Nigeria’s former Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
has said she had high hopes for the country, while she was growing up.
The former World Bank director stated this on a panel at the
Mo Ibrahim Forum in Morocco.
“When I was 18, the world seemed open, prospects from my
country seemed good; we had come out of a war, we were united and rebuilding so
it seemed like a place where there was a lot of opportunities because we were
reconstructing the country, there were a lot of jobs.
“I had very high expectations of a country where it would
have what it needed infrastructure wise and people could go up and down the
ladder anywhere they pleased”, she said.
Okonjo-Iweala also singled out unemployment as one of the
greatest challenges Nigeria was battling with.
“When we think about creating jobs, which is the biggest
problem our economy is faced with, we want to get very practical to talk about
what we should be doing rather than the theory,” she said.
“One thing is important, you can not create these jobs
unless you have a conducive environment in the economy that enables and
encourages your domestic private sector to invest as well as the foreign
private sector so that is where it begins”, she added.
By Ifreke Inyang
