The Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has revealed how her investigation into an alleged $2.4bn fuel subsidy fraud led to the abduction of her elderly mother, with the kidnappers demanding that she quit her job as Nigeria’s finance minister and leave the country.
Okonjo-Iweala recounted the frightening experience during an interview with Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua on the Leaders programme, describing the five-day ordeal as the worst experience of her life.
The former minister said she initially felt paralysed by fear and even considered resigning when she learnt that her mother, Professor Kamene Okonjo, had been taken hostage.
But her father, the traditional ruler of Ogwashi-Uku, Delta State, urged her not to surrender to the kidnappers’ demands.
“He said, ‘We don’t give in to blackmail.’ And he said, ‘You’ve got to carry on. You’ve got to go to work,’” she recalled.
According to Okonjo-Iweala, the crisis began when officials in her ministry noticed a sharp increase in claims by fuel importers seeking payments under Nigeria’s petroleum subsidy programme.
Suspicious of the sudden rise, she said she approached then-President Goodluck Jonathan and sought permission to audit the claims.
“So I went to the president and said, look, something is going on here. Could we audit the accounts? And he said, yes, go ahead,” she recalled.
The audit, she said, uncovered about $2.4bn in suspected fraudulent claims, prompting the government to withhold payments it considered unjustified.
“And we found about $2.4 billion worth of fraud. So we refused to pay,” she said.
She linked the subsequent kidnapping of her mother to the controversy surrounding the subsidy payments, saying the abductors wanted her to abandon her position and leave Nigeria.
“I was told that for her to be released, I should resign and leave the country,” she said.
The WTO chief said she never imagined that her parents could become targets in the course of her official duties.
“I never dreamt my parents could ever be touched in this way, that people would be that evil,” she said.
Despite her mother’s eventual escape, Okonjo-Iweala said the incident left her with a lingering sense of guilt over the suffering her family endured.
“She was held in the middle of a forest, and one night she escaped. She’s still alive. She’s 96 now,” she said.
“It was a terrible, terrible five-day ordeal. I think the worst in my life.”
The kidnapping occurred in December 2012, when Kamene, then 82, was abducted from her home in Ogwashi-Uku. She was released five days later, on December 14, following an extensive search by security agencies.
At the time, Okonjo-Iweala publicly linked the abduction to the dispute over fuel subsidy payments, saying her mother had been told that she was being targeted because of her daughter’s refusal to approve payments to unverified fuel importers.
The incident became one of the most disturbing episodes of her tenure under the Jonathan administration, highlighting the risks surrounding the government’s efforts to scrutinise the controversial subsidy scheme.
Now heading the WTO, Okonjo-Iweala has revisited the ordeal in recalling the personal cost of confronting suspected corruption and the threats that followed her refusal to approve questionable claims.
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