On the surface, President Muhammadu Buhari’s 21 ministerial nominees are a study in technocracy and brilliance. Some of them were governors who achieved renown; and others are either famous for the projects they undertook or the policies and programmes they enunciated. In all, the nominees look set to add value to the Buhari presidency. But there is no wow factor in the list, and no surprise. Most of them are quite known to us and to the president himself. Why did the president then have to wait for four full months to reveal this largely familiar list? Was it a reflection of the pawky caution and methodicalness many observers attribute to him, and which he himself boasted of? Or was it a reflection of his newly acquired habit of hesitations and tentativeness, that is, assuming we accurately read his actions and administrative style as a fast-paced revolutionary when he was head of state for some 20 months in the early 80s?
The weight of evidence so far suggests that President Buhari is more indecisive than he is cautious. The two attributes are not the same. There is no one on the list of 21 whom he could not have engaged in a month, or with a little more diligence, even before he assumed office. All of them may not be politically exposed to all parts of the country, but there is none who is not exposed one way or the other to at least a small part of the country. Had the president not demonstrated clear reservations about the usefulness of federal ministers, reservations loudly expressed at international fora and which he wished he could get away with, it seems he could have secured their services in weeks rather than in painfully tortuous months.
The ministerial list was an anticlimax, not to say a paradox. Only last month in France, the president had denigrated the office of minister. But before then and even after, he had announced he was assembling the best team, and probably the best brains, to add value to his government and to join hands with him in redeeming, developing and remoulding the country. Could ministers whom he snorted were only a little better than noisemakers rise to the lofty height of reformers or an army of change agents executing his party’s change mantra? There cannot be a direct or simple answer. It must be assumed, however, that being a closet satirist and humorist, President Buhari merely likened ministers to noisemakers as part of his increasingly famous predilection for self-deprecating commentaries.
At bottom, too, perhaps the president was never really comfortable with a packed and charged group of polemicists and ideologues — only that we never really noticed when he was military head of state. From his disparaging remarks on ministers and his laudatory appraisal of the pivotal role played by permanent secretaries, perhaps the president feels more comfortable with the top civil servants and what many withering years of bureaucratic attrition has turned them into — an assortment of ideologically disemboweled group of yes-men and dutiful conformists more anxious to keep their jobs than offer sometimes radically dissenting opinions. By the time the president finalises his list of ministerial nominees, the nation will be able to pass a firmer and more accurate judgement on the cabinet and the mindset of the man who assembled them. Preliminary assessment, however, suggests that in assembling his ministers, President Buhari was stimulated by indecision and other sentiments than by carefulness or methodicalness.
Whether by design or accident, however, the president seems to have unleashed quite a few forces destined to shape his government now and in the future, as well as determine just how re-electable he will be a few years from now. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Southwest. When the president made his first set of appointments, and it was widely judged as embarrassingly skewed in favour of the North, this column pointed out that he was inadvertently empowering a faction of the Southwest elite who bitterly opposed his election. That bitter faction had campaigned that the pro-Buhari faction was unwisely, slavishly and recklessly mortgaging the future of the South and, in particular, the Southwest. Though they lost the argument, and the Southwest embraced change, the narrowness of the first set of Buhari appointments, not to say the lack of ethnic diversity in the president’s kitchen cabinet, seemed to have armed the anti-Buhari faction of the Southwest political elite to voice their concerns to popular southern acclaim.
For those who understand the nuances involved in the selection of the 21 ministerial nominees, the list seems capable of further fracturing the Southwest’s dominant and therefore triumphant elite. Here is why. It is well known that the Southwest’s political elite is divided into pro- and anti-Buhari tendencies. But what is not well known is the fact that even the pro-Buhari Southwest political elite is further divided into two stealthily conflicting groups. One group is radical, daring, pushy and enterprisingly and confidently ‘internationalist’, and the other is more amenable to President Buhari’s ways, less adventurous and questioning, somewhat isolationist, and anxious to serve without provoking tremors or ruffling too many feathers. The president prefers the latter and has included them in his first set of nominees. They may be intelligent and technocratic, but they will not rock the boat or dissent vigorously. Nor will they have masterful control over the Southwest, a control that was just beginning to accrete.
As far as the first list is concerned, the president may have unwittingly empowered the anti-Buhari forces of the Southwest. This could yet prove fatal to both the president’s second term ambition and the country’s stability. Given the immense and, in some respects, unpopular concessions made by the Southwest to the Buhari project, the region’s radical elite needed to have something more substantial to show for all their efforts. In the event, the legislative leadership elections robbed them of that leverage, and in the ministerial appointments the radical internationalists of the Southwest’s pro-Buhari political elite may again have been left holding the short end of the stick. This could leave the Buhari presidency bereft of powerful defenders in the continuing national contest for political space and control. It may not be obvious, but the ultimatum given to President Buhari over the rampage of suspected Fulani herdsmen, and the hint of self-determination given by Yoruba leaders last Thursday, may be a reflection of the budding alienation being felt by the Yoruba, an alienation that seems to be underscored by the shortcomings of the legislative leadership elections, the skewed Buhari appointments, and the structure and temper of the ministerial list.
What is even more evident from the ministerial list is the general indication of absence of political strategies. The first tentative step towards re-election is often laid by ministerial and other presidency appointments. In both the presidency appointments and the cabinet list, there has been no deft political touch, one capable of rousing the country’s constituencies and herding them into the Buhari column. And by unreasonably delaying the list for four months, it enabled the anti-Buhari elements in many states to regain their composure and begin plotting the downfall of many of the nominees or thoroughly destabilise them. Though the problem is worse in the Southwest due to its peculiar and sometimes incomprehensible divisions and factions; the absence of political strategies and calculations in the list is no less noticeable in other parts of the country, especially the rest of the South. The ruling All Progressives Congress is riven by bitter dissent and conflicts, and the president has not demonstrated the courage or sagacity to tackle it aggressively. He has dilly-dallied over the Senator Bukola Saraki rebellion, while his wife, Aisha, even delegates responsibilities to Saraki’s wife, Toyin, who is under EFCC investigations. And while he has handled the anti-Boko Haram and anti-graft wars with aplomb, the other parts of the country have neither seen him nor felt his touch in the real sense of the word.
President Buhari does not have as much time as he thinks he has. Worse, he appears to be laying suspect foundations for his re-election, or even behaving as if he is uninterested. If he is truly uninterested in re-election, surely his party, which has made a hash of intra-party politics, cannot be uninterested. Nigerians must not only see and feel the politics in President Buhari’s cabinet, just as they want to see and feel his performance, they must also have assurance that the man they voted into office possesses the highest qualities and strength of character of a patriot, nationalist and tactician. So far neither the cabinet list nor his appointments have shown any of those attributes.
