TELL me your name and I will tell you who you are! This aphorism is apt in the case of the Minister of Finance, Dr (Mrs.) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Months have rolled by since the name crept into the consciousness of Nigerians. It virtually came from the blues and the public wanted to know the background of the compound-named personality. And the question then was "Okonjo who?"

The press quickly filled in the gap. She is a Harvard and MIT-trained economist, Vice President of the World Bank and married to a surgeon and an Igbo, Dr Ikemba Iweala from Abia State. She hails from Delta State and from a family of academics. Her father, Chukuka Okonjo, 75, is a retired Professor of Economics. A trustee of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), he was director of the United Nations Institute for Population Studies in the University of Ghana; and former Education Adviser to the Government of Ghana.

And wait for it! Ngozi's mother, Kamene Okonjo, is a retired Professor of Sociology from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), where her husband also taught before moving to Ghana. Besides, the Minister grew up in the midst of other eggheads, five, all members of the Okonjo family. Any wonder how Ngozi came about her station in life! Prof. Chukuka Okonjo, taking the story from here, noted that "it is normal that you do the same thing if you find most people surrounding you are academics."

According to him: "It seems the whole lineage is a very talent group. I have six other relatives. One was a school dropout and one had a Masters degree and was general manager of Siemens. And the remaining five made it up to Professorship.

"So it's normal to find that most people around you (in her place) are academics. She grew up with a family sociologist (her mother, Prof. Kamene Okonjo) and was Head of the Department of Sociology when she was teaching. So I have said it is normal that you do the same thing if you find most people surrounding you are academics."

Stating that he is from Ogwashi-Ukwu in Delta State and used to teach Economics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka where he was a Professor of Economics; he said that as a father he is "very grateful and happy" to see his child succeed as a Minister of Finance. But he remarked that "naturally, we are watching her with very great interest; we are watching her career with very great interest."

Could he describe his daughter's childhood and whether he envisaged she would be in the position she is today?

"Well, she was quite a bright young woman. She was born virtually at the University of Ibadan. She went to school at the University Primary School, then Queens' School in Enugu. And then the Nigerian Civil War occurred and her mother set up a wartime experimental school - the only secondary school that ran in Biafra throughout the war and she (Ngozi) attended this school.

"When the war ended, she came to St. Anne's School, Ibadan and did school certificate examination and higher school certificate (HSC) there. From there, she went on to Harvard where she did Magna cum in Economics. Then she went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) also in the United States where she did a Masters and then a Ph.D. But each time, from Bachelors, Masters to Ph.D., she did research in Nigeria. We brought her home to do research in Nigeria.

With father and daughter both economists, are there areas where they differ especially with regard to solutions to problems confronting Nigeria's economy? Okonjo said that, "Dr (Mrs.) Okonjo-Iweala is such a busy person that when I see her we don't have time to talk economics. I haven't seen her for some time because I was told she is out of the country. Whenever we see, it is only to exchange pleasantries of the family, not to start discussing economics. So I cannot really answer this particular question."

"Naturally, I read in the papers and see what they are trying to do, like the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), like the moratorium, which the Netherlands has given us. So I have my ideas where we should be going just as she and the government she serves have an idea of where they are going.

"Of course, you know that the government has a new Economic Adviser. I am happy to see all of them; they are my children. Professor Charles Soludo is my academic child and also I have Dr. (Mrs.) Okonjo-Iweala, my daughter in the same government. And then the Minister of Education, Professor Fabian Osuji used to be the pro-chancellor of the University of Nigeria. I am being paid pension by UNN. So I have every reason to be proud."

Okonjo finds it a bit difficult to answer a direct question on when he left the university. But he explained that he left the university (UNN) in 1974, and went to Ghana to become a professor at the University of Ghana. And at the same time a director of the Regional Institute for Population Studies, which is a United Nations institute located in the University of Ghana, doing post graduate studies.

"So as a director of this institute in the United Nations, I was a United Nations' official, training students from all over Africa in the field of demography. But these students were taking University of Ghana degrees then, may be Master of Arts (MA), Masters in Philosophy (M.Phil) and Ph.D. degrees in population studies," he said.

As a trustee of ASUU, he must feel constrained that Nigerian University teachers are at loggerheads with the government in which his daughter is serving.

"No, not at all!" was his response, the reason being that: "In the first place, everyone in the family does what he or she is doing independent of the other people. People see the government and ASUU being at loggerheads but I think it is a mistaken view of the actual position because both government and ASUU are all struggling toward the same end. But ASUU (the teachers) being in the profession are concerned than government. So the teachers are very, very concerned about what is happening in education - that the education they give should be of the highest standard so that they can have the joy of working in a field, which gives them job satisfaction.

"Naturally, the government itself ultimately must be interested in seeing that we have a very high standard of education, which equals that of other developed countries. So as of now, there are differences of opinion as to how to get to this goal. Obviously, government doesn't have all the answers neither does ASUU have all the answers."

But is he satisfied with government's handling of ASUU matters?

It is not a matter of saying how satisfied, he said. "I can't speak for ASUU; I am not an official of ASUU," he added.

But he is a trustee!

"As a trustee, I am a trustee; the officials of ASUU are better in a position to tell you what the teachers feel," he said.

He declined to buy the argument that it is not what the teachers feel but what he feels being a trustee and a one-time lecturer. Again, is he satisfied with the way things are going in the universities?

He said: "That is what I am saying; the officials of ASUU will be the persons best placed to react to that. But you are asking me my personal reaction. Well, as it is, if you are working in any field; you want to have all the goodies; you want to have job satisfaction, to see everything working well.

"So there is no one who is actually fully satisfied. No matter what sphere of interest you are in, you want improvement. You want to be the best in the place. It is the same with ASUU, the same with myself. All of us want to be in the forefront of everything. You take the police, they want to be known as the best police force in the world. So obviously, if they are fully satisfied with what is happening to them immediately, then there is no progress. Dissatisfaction with your current position creates progress."

Although he reckoned that his comparison of what obtained in those days in the universities in Nigeria and what happens today might be a bit warped because after leaving the United Nations, he became the Education Adviser to the Government of Ghana; he nonetheless, let us into his experiences.

His words: "I was one of those who sort of supervised the whole Ghana education system. It is a pity to come back to Nigeria to find that the problems, which we had solved in Ghana about 1981, are recurring here in Nigeria in 2003, creating difficulties, which should normally not be created."

On those problems he spoke about that they solved in Ghana but that are recurring in Nigeria, Okonjo recalled:

"When I took off as Education Adviser to Government of Ghana, the number of people going to secondary school and university was very, very small. Right now in Nigeria, the situation is that we are trying to gather almost all the children under the Universal Basic Education (UBE) programme. So you have about 24.9 million children in school. That is, between the ages of 12 and 17 are in school when they really ought to be well above that. When you get to the tertiary education level the situation is even worse. Only 5.86 per cent of the age group, 18 to 24, are in school in the tertiary institutions.

"Then when you get to what I call 'quaternary education', the situation is simply inexplicable. Nigeria spends 0.1 per cent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on quaternary education and has 15 scientists and engineers per million of our population. For example, Japan spends 2.8 per cent of her GDP on quaternary education and has 4,960 scientists and engineers per million of her population. Naturally everybody in Japan can read and write. In other words they are literate... We have between 40 million and 56.7 million illiterates in Nigeria. And it is one of the nine countries of the world that have the highest burden of illiteracy. So we have something we should be thoroughly ashamed of as Nigerians."

Yet, drawing from his experiences in Ghana, how does he think this situation can be handled?

"What we can do is very, very easy. In actual fact, I am writing a book right now (Re-inventing the Education System of a Bankrupt Nation State: The Case of Nigeria), which shows you that first of all, within the next three to four years, you can have 24 million people in secondary school at very little cost to the country. How you can immediately multiply the number of persons at the tertiary level who are doing university type education - about 2.7 million. At the same time, we should be able, between now and 2007 or 2009, to have something like 10-12 million persons doing tertiary non-university education.

"And then between now and 2009, we should, like Ghana Government, increase secondary education by 10 times. Some people said where are the schools? I found the schools. Where are the teachers? I found the teachers. Not only did that happen; primary school education increased by 12 per cent per annum, twice the rate the World Bank has recommended. Yet the Ghana Government did not go broke. You may be extremely surprised what can be done here at next to nothing."

On The Netherlands' rescheduling of Nigeria's debts and others, he said: "Pay up your debts if you can. They are rescheduling if you can't pay. Rescheduling involves spreading your debts over a large number of years, so that you can pay; and do things, which won't make you to have all the debts. Alternatively, if your Gross Domestic Product (GDP), your total wealth grows so fast... but what you are paying is a small fraction of your total wealth... if you do that, then there will be no problem. If you don't, Argentina is a good example of what could happen to you."

And his view on the Obasanjo administration's economic programme on deregulation!

(Laughs) "I have no view on that...," he said.

But the public would want to share from his wealth of knowledge and experience in this regard. He was not moved.

"I don't know. It depends on what you want to do. And I am not the government. The government has its ideas on where it wants to go and shapes policies to get there. If I were in government, I might do things differently. But the government has more information now than I have and therefore shapes policies based on the information, which they have and their judgment of the situation. If I judge a situation from my background whilst for the past 13 months, I have not had electricity supply, so we should even deregulate NEPA; kick them out. But you see that may not be the right answer."