Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, described Soludo’s criticism of the management of the economy under President Goodluck Jonathan as “intellectual hara-kiri.”
Soludo, who was the CBN governor between May 2004 and May 2009, had on Monday written an article in which he claimed that the Nigerian economy under Jonathan had performed woefully.
Okonjo-Iweala stated this while reacting to the article written by Soludo through a statement issued by her Special Adviser on Communications, Mr. Paul Nwabuikwu,.
She said not only was it littered with abusive and unbecoming language, it showed Soludo, whom she described as an “embittered loser in the Nigerian political space,” could get so derailed by misquoting economic facts and maliciously turning statistics on their head to justify a hatchet job.
Okonjo-Iweala had said the Federal Government had hired forensic auditors to scrutinise the accounts of the NNPC following the controversies generated by the allegation of the missing money. But up untill now, the report of the audit has not been made public.
“It is a sad day for Nigeria and the economics profession that someone like Soludo, a former CBN governor, should write such an article. If Soludo wants to regain respect, he should return to the path of professionalism. He certainly needs something to improve his image from that of someone whose sojourn into national economic management ended in disaster for the banking sector.
“His sojourn in politics ended in overwhelming rejection by the electorate, and more recently, his sojourn abroad has put him out of touch with the reality of the Nigerian economy.”
There is definitely an issue of character with Prof. Charles Soludo and his desperate search for power and relevance in Nigeria. So much of what is written is outright nonsense and self-seeking aggrandisement that need not be dignified with a response.
“It is totally remarkable that Prof. Charles Chukwuma Soludo, the man who presided over the worst mismanagement of Nigeria’s banking sector as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria between May 2004 and May 2009, can write about the mismanagement of the economy.
“The consolidation of the banking sector was a good policy idea of the (Olusegun) Obasanjo administration but Soludo went on to thoroughly mismanage its implementation, leading to the worst financial crisis in Nigeria’s history.
“So what did Soludo do? After consolidation, the regulatory functions of the Soludo-led CBN were very poorly exercised. As governor, he failed to adequately supervise and regulate the now larger banks, an anomaly in financial sector supervision.
“In fact, as every Nigerian knows in his time, there was very little separation between the regulators and the regulated, which is a violation of a key requirement of central banking success.
“This led to infractions in corporate governance in many banks as loans and other credit instruments running to hundreds of billions of naira were extended to clients without following due process, and several of these loans could not be paid back.”
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