Soludo gets reply from Ngozi Okonjo Iweala

On Sunday, it will be recalled that Professor Charles Soludo published a rejoinder article where he leveled allegations of mismanagement and pandering to World Bank interests against Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, accusing her and her administration of essentially facilitating the theft of over N30trn in the last four years.

Nigeria's coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on the other hand has said that she would not be replying the former CBN governor anymore, over his claims that N30 trn was lost under her watch.

She said this during an on-air interview organized by Raypower. She however told Nigerians not to be deceived by the misinformation peddled by the Professor.

Her response to the missing N30trn was: “This is part of the packaged lies that Nigerians must avoid. I don’t want to enter into that debate, we have answered him (Soludo) and I don’t want to join issues with him because you don’t join issues when things don’t make any sense.”

Continuing, she said: “There is a lot of misinformation that is being put out and it is sad for me. I have not been controlling the audit, it is the Auditor General. Nigerians have been misinformed. They left out the fact that the Auditor-General was in charge of the report.

“I was only interviewed for it and there was no way I could be in charge, but some people decided to paint it as if I was in charge of the report and that is very unfortunate.

“It is part of the packaging and misinformation in this politics, and it has to stop because Nigerians cannot be continuously deceived."

When asked if Nigeria is broke, she responded by saying that 2015 is going to be a very tough year' for Nigeria:

“This question of the economy is broke has been going on for four years now.

“People in the opposition have tried to package this and they have been saying this because they just wish the economy will be broke because they want to get Nigerians alarmed.

“They want to make them feel hopeless about the economy. But Nigerians cannot be deceived. All these three years that they have been saying that the country is broke, has the economy not been running?

“Now they saw that oil prices are falling and they are holding on to that. I have been very clear in saying that it is going to be a difficult year for the country, but this is something we can manage.”

"The other story going around is that we are not able to pay salary. In December, the reason why salary took so long was because the payroll system we are using actually locked out some agencies when they tried to pay more people that are not in the system. The system locked out 14 agencies and we had to restore them for payment manually.

“I want to make one thing clear, because of the fall in oil price and the drop in quantity, less has been coming to the coffers