By Gimba Kakanda
Beaming in her trademark ankara dress on the website of Time magazine in the past week is Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. She’s been announced as one of the magazine’s persons of the year for 2021; a distinguished annual list of achievers. Across the cyberspace is a deafening disappointment in her political contemporary, Femi Fani-Kayode, who’s made history of opposite honour. The unequal curves in their career trajectories are a subject of philosophical lament.
NOI and FFK had a head start over their contemporaries. One was the son of a distinguished lawyer and politician, and the other from a royal family and the daughter of accomplished academics. This privilege jump-started their bid to stand on their own, with prized education at the world’s highest-ranked institutions. This, fortunately, is where their difference begins to tell even though their paths would cross years down the line as the topmost policymakers of their country.
Femi Fani-Kayode’s patrilineal lineage is a testament to academic excellence. His father and grandfather were educated at the prestigious Cambridge University. He followed in their footsteps to also study Law at the same institution. Down the line of this ancestry was also a Fourah Bay College-trained priest, his great-great-grandfather.
Like FFK, NOI too rode on the coattail of academic models. Her father was a University of London-trained Mathematician who peaked as a Professor of Mathematical Economics after his postgraduate studies in Germany, and functioned in both the theoretical and practical spaces of his discipline. Professor Chukwuka Okonjo, who passed away in 2019, was also an economic advisor to the Ghanaian government. His wife, Professor Kamene Okonjo, became a Professor of Sociology.
NOI began at Harvard University, where she studied Economics and then a PhD in Regional Economics and Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She spent about 25 years at the World Bank and rose to the position of Managing Director, the second-in-command. This difference has made her the star of global development organizations and businesses as they contest to convince her to sit on their boards.
Outside the realm of these academic halos, FFK’s father, along with friends—FRA Williams and Bode Thomas—set up the first indigenous law firm in Nigeria and, in politics, the older Fani-Kayode became the deputy premier of the Western Region. He’s fondly remembered for moving the motion for Nigeria’s independence from colonial rule. As for NOI’s father, political involvement began through rebellion against the Nigerian state during the Biafra War in defence of his people. He was a brigadier in the Biafran Army and headed the Biafran Organization of Freedom Fighters. After the war, he taught at the University of Nigeria where he attained the professorial rank before leaving for Ghana to head a United Nations project. Until his death, he was the Obi of Ogwashi-Uku.
FFK and NOI are proof that even privilege and academic excellence only take one so far. Moral principles can’t be inherited or jump-started. The pattern of their selection as ministers under President Olusegun Obasanjo was enough difference. NOI was chosen based on her professional antecedents and FFK for becoming a thorn in the flesh of the President. He barked at Obasanjo too loudly, the President had to create an image-laundering office, Special Assistant on Public Affairs, for him.
NOI came to the Obasanjo government with an impressive resume and demonstrated understanding of the international financial system, and headed the Ministry of Finance and then Foreign Affairs. She spearheaded, among other reforms and decisions, the cancellation of Nigeria’s external debt with the Paris Club. Despite the rots in the government, she held her side of the ship more than several of her colleagues, so much that she was able to return to a more senior position at her former place of employment at the end of her tenure. In 2011, she was again invited to Nigeria to take charge at an expanded Ministry of Finance under President Goodluck Jonathan.
The world of FFK, on the other hand, has been a turbulent scrambling for a balance since leaving office. His law degree has been sacrificed for the anti-intellectual pursuit of wild conspiracy theories and briefcase activism. FFK’s template has been barking at the government until he gets invited to the dining table. During the Jonathan days, with NOI occupying a respectable office, he masqueraded as an activist and the food took too long to arrive. At a book presentation in April 2013, he charged that the government would be remembered for its legacy of “destruction and disaster” in Nigeria. Much later in the same year, he accused the Jonathan government of complicity in the rise of Boko Haram, and that Jonathan was plotting to manipulate the 2015 elections in a terrorism-ravaged country. In about a year, he was the Director of Publicity for the Goodluck Jonathan Presidential Campaign.
After Jonathan’s defeat, he had no place to thrive but the business of manufacturing unresearched claims online. Soon, he was under trial and going from court to court to answer for his part in the sharing of arms deal money by Jonathan’s National Security Adviser, Colonel Sambo Dasuki. FFK too landed briefly in Kuje prison in the course of the trial, and, for that, he searched the English dictionary for the most toxic invectives to throw at the APC and President Buhari. He described the APC as “not a political party but a satanic lodge of devil-worshippers and a cult of death. They bring nothing but death, decay and destruction,” and vowed that he “would rather die than join APC.”
The news of his sycophantic assessment of the APC-led government since his defection is damning. He’s suddenly become an apologist for those he once told a legion of anti-Buhari minions online are devils. He jumped from ethnic pole down through regional pole to religious pole to undermine the Buhari-led government and was cheered on by kinsmen tricked into believing that he was indeed fighting for the Yoruba nation, and even hosting, and facilitating an alliance with, Nnamdi Kanu. Today, the latter is in the custody of the DSS and expecting his Yoruba friend to join the band agitating for his freedom from the Hausa- Fulani “devils” FFK now refers to as “friends and brothers.”
NOI offers us an alternative to FFK. She’s shown us the essence of utilizing our privilege wisely and having a fallback plan before joining the government. FFK got the same privilege of first-rate education and a strong coattail to pursue his dream but skipped a class that taught character. NOI climbed up this ladder to a height upon which the world looks while her former colleague is digging deep into the abyss of shame to find food and relevance. As NOI makes history as the first African Director-General of the World Trade Organization, FFK intensifies our prayer for more than just a noble beginning.
• Kakanda is a newspaper columnist and social media influencer.