Subsidy: Oil mafias planned to kill me, Okonjo-Iweala reveals

Two-time minister of finance and Word Bank financial consultant, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has revealed that there was plot by oil mafias in Nigeria to kill her while serving as minister under ex-President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration.

TheCable online medium also quoted Okonjo -Iweala as saying that the mafias orchestrated the kidnapping of her mother as part of their plot against her.

According to her, a friend to one of her brothers attended a meeting where the plot was hatched, after which he advised her brother that security should be beefed up around her.

The former minister who revealed this in her booken titled: ‘Fighting Corruption is Dangerous: The Story Behind the Headlines’ , noted that the cabal is striving to conquer and pocket the nation’s economy.

The financial expert wrote in the book that “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, 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 friends 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 paralyzed 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 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.

The minister said the attack on her mother was due to her refusal to resign from office, after she had convened a task force that audited fiscal accounts and detected “fraudulent” claims for oil subsidy payments by oil marketers, which she refused to pay.