If you think the drama between former CBN Governor, Charles Soludo and Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has ended, then you are on a long thing. After Charles Soludo called the president out, with the Minister replying him and branding him the worst CBN governor Nigeria has ever had, Mr Soludo is back! In a lengthy, over 6000 words article, Mr. Soludo today rejected claims by Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala that he performed poorly as the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, when he was still in office.
According to him, his performance as CBN governor was unprecedented and locally as well as globally acknowledged. “In Nigeria’s history, no governor of the Central Bank has delivered 24 consecutive months of single digit inflation as I did until the advent of the unprecedented global crisis in 2008,” he said. Continue below...
He also challenged claims by Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala, who is also the Coordinating Minister of the Economy, that the Nigerian economy is doing well. He accused Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala of running the country’s economy aground.
“You are brilliant Madam, but you need serious help,” he said.
“Having spent all your life in the World Bank bureaucracy largely in administration/operations, no one will blame you if your economics has become a bit rusty. There are firebrand Nigerians all over the world to draft to service. It is certainly embarrassing to Nigeria for you to be bothering World Bank economists to help you with most basic economic analysis, he said.”
“What worries me is that this government is the first in our history to attempt to manipulate our national statistics under Okonjo-Iweala. When NBS published the poverty figures in 2011, she felt indicted and incensed. She called upon the World Bank to come and examine the ‘methodology’ and get NBS to ‘review’ its numbers. Oby Ezekwesili (as VP Africa Region rejected the call to try to tamper with a country’s statistics). Once Oby left, the ‘World Bank’ started talking about ‘new figures’, without conducting any new surveys.
“I was told about it by a World Bank economist, and I cautioned that it was a dangerous gamble that would damage the credibility of the NBS. If you want to ‘review methodology’, you conduct another survey but you can’t change ‘methodology’ because you don’t like the published figures. No government in our history has tried it: even Sani Abacha allowed a poverty survey that put poverty at 67% under his regime. At this rate, who will believe statistics coming from the Nigerian government again? Is it now the World Bank that sits in Washington and allocates poverty numbers to Nigeria? Something smells here!”Mr Soludo said.
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