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Oby Ezekwesili: Nobility In Service

By Njideka Agbo
08 October 2018   |   7:55 am
Obiageli Ezekwesili was born in 1963. Ezekwesili holds a master's degree in International Law and Diplomacy from the University of Lagos, and a Master of Public Administration degree from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Before she obeyed the national clarion call, she worked as a chartered accountant in Deloitte and Touche and at…

Obiageli Ezekwesili was born in 1963. Ezekwesili holds a master’s degree in International Law and Diplomacy from the University of Lagos, and a Master of Public Administration degree from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Before she obeyed the national clarion call, she worked as a chartered accountant in Deloitte and Touche and at the Center for International Development, Harvard.

Her stint with the government began with her appointment as the first head of the Budget Monitoring and Price Intelligence Unit (popularly known as Due Process Unit). During her time, she was credited with changing and cleansing the method of public procurement or contracting at the Federal level in Nigeria.
In June 2005, she was appointed the Minister of Solid Minerals (Mines and Steel) and again, she kicked off a reform programme that put Nigeria on the global platform as a mining investment destination.

A year later, she became the Federal Minister of Education and in March 2007, she was appointed her Vice president of World Bank Africa region.
The co-founder of Transparency International (TI) has been named in BBC’s 100 Women, Time 100 Most Influential People, New York Times 25 Women of Impact for 2015, Albert Einstein’s Foundation’s Genius:100 Visions of the Future.

In 2014, she became a co-convener of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, the campaign addressed the kidnap of the 300 Chibok girls which received global recognition.
Owing to her achievements and her “fight against corruption”, she was nominated a recipient of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) director Henrik Urdal described as her “an international champion in the fight against corruption… Chairperson of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI), leading the first-ever national implementation of the global EITI standards.”

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