#OccupyNigeria: Why Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Should Be The Next President Of The World Bank By Ikhide R. Ikheloa

#OccupyNigeria: For all the
beautiful children murdered in
January for standing up to the
myrmidons of our darkness.

I fully expect Nigeria’s Minister of
Finance and Coordinating Minister
for the Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-
Iweala to be the next president of
the World Bank. Her rejection as the
first African to run the World Bank
would be wrong on many levels.
There is no one else better primed
to execute the obnoxious policies of
the World Bank against African and
brown nations than Okonjo-Iweala.
Her current tour of duty although
disastrous to Nigeria and her poor,
has given her an impeccable
resume to spread the World Bank’s
gospel of uncritical capitalism and
indifference to the world’s poor and
dispossessed. Okonjo-Iweala has the
playbook down pat, for those of us
who still remember #OccupyNigeria,
that uprising of Nigerian youths
against the Okonjo-Iweala-led World
Bank endorsed policies against the
poor, that uprising that was
quashed with ruthless efficiency and
left several young people dead for
exercising their rights of association
and protest.
No shrinking violet, Okonjo-Iweala
has led an aggressive and fairly
effective campaign for the
presidency of the World Bank.
South Africa has endorsed her
campaign and The African Union
has a beautifully penned
hagiography in support of the
candidacy here that should make
even Iweala blush with excitement.
There is a sense of entitlement here,
but hey, regardless, she is going to
be a vast improvement over the sad
sack of odium that was the IMF’s
Dominique Strauss Kahn.
As an institution, the World Bank is
an ancient bureaucratic relic whose
time has come and gone. Now it is
mostly a mean cudgel for meeting
the West’s imperial needs in
developing countries, aided by
many of Africa’s intellectual and
political elite. The fawning over
Okonjo-Iweala by Westerners has
been comic. Early in March, the
Economist started out of the gate by
braying Okonjo-Iweala’s term of
endearment, Iron Lady. Well, She
definitely is no Margaret Thatcher,
let’s not be patronizing. David
Smith of the Observer leads the
pack of hagiographies but
unwittingly makes Okonjo-Iweala
look like some sort of Don Quixote
tilting at windmills, rather than a
serious economist. You would think
he just sighted a simian using twigs
as an instrument to fish termites
out of a log. There is more crowing
here by Lant Pritchett of the
Guardian. Annie Lowry of The New
York Times has a more nuanced
piece here on the three top
candidates: Dr. Jim Young Kim,
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Jose
Antonio Ocampo. The New York
Times does have a more dignified
editorial in which it appears to lean
towards Okonjo-Iweala but it is loud
in what it does not say about her
candidacy.
What the West will not say in public
is in the intelligence briefings that
made President Barack Hussein
Obama avoid her like the plague
and go for Kim. Again, anyone in
doubt should remember #
OccupyNigeria. Okonjo-Iweala and
her colleagues in Aso Rock and
NASS that pretend-legislature
callously rammed through one of
the most obnoxious taxes on the
poor in the history of Black Africa.
Again, many Nigerian youths died
protesting this outrage on the
majority by a privileged few
screwing Nigeria for their own
benefit. Under normal
circumstances, were Okonjo-Iweala
a Westerner or white, she and her
bumbling team would have been
fired for gross incompetence. The
show of double standards is galling
and maddening. Kim’s works have
been given more scrutiny and
rigorous analysis while Okonjo-
Iweala has been described in
patronizing terms with absolutely no
mention of her views or
documented works and her deadly
role in the subsidy removal fiasco of
this past January. But she is African
and the world recoils when it comes
to holding African leaders and their
intellectuals accountable. That
would mean, finally, Africa is on an
upward trajectory, perish that
thought.
It would be interesting to know what
intelligence America’s White House
had on all the candidates that made
Obama choose Kim, someone whose
views are actually full of compassion
and common sense and seem to go
against the grain of what the World
Bank now stands for. In any case,
Obama in my view has become an
apostle of orthodoxy in thought and
governance and it takes one to
know and avoid one. Besides
Obama has no history of respect for
Africa and Africans. If he does he
has a strange way of showing it; his
tenure so far has lacked any
coherent foreign policy when it
comes to Africa. President Bush was
a better friend of Africa, by far.
But I digress. When Okonjo-Iweala
departs for the World Bank, she will
be leaving Nigeria much worse than
she found it. That is the most
compelling reason why she
deserves the World Bank
presidency. Nigerians need a break.
Okonjo-Iweala’s appointment would
be the most eloquent marker of how
seriously the world takes Africans as
human beings. As a parent, I
personally hold Okonjo-Iweala and
the Nigerian leadership responsible
for the numerous youth who were
murdered and maimed early this
year by the state for exercising their
rights. Again, no Western leader
could have survived that mess, not
one. The world shrugs its shoulders
routinely and rewards African
incompetence, corruption and
brutality. That is why certified wife-
beaters, petty crooks and murderers
are paraded on the world stage as
“African statesmen.” This is how to
keep Africa in perpetual bondage.
The World Bank is good at that.
The presidency of the World Bank
would be a wonderful homecoming
for Okonjo-Iweala one of their own. It
is interesting to me that the same
African intellectuals and activists
who constipated the Internet with
anti-subsidy rants have been quiet.
Indeed the few vocal ones are
actively lobbying for her
appointment. That is how we roll in
Africa. I was one of several that
protested the policies of the World
Bank in January, how soon we
forget. For the children that were
murdered in the struggle for
Nigeria, may their sacrifice not end
up being for nothing. For my
mother in the hellhole that serves
as her village in Nigeria, the beating
goes on. And the beat goes on.
From the White House to the World
Bank, Africa is screwed by her own.
Farewell, I hope, and pray, Dr. Ngozi
Okonjo-Iweala.