African finance ministers are rarely celebrated. It is just as rare that they are women. On both counts, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is an exception.

She played the lead role in rehabilitating Nigeria’s battered image as finance minister between 2003 and 2006, persuading creditor nations that an oil-rich part of Africa, notorious for its wasteful ways, was sufficiently on the mend to justify an $18bn debt write-off.

In the west, she has been held up since as a model reformer. Tough, articulate and Harvard educated, but dressed traditionally as a Nigerian, she is the ideal Davos African, in demand round the world.

For the past year, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala has chaired advisory boards on Africa for Renaissance Capital, the Russian investment bank seeking to repeat in Africa the success it had in the former Soviet states during the 1990s.

She has set up an opinion poll back home as well as a $60m fund to promote African women, while also serving the philanthropic foundations of Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese telecoms mogul.

Forbes magazine lists her among the world’s 100 most powerful women. Other publications have queued up to offer plaudits.

Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala is herself the first to register embarrassment to those who single her out as Africa’s potential savior.

“Give me credit only for what I’ve done,” she says. “We did do something unprecedented in bringing debt relief to Nigeria. We broke the jinx and showed things can change. We brought openness to our finances and I did help to fight corruption. But there were others fighting too. I was not the only one.”

In October, Robert Zoellick, the World Bank president, named her to the top level of the bank as managing director for Africa, South Asia, Europe and central Asia, a job she starts at the end of this week.

Mr. Zoellick may be hoping some of her magic rubs off on the World Bank as it recovers from the turbulent presidency of Paul Wolfowitz and fights to retain its relevance as the world’s largest lender to the poor.

That Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala can hold her own among the great and good is in little doubt. It is more arguable whether the reforms she initiated in Nigeria that first propelled her to fame have stood the test of time.

As finance minister at the head of a formidable economic team, she took on vested interests of the most venal kind.

She shed light on federal accounts, sought the country’s first sovereign credit rating, and budgeted on oil – which contributes more than 90 per cent of government revenues – well below world prices, giving Nigeria the cushion it had lacked when past oil booms drew to a close.

By all accounts, she ran a tight ship. But finance ministers are only as powerful as they are allowed to be.

One senior donor official says Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala used to return from trips abroad to find that in her absence, government largesse had been dispensed to businesses and individuals.

When former president Olusegun Obasanjo brought her in from her previous job as vice-president at the World Bank, where she had spent a 20-year career, he needed to prove that reforms in Nigeria were paying off.

He had staked his reputation abroad on fighting corruption and, at home, partly on winning reprieve from the nation’s crippling $32bn external debt.

On both counts, he was foundering after a first elected term in office.

Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala quickly turned the situation round. With a Harvard degree in economics and a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she spoke the right language at G8 summits, winning over the likes of Tony Blair, then Britain’s prime minister, and Sir Bob Geldof, the campaigning rock star, when they were seeking an African champion to lend weight to their pursuit of debt relief.

In the less salubrious world of Nigerian politics she was viewed as an outsider. Once she had dealt with Nigeria’s cumbersome debt, Mr. Obasanjo moved her on to foreign affairs and she resigned.

“I no longer felt that I could work in the environment that had been created and felt I had made my contribution,” she says.

Nigeria now has one of the lowest ratios of debt to gross domestic product in the world.

Less progress has been made in distributing soaring government revenues more equitably and efficiently to make Nigeria work. Mr. Obasanjo retired from office this year following elections marred by fraud and with much of the lustre provided by his reform team long since gone.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala said she was rejoining the World Bank because she believed in Mr. Zoellick’s vision of its role in the world.

“In a short time he has revived morale,” she said. “He wants to do things differently and more innovatively and to respond faster to client countries’ needs. He also believes that countries should take the lead, as Nigeria did (in reforms). That is the way to go.”

It is telling that of the team of reformers that Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala led, only one or two have remained in government. One Nigeria columnist argued that the biggest favor the World Bank could do for Nigeria now would be to send Mrs. Okonjo-Iweala back home to continue where she started.

Culled from Financial Times