How I Almost Died Serving Jonathan – Okonjo-Iweala

Former Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has revealed how God saved her from evil-doers who planned on inflicting “maximum physical damage” on her while she was serving in former President Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet.

Okonjo-Iweala, who revealed this in her book titled: ‘Fighting Corruption is Dangerous: The Story Behind the Headlines’, said some oil marketers had planned on paralysing her to a wheelchair in order to eventually force her out of office.

The former minister said but for a family friend who was present at the meeting held to attack her, the oil marketers would have succeeded in consigning her to a wheelchair.

She said in the book, “My mother’s ordeal was not the end of frightening events that occurred in late 2012 and early 2013. A few months after my mother’s escape, I had just wrapped up a meeting late one afternoon when my cell phone rang. It was again my brother Onyeama,” Okonjo-Iweala wrote.

“My first thought was that something else had gone wrong in the family. He frantically asked me, ‘where are you, where are you?’ I was surprised and I said I was in my office. He said I needed to immediately seek additional security and I must vary my route for travel.

“I asked what was wrong and my brother told me a very strange story. One of my brother’s old friend had just called him to say he had just left a secret meeting where the subject was to inflict maximum physical damage on me, just short of killing me. The agreement reached in this meeting was to attack me in a way that I would end up paralysed and bound to a wheelchair and forced to leave the finance ministry.

“The meeting was held by a group of oil importers and marketers to whom the federal government ‘owed money’. It was held in the house of the chair and owner of the of one of the oil marketing companies. They were angry I was withholding the subsidy payments that they thought were owed them for their refined petroleum imports.

“My brother’s friend participated in this meeting but felt what was being planned was unjust and cruel and I did not deserve it.”

She said her mother’s abduction while she was minister was due to the fact that she refused to resign from office as well as her refusal to make subsidy payments to some oil marketers after she detected fraudulent acts.