Nigeria's current Finance Minister, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, is the image of an honourable reformer. A Harvard and MIT-trained economist and former Vice-President of the World Bank, she has the experience, technical skills and connections to carry through tough reforms in Nigeria's large and unwieldy economy. In her signature Nigerian print wrapper and headtie, she cuts a figure of integrity and home-grown savvy essential to any effective intervention in such a complicated country. Dr Okono-Iweala's recent book, Reforming the Unreformable, tells the story of her travails and triumphs on the Nigerian reform trail between 2000 and 2007, as Financial Adviser and Finance Minister to the former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Billed as an account from the front lines of economic reform in Africa, this book offers a comprehensive tour through the thinking of a key player in Nigeria's post-structural adjustment economic reforms. It details Dr Okonjo-Iweala's efforts to tackle corruption, implement a major debt-relief strategy, clean up the budgetary process, and modernise, deregulate and where possible privatise the telecom and energy sector, ports and customs service, as well as overhauling the civil service and banking sectors. Despite constant references to the originality and homegrown character of the reform strategy, anyone who knows Nigeria cannot help but have a strong sense of déjà-vu. Nigeria's Structural Adjustment Programme instituted in 1986 was also a ‘homegrown’ economic reform programme, formulated after the IMF/World Bank-branded structural adjustment package was resoundingly rejected by the Nigerian public.

In similar fashion, the ‘homegrown’ NEEDS programme put together by Dr Okonjo-Iweala and her team looks suspiciously like the IFI-led PRSP reforms rolled out across the Third World, emulating exactly the PRSP repertoire of integrating neo-liberal policies into a more congenial package of debt-relief and civil society consultations, and requiring at least a year of implementation before actual debt forgiveness is granted. Yet this package of economic reforms is presented in the book as a product of Dr Okonjo-Iweala's capacity to think ‘outside the box’ and to challenge the hypocrisy of the international financial institutions. Even spiced up with personal reflections and moments of economic suspense as Dr Okonjo-Iweala attempts to secure vital international support for her policies, sometimes with only seconds to spare, the book reads like a very long IMF strategy paper, complete with Boxes. Rather than ‘development economics in action’, it seems more like post-Washington Consensus neo-liberalism in action.

The emphasis on the novelty and local ownership of the reforms is further belied by constant recourse to strategies for bypassing rather than engaging with local democratic institutions and Nigerian civil society. While playing to a pantheon of external backers in the World Bank, IMF, US and UK governments, as well as to international development celebrities such as Bono and Bob Geldof, the book is filled with references to mechanisms for evading local democratic process, through Economic Teams, Task Forces and legislation to ‘lock in’ reforms. Local sensitivities about outsourcing the Customs Service to a British corporation, and widespread resistance across Nigerian society to the removal of the petrol subsidy are simply dismissed as a product of ignorance and vested interests. The internal politics surrounding the reforms is reduced to a technical question of managing winners and losers, with little attention to the concerns of Nigerian society, or the effects of the reforms on them. While corruption and vested interests are very real problems in Nigeria, there is also a great deal of principled opposition and popular distress which reformers ignore at their peril.

Indeed, this is a book that says as much in its silences as in its stories. Despite references to problems of crippling poverty, unemployment and low levels of social expenditure, there is disturbingly little reflection on what Nigeria's current problem of ‘broken institutions’ owes to the last round of neo-liberal reforms implemented under the failed structural adjustment programme, which oversaw a draconian reduction of public expenditure and rolling back of the State with little attention to what would replace it. There are repeated references to hard choices and trade-offs, but the author is rather coy about who sets the priorities. Even less is said about the effects of these reforms on the Nigerian population. While Dr Okonjo-Iweala congratulates herself for doubling Nigerian growth rates between 2000 and 2007, she says little about the anomalies of rising poverty, catastrophic unemployment and spiralling unrest in a country with an average of 7% growth for the past decade. She simply notes that the neglect of the real sectors and the lack of job creation remain a weakness of the reforms, and places her faith in the private sector to do what the market failed to do in the last round of reform.

Under the guise of homegrown policy-making and technical competence, this book documents the on-going efforts to embed neo-liberal reforms in the heart of African governments, while glossing over the realities of political resistance, local democratic process and the effects on popular livelihoods. Even dressed up in Nigerian cotton prints, it looks less like local ownership than like international infiltration of the policy process.