Nigeria’s finance minister made use of her sizeable Twitter following on Tuesday night to defend president Goodluck Jonathan and reassure the public of the government’s efforts to find the kidnapped Chibok school girls, taken from their school on 14 April.
Largely paraphrasing an interview she gave to Katie Couric on Yahoo News during the World Economic Forum in Abuja, which was then posted on a Facebook page dedicated to her, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, tweeted that the event was “a success for our abducted girls”.
“Over 1,000 world and business leaders came to show that they would stand against terror,” she added.
Nigerians on Twitter were quick to object, suggesting perhaps that with the girls still in captivity, it might be premature – and a touch inappropriate – to pronounce a meeting of business leaders a triumph, but Okonjo-Iweala powered on: “We accept that [government] did not communicate all it was doing before, so as not to cause harm to the girls. That's the reason for the reticence.”
Despite the growing clamour of opposition, the minister continued: “For me, it is deep pain and depression to know that those girls' mothers are waiting. These are our daughters, and we have to get them back.”
And with that, while her followers were still smarting, she moved on to other phenomena that, along with terrorism, were not “just a Nigerian problem”. “Inequality is a major challenge in the growth story of Africa and Nigeria. Just as it is also a global phenomenon.” Many of the tweets last night to which she received backlash have this morning been deleted.
Despite being called a "brilliant reformer" by Bono and Gordon Brown, Okonjo-Iweala does seem to be prone to a public blunder. As a speaker at TEDx Euston last November, she danced to an instrumental version of the popular Afrobeat song “Chop my money”, pidgin for ‘spend my money’. The title of her keynote? ‘Don’t trivialise corruption, tackle it.’
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