Ezekwesili on Wednesday, while answering questions from Christine Amanpour, in an interview on CNN, monitored by our correspondent, said corruption thrives in a society when there was no incentive on the part of the people who govern to produce results.
“I was one of the co-founders of Transparency International, and we know that corruption is a task on the poor and we already know that there are ways to tackle corruption. You prevent the opportunity for corruption, you reduce corruption and part of my agenda is to deregulate the economy in such a way that public officials don’t have too much presence in the economy to be able to utilise it for personal gain,” Ezekwesili said.
On how to deal with the corrupt public official with vested interests who wants the status quo to remain, she said, “The society know me for having taken them on before, I was the one that worked on fixing of our public procurement system. It was chaotic until I entered government,” she said.
On Boko Haram’s kidnap of school girls, Ezekwesili said she was saddened that the country had failed the children of the poor who had decided to attend school.
She said, “When I was the minister of education, one of my reform areas was getting more girls to go to school, especially in the north.
“When these girls went to school and were abducted, what I expected my government to do was an immediate swift response, but that did not happen, so I decided that I will be a voice to those girls until they are all rescued. As far as I’m concerned, we have no credential to ask girls to go to school around the world until the rest of the world bring back the rest of the Chibok girls as well as Leah Sharibu, and Alice, a humanitarian aid worker who was abducted while meeting the needs of those that were displaced in our country,” she said.
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