The State of Nigeria's Economic Reforms

Transcript

NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA: Basically what happened is that President Obasenjo won his second term. It gave leadership -- and this is very important that he took the initiative to say that look, it's time to turn away from the politics which he focused on in the first term to economic center reform of the economy, and the economy had a lot of problems.

To do this, he assembled an economic team when he approached me to be finance minister, learning lessons from how the Brazilians had done their reforms, the fact that no one person can do this -- but you need to assemble a team of people who will be reformers. So, we talked about it and we accepted this was the way to go, and under my leadership we got together a team, and of course he was the political inspiration, and he gave the commitment that made the team function. So, he deserves credit for having, you know, backed us on the reforms. But what we decided to do -- these 12 men and women initially -- excellent colleagues -- and, you know, they deserve all the credit because each person or set of people were responsible for a set of the reforms, and that's what really made it happen. And we focused on trying to identify the key issues in the economy and then what types of reforms would be necessary in order to turn the economy around. Then essentially today we've tried to encapsulate them in three main blocks: macroeconomic reform; structure reforms; and institutional and governance reforms. And I'm going to talk about the macroeconomic and institutional and governance reforms.

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