I felt Nigeria didn't have to succumb to the image of being a corrupt country; we didn't have to let the economy stagnate.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of resisting negative stereotypes and the potential for economic growth.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala highlights the need for Nigeria to challenge its reputation for corruption and to actively work towards economic progress. The quote reflects a belief that nations can shape their identities and futures by rejecting harmful perceptions and taking proactive steps towards improvement.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about national development at a conference.
When I became finance minister, they called me Okonjo-Wahala - or 'Trouble Woman.' It means 'I give you hell.' But I don't care what names they call me. I'm a fighter; I'm very focused on what I'm doing, and relentless in what I want to achieve, almost to a fault. If you get in my way, you get kicked.
I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear.
The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs.
When you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy.
Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics.
I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.
We are not the same India that the world saw in the 1970s and '80s. Hence, we have a responsibility to live up to the pedestal on which we have been put.
Thankfully dreams can change. If we'd all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses. So whatever your dream is right now, if you don't achieve it, you haven't failed and you're not some loser-but just as importantly-if you do get your dream, you're not a winner.
History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that theyβre processes β that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today; just as today, we are making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions.
A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Most people don't want to change. They're comfortable and set in their ways. But in order to change, you have to be able to agitate people at times. And I think that's something that's very necessary for us to improve as a country.
The more exposure people have to the realities of factory farming, the more we will see people rejecting it. It's already happening.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.