EDITORIAL ; THE MESSAGE, THE MESSENGER AND THE POLITICS OF THE ECONOMY

I am not a big fan of Ngozi Ikonjo Iweala. I consider her a poster child of the Brendan Woods Institutions whose brand of economics is more theoretical than developmental. I would not go as far as calling her an Auntie Tom,but her tendency to speak of our economy in a detached, almost disinterestedly dismissive manner turns me off.

But I concede to the fact that she truly loves her country, and given a proper working environment, could do a " Buhari", you know, massive shock treatment, to our economy, like she did with the debt relief issue, and when she started publishing monthly allocation to the three tiers of government under Obasanjo, effectively exposing the lie of state governments in regards to funds.
But that was then.
Since her second coming under the Jonathan administration, with added powers to oversee the economy under a president who is relieved about being relieved of the responsibility of driving the economy, I had expected her to be the sherriff in town, keeping a tight leash on the economy and ensuring that we were not dragged down the debt hole that she dug us out from.
When Chales Soludo, in the spirit of the season, decided to hit, and hit hard at the economic underbelly of the Jonathan administration, I know madam would come out with the two guns blazing, leveling the professor with a barrage of statistical bullets and data tipped arrows.
But what did we get?, a bucket load of insinuations, inferences and innuendos. a rebuttal long on verbosity but short on facts. The most galling being the act of dragging a serious matter of economic downturn and our lack of savings to the gutter, spewing insults that a street walker would be proud of, and regaling us once more, the campaign manual of the Jonathan administration.
This is not an acceptance of Soludo's postulations, but it was a missed opportunity by the minister to once and for all explain the policy direction in the era of falling oil prices in layman terms, and she sacrificed that on the altar of politics and personal aggravation.
it was not all bad news however, she did admit that the power reforms had not yielded the expected turnaround, and that it was the governors who derailed her attempts at saving for the rainy day, an affront that the old Ngozi would have sniffed her nose at, march to her office, and resigned.
But I guess her patriotism, and the rush that comes with holding the economic jugular of 170 million people in your two hands, is much more important than that of a world renowned advocate of proportional saving of the Sovereign Wealth of our Commonwealth, on the altar of immediate gratification of political expediency..
My Ten Kobo