curator
Administrator
What do you do when you find yourself in a slimy hole? Wisdom dictates that you stop digging. But for Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister for the Economy, this treasured American dictum makes no sense as far as the issue of the corruption-drenched waivers and exemptions goes. In yet another desperate attempt to defend the misuse and abuse of import duty waivers, exemptions and concessions, she pointedly singled out The PUNCH for attack, accusing this newspaper of “trivializing corruption” at the TEDxEuston forum in faraway London.
In her latest blunder, she once again faulted our insistence that import duty waivers have become, in the hands of successive Nigerian governments, instruments of massive corruption and not of economic stimulation as she claims. After “entertaining” her audience with what she called “a whole series of newspapers with their negative reports,” the minister went on, “I had an example recently of this trivialization from one of our national newspapers, ‘The PUNCH newspaper’; they claimed that a government policy where we give incentives to industries or business people to spur them to invest in the economy was a bunch of corruption.”
But if you accuse someone of lying, you must be prepared to prove it. If you are a government minister, backed by all the power and integrity that should go with the position, that onus of proof becomes double. Not our eminent minister. As she was grandstanding in London, fresh revelations were being made back home of the magnitude of the loss to the economy of the fraudulent waivers.
Click here to read more
Click here to watch the TEDxEuston video
Source: Sahara Reporters
In her latest blunder, she once again faulted our insistence that import duty waivers have become, in the hands of successive Nigerian governments, instruments of massive corruption and not of economic stimulation as she claims. After “entertaining” her audience with what she called “a whole series of newspapers with their negative reports,” the minister went on, “I had an example recently of this trivialization from one of our national newspapers, ‘The PUNCH newspaper’; they claimed that a government policy where we give incentives to industries or business people to spur them to invest in the economy was a bunch of corruption.”
But if you accuse someone of lying, you must be prepared to prove it. If you are a government minister, backed by all the power and integrity that should go with the position, that onus of proof becomes double. Not our eminent minister. As she was grandstanding in London, fresh revelations were being made back home of the magnitude of the loss to the economy of the fraudulent waivers.
Click here to read more
Click here to watch the TEDxEuston video
Source: Sahara Reporters
