Jonathan’s economic team ’ll fail –Prof. Tam David West

Posted by admin Latest Politics Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

Former Oil Minister, Prof. Tam David West, yesterday assessed the chances of President Goodluck Jonathan’s economic team succeeding and returned a verdict of ‘doubtful’. The ex-minister said, formidable as the team is in its composition, it bore an insidious germ of failure.

Besides, the former university don said apparent lack of focus and political will on the part of the president, as well as cynical public perception were factors likely to militate against the group’s success.
In an interview with Daily Sun in Ibadan, David-West admitted that the team was “a good team” based on the members’ credentials and antecedents.

He, however, noted that Jonathan’s pronouncement on how it was to operate and subordinating other equally eminent members to the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala may frustrate the group’s workings.

Also, he observed that some of the members held extreme views on the economy which contradict the others’ and which they may not easily abandon. His words: “ Yes, it’s a big house of 20 eminent men and women in their chosen fields, but they’ll have problem to work together as a team because some have views completely at variance and conflictual which will make it a Tower of Babel, because they have had these philosophies all their lives and cannot abandon them”.

David West argued further that President Jonathan may have “by his own indiscretion and carelessness” made the team unworkable by “making Okonjo Iweala a super minister with his unpresidential statement that anyone who cannot work with her would be sacked, while swearing in the members”.
The question, according to David West is: “How do you expect a person like Atedo Peterside, who owned his own bank and one of the greatest banking gurus in the land to be a subordinate to a fellow minister? Or Aliko Dangote, one of the Africa’s most successful industrialists? You see how Jonathan has by his own indiscretion destroyed the team.

The ex-minister also doubted if the economic blueprint the team is to implement was original and well-focused. “It’s like an emergency operation and not an original thought, to me, because it’s like packaging economic policies under Obasanjo in a new wrapper, not taking into consideration, other dynamic factors in the intervening period between that regime and the incumbent”, remarked David West.

-Sunwp_posts