Renowned economist and a former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, on Sunday alleged that over N30tn had been stolen under the watch of the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

Soludo, in a 10-page response to Okonjo-Iweala’s rebuttal of his earlier criticism of the management of the Nigerian economy under the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, said the nation was in for a very turbulent time this year because the economy had been grossly mismanaged.

The Federal Government had last Wednesday described the five-year tenure of Soludo as the governor of the CBN between 2004 and 2009 as a disaster to the banking sector.

The comment came on the heels of an earlier article by Soludo last Monday in which he claimed that the Nigerian economy under Jonathan had performed woefully.

Okonjo-Iweala had in a statement on Wednesday described Soludo’s as an “embittered loser in the Nigerian political space.”

But Soludo, in his new article, which was made available on Sunday, said if the prices of crude oil in the international market failed to rebound, Nigeria would face an unprecedented level of economic crisis with horrible attendant hardships for the citizenry.

“Our public finance is haemorrhaging to the point that estimated over N30tn is missing, or stolen, or unaccounted for, or simply mismanaged,” the former CBN governor stressed.

In the piece entitled, ‘Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and the missing trillions’, Soludo said the sharp decline in the naira-dollar exchange rate from 158 a few months ago to 215 currently showed that trouble was already at the doorstep.