as tax and royalties for the period under review.

Critics had pointed out that a better policing of the national treasury by Okonjo Iweala, to prevent the kind of heist committed by NNPC would have allowed Nigeria to build up its foreign reserves and Excess Crude Account, ECA, thus giving the country the strength to survive the downturn in the price of oil which has also led to the fall in the value of the naira. The foreign reserves which in the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua Administration grew up to as much as over $60 billion now stands at about $34.5 billion while the ECA Account has equally depleted to a mere $3.1 billion from a level of $9.43 billion.

Soludo noted for instance that former President Obasanjo met about $5 billion in foreign reserves, and with the average monthly oil price for the 72 months he was in office at $38; he left $43 billion in foreign reserves after paying $12 billion to write-off Nigeria’s external debt. In contrast, the former CBN Chief noted that while the average monthly oil price has been over $100 in the first four years of the Jonathan administration and the quantity of oil sold higher, Nigeria foreign reserves have been declining and exchange rate depreciating. “My calculation is that if the economy was better managed, our foreign reserves should have been between $102 –$118 billion and exchange rate around N112 before the fall in oil prices. As of now, the reserves should be around $90 billion and exchange rate no higher than N125 per dollar,” said Soludo.

But the Minister had defended herself with claims that the depletion of the ECA was based on request of Governors who are joint owners of the account for funds while the Foreign Reserves was used by the CBN, the manager to meet various obligations of the country. “The reserves are also used to settle both public and private sector foreign currency obligations, including the importation of goods such as equipment for power sector. Whenever an Agency of Government or a private individual/company needs to make a payment in foreign currency (e.g. payment of goods and services, settlement of external debt, etc) it must provide the naira equivalent to the CBN in exchange for the required foreign currency,” said the Minister. But the fact remains that Okonjo-Iweala is leaving the Nigerian economy far worse than she met it.

The Minister had also insisted that in spite of the challenges posed by 50 per cent decline in the price of oil, she would hand over a healthy economy to the new administration when she vacated office. The Minister who told journalists recently that she has always told Nigerians the truth about the economy identified the agricultural sector, which has seen the rise in food production with attendant positive effect on food prices as one major legacy of the Jonathan government. Other sectors, which she said have witnessed great revolution, include “the National Industrial Revolution scheme and the Automotive Policy whose implementation has led to the opening of factories for car manufacturing and assembly.

According to her, the impressive rise in the cement production due to positive policies has turned Nigeria into a net exporter of cement while the government has been creating about 1.4 million jobs a year out of the 1.8m needed.

“Various job creation and job enhancement schemes such as Youwin which has seen the creation of over 27,000 jobs by young entrepreneurs sponsored and trained by government for other youths; the Graduate Internship Scheme. She added that recently launched Development Bank of Nigeria will help to achieve strong growth of small businesses by providing SMEs, for the first time in recent memory and affordable interest loans of up to 10 years.

“The support for the creative industries which has helped to strengthen the capacity of script writers, producers, directors and other professionals in the motion picture industry and led, in turn, to the production of higher quality films, and creation of more jobs.”

On balance, the woman from the World Bank, will not leave office with her head raised high, like she did in 2006, after clearing Nigeria’s debt with the Paris Club. This time around, her tenure will be remembered for plunging Nigeria into a great cash crunch, that is already exacting a great toll on the states and their workers.