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| Dr. Oby Ezekwesili. |
Dr. Oby Ezekwesili was Senior Special Assistant, SSA
to former president Olusegun Obasanjo on Due Process, later served as Minister
of Education and Minister for Solid Minerals.
She was Vice President at the World Bank.
A woman whose intelligence even men fear to compete
with, an upright woman of inestimable value, fearless and a child of God, which
is why she does the things we see and hear her do these days, and in this
interview she granted the Sun Newspapers with excerpts presented here, she
spoke like she had always done with passion for what she believe in, NIGERIA.
Culled from the Sun Newspapers.
AThere
are insinuations in the public space that you built opposition against
President Buhari because he failed to offer you a ministerial position. Is that
true?
You should help me answer that question how a woman who left
government at the age of 44, having been a minister twice over, should think
that issues of being a minister would be so high a stake for me to put myself
out in the way that I have put myself concerning President Jonathan’s failure
to give justice to Chibok girls, concerning President Buhari’s failure to do
the same thing.
When
it came to the matter of dignity of life, I felt that President Buhari, having
promised that he was going to bring our Chibok girls back within a matter of
six months, which was what he said in his inaugural speech when he said, ‘I
would not consider myself to have defeated Boko Haram without the rescue of Chibok
girls.’ And then, he gave the timeline for defeating Boko Haram as end of
December, 2016. The question balanced out right?
So, when we as a movement began to insist that you must bring
these girls back, it shows that our advocacy for the girls was a continuum, it
didn’t matter whether it was under your government they were taken or not.
So,
it is not personal?
It wasn’t personal. So, not understanding that, but instead, the
government became adversarial just like the Jonathan administration to the movement
and then, they began to say all these exactly the same thing that the President
Jonathan administration and the allies were saying, oh, you know, she is angry
at the president because she is not a minister. But President Jonathan failed
to tell them how many times I was asked to be a minister in his cabinet and I
refused. So, the people who speak like that speak out of ignorance and they
speak out of a complete absence of fundamental values that drive me. I am a
woman driven by character and my courage of conviction. Look, having spent six
and a half years in government, I have no need to prove any point. There is no
point to prove! The work that I do, supporting countries on the continent at
leadership level to run better economies, that gives me the greatest joy.
At
44 for goodness sake, I had been the minister and then gone to the World Bank
and been vice president. Can you imagine a situation where people even do not
get analytical in their thought? What I was ten years ago, is something that I
need to be and that is why I am doing the things I do. Does it make sense? I
mean, think of it.
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