Advancing macroeconomic reforms by Okonjo-Iweala

In her book, Reforming the Unreformable, the Nigerian Experience, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala provided background of the reforms in Nigeria and how she became the Finance Minister under President Olusegun Obasanjo
On the morning of July 17, 2003, I sat down at my desk in Nigeria’s Ministry of Finance, just after being sworn in with other ministers by President Olusegun Obasanjo as a member of the cabinet.
I was overwhelmed when I reviewed the enormity of the problems confronting the country and saw the huge mountain of files already stacked for action on my desk. I wondered where to begin, and whether I had in fact been insane, as many friends and family thought, to leave my comfortable job and recent promotion to vice president at the World Bank to accept this huge challenge.
I had spent the two months between the time President Obasanjo first approached me to serve in May 2003 and the swearing-in ceremony in July working intensely on analyzing the problems of the economy and identifying the bottlenecks.
This analysis clearly showed that if we were to make any headway in improving economic and social performance of the country, we had to begin with macroeconomic and budgetary reforms.
We had inherited an unstable macroeconomic environment characterized by volatile exchange rates, double-digit inflation (23 percent on an annual basis in 2003), a high fiscal deficit (3.5 percent GDP in 2003), low foreign-exchange reserves ($US7.5 billion in 2003), and low GDP growth (2.3 percent on average for the past decade, including negative GDP growth per capita in those years because of the increase in population).