President Goodluck Jonathan recently approved the appointment of Ministers who will assist him in discharging his obligations to Nigeria.
NLI Founder and Former Minister of Finance, Mr. Segun Aganga, has been re-appointed as a Minister.
Segun Aganga is Nigeria’s Former Minister of Finance and Chairman of the Board of the Bretton-Woods Institutes, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs London. Prior to joining Goldman, Segun was at Ernst & Young for 22 years where he established and led the European Alternative Investment Management Practice.
Segun has been the Chairman of the London Investment Banking Association’s prime brokerage committee and the Alternative Investments Managers Association’s hedge fund committee. He also sits on a number of boards including Technoserve. He is the founder of the Nigeria Leadership Initiative (NLI).
NLI Fellow and Chairman, Editorial Board of The Guardian, Dr. Reuben Abati has been appointed Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity.
Reuben Abati had a First Class Honours degree in Theatre Arts at the University of Calabar and won the Vice Chancellor’s prize as the overall best graduating student of the university in 1985. He also distinguished himself as a University Scholar at the University of Ibadan where he did his Masters and Ph.D programmes.
He completed his Ph.D at the age of 24 within just two years, specialising in Dramatic Literature, Theory and Criticism. He also did a Journalism programme as Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow, College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park, United States between 1996 and 1997.
In 1999, Abati earned an LL.B (Hons) from the Lagos State University, Ojo. Some of the awards he has won include The Cecil King Memorial Prize for Print Journalist of the Year, 1998; The Diamond Award for Media Excellence for Informed Commentary, 1998; Fletcher Challenge Commonwealth Prize for Opinion Writing, 2000; and Diamond Award for Media Excellence for Informed Commentary, 2000 and Freedom Peace Prize for Journalism (2006). Before taking up a career in journalism, Dr. Abati was a lecturer in the Department of English, Ogun State University, now Olabisi Onabanjo University. He has been a member of the Governing Council of the same University since 1999.
Dr. Abati is a widely published author and literary critic.
NLI Fellow and Managing Director of The World Bank Group, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has been appointed Minister of Finance
From June to August 2006, she was Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nigeria, overseeing Nigeria’s External Relations. From July 2003 to June 2006 she served as Minister of Finance and Economy of Nigeria and Head of Nigeria’s much acclaimed Presidential Economic team responsible for implementing a comprehensive home grown economic reform program that stabilized the macro-economy and tripled the growth rate to an average 6 percent per annum over 3 years. Her achievements as Finance Minister garnered international recognition for improving Nigeria’s financial stability and fostering greater fiscal transparency to combat corruption. In October 2005, she led the Nigerian team that negotiated the cancellation of US $18 billion or 60 percent of Nigeria’s external debt with the Paris Club. The debt deal also included an innovative buy-back mechanism that wiped out Nigeria’s Paris club debt and reduced the country’s external indebtedness from US$35 to US$5 billion. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala oversaw Nigeria’s first ever Sovereign credit rating of BB- from Fitch and Standard and Poor’s—a rating that grouped Nigeria with other emerging market countries such as Brazil, Vietnam, Venezuela, and Philippines.
Previously, she pursued a 21-year career as a development economist at the World Bank, where she held the post of Vice President and Corporate Secretary. This included two tours of duty (six years) working in the East Asia Region, the last tour (1997-2000) as Country Director Malaysia, Mongolia, Laos and Cambodia during the East Asian financial crisis; two duty tours in the Middle East Region, the last (2000-2003) as Director, Operations (deputy vice-president) of the region. Dr Okonjo-Iweala also served as Director of Institutional Change and Strategy (1995-1997). In this post she assisted with the implementation of the Bank’s reform agenda. From 1989 to 1991 she was Special assistant to the Senior Vice President, Operations, an assignment that enabled participation in high level policy formulation and discussions for countries as diverse as China and Burkina Faso.
Dr. Okonjo-Iweala was educated at Harvard and has a PhD in Regional Economics and Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is fluent in French, Ibo and English with working knowledge of Yoruba. She has received numerous awards, including Honorary Doctorate of Letters from University of Dublin, Trinity College, 2007, Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Colby College, 2007 and Brown University, 2006, Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Northern Caribbean University, Mandeville, Jamaica, 2005, Time Magazine’s European Hero of the Year Award, 2004, for her work on economic reform in Nigeria, Euromoney Magazine Global Finance Minister of the year, 2005, Financial Times/The Banker African Finance Minister of the year 2005, This Day (Nigeria’s premier newspaper) Minister of the Year award 2004 and 2005.
NLI Fellow and Accenture’s Country Managing Director for Nigeria, Mrs Omobola Johnson has been appointed Minister of Technology and Communications
Omobola holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Manchester and a Masters degree in Digital Electronics from King’s College, London.
She joined Accenture, then Andersen Consulting in 1985. In the seventeen years she has been at Accenture, she has progressed through various roles and is currently the Country Managing Director for Nigeria.
