Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

It was hardly the best of circumstances for an interview when Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala sat down with Foreign Policy in Washington, D.C., recently. In addition to jet lag, the Nigerian finance minister was battling both malaria and the flu. “Anyone else would be lying in bed right now,” she said wryly. But toughing through malaria might be easy compared with the Harvard- and MIT-trained economist’s day job: attempting to clean up Nigeria’s notorious corruption and cutting hugely popular subsidies in a country that has become the textbook example of the resource curse. It’s also a brutal place to be in public life: Just two days after this conversation, Okonjo-Iweala’s mother was kidnapped and held for ransom. (She was released after five days.) In a wide-ranging conversation, the former World Bank managing director — favored by many to run the organization, though Barack Obama stuck with tradition and nominated an American, Jim Yong Kim, last year — touched on the biggest challenges facing Nigeria, why she’s bullish about Africa, and why Americans shouldn’t be so smug.

There are similarities I’ve learned living both in the United States and Nigeria. The first is that the U.S. is a big country, and it’s very self-absorbed. The average U.S. person doesn’t really think about what’s happening elsewhere, to be honest. Nigeria is a large country too; we have 167 million people. And people there, too, are not really thinking of what’s happening outside. But we’re in the Internet age, and so domestic politics is no longer domestic, really. It’s international. I don’t think that has quite hit our politicians.

The big difference is that the United States, being a developed country, has strong institutions. In Nigeria — which is a much younger country, only about 50 years since independence — the lack of these institutions is to be understood. But it does make for a different way of doing business. Some of the things that are looked upon as corruption over there have found legal and professional names over here, in the United States. For instance, at home when people go to lawmakers and induce them with trips and gifts and so on to pass legislation, it’s called corruption. But in the U.S. it’s actually a profession called lobbying! Read More

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