In this new episode of Head to Head, airing 1 May 2015 at 20.00 GMT on Al Jazeera English, Oby, as she’s affectionately referred to in Nigeria, tells host Mehdi Hasan and an audience at the Oxford Union that, a year after over 200 schoolgirls were kidnapped in Chibok, northern Nigeria, by Boko Haram, the #BringBackOurGirls campaign was not a failure. “No, I wouldn’t say that we have failed. I would say that we have not been able to move the elephant.”
Oby
blamed the outgoing administration of President Goodluck Jonathan for
its inaction and failure to rescue the young hostages, and said she
thought it was still possible
to defeat Boko Haram.
Known
as “Madam Due Process” for her fierce anti-corruption drive, Oby
founded Transparency International in 1996, was an advisor to former
President Olusegun
Obasanjo, and served in two of his cabinets as Minister of Education
and Minister of Solid Minerals between 2003 and 2007. After leaving
government, Oby moved on to become vice president of the World Bank for
Africa, where she stayed until 2012. More recently
she coined the phrase “Bring Back Our Girls,” which turned into a
world-famous Twitter-hashtag campaign.
Questioned
by Hasan about endemic corruption in Nigeria, Oby said her country has a
“political class problem,” but refused to condemn her former boss and
mentor President Olusegun Obasanjo, who ruled between 1999 and 2007.
Under pressure by Hasan, she conceded Obasanjo was “aware
of the elements of corruption, and it was his responsibility to tackle” them, but categorically denied he was corrupt himself. “Of
course it [the government] was [corrupt]! [But] There was no way it
could have been more corrupt than the government of Abacha,” she said,
referring to the military dictatorship of Sani Abacha that preceded
Obasanjo’s rule.
Oby lamented that the government she was
part of was not able to “succeed fully” in tackling corruption, and
defended her own track record, saying she had not been “window dressing”
for a corrupt regime
and insisting - despite holding two ministerial positions in the
Nigerian government, being an advisor to presidents and holding high
office at the World Bank – that she was not a politician.
During
the interview, Ezekwesili and Hasan discussed whether widespread
poverty, inequality and corruption are at the root of the brutal Boko
Haram insurgency,
and debated whether World Bank policies have helped or hurt Africa’s
development.
Challenged
over the effects of Word Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)
conditionalities for African countries, Oby told Hasan she would “define
an exit date” for both institutions. When pressed about setting the
exit date, she said she stuck to her 2008 suggestion of a 25 year
deadline by 2033.
Hasan
is joined by a panel of three experts: Priscilla Nwikpo, a
British-Nigerian broadcaster and commentator; Richard Itaman, a Nigerian
economist and
researcher at the University of London, School of Oriental and African
Studies; and Richard Dowden, executive director of the Royal African
Society in the UK and former correspondent for
The Economist.
In
each episode, Hasan goes head to head with a special guest, asking the
probing and hard-hitting questions few dare to ask on the big issues
such faith,
foreign intervention, the Middle East, US foreign policy, and the
economic crisis.
The interview with Ezekwesili is part of the fourth series of Head to Head,
which is Al Jazeera’s forum for ideas, hosted by Mehdi Hasan. The
fourth series saw Hasan
interview former NATO boss Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former head of
Pakistani Intelligence Agency ISI Gen. Asad Durrani, and Israeli
historian and anti-Semitism expert Robert S. Wistrich.
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