Ordinarily, one does not need to tell President Muhammadu Buhari’s ministers who were sworn in on August 21 that time is of the essence; and that they should hit the ground running. In normal climes, the ministers ought to have known that and, in fact, been in firm control of their respective ministries by now. But ours is not a clime where time is of the essence. Otherwise, it would not have taken President Buhari six months (from the date he was worn in) to form his cabinet in his first tenure, despite the fact that his predecessor conceded defeat even as election results were yet to be concluded in 2015. So, for the president to have inaugurated his cabinet in August, this time around, three months after he was sworn in, and in spite of the fact that his reelection is still the subject of litigation, we can say some progress has been made. But that does not make it right; indeed if the truth must be told; it is still not good enough. It therefore should not be the benchmark.
For an election cycle of four-year duration, three months is too much to sacrifice either shopping for the right candidates or trying to put round pegs in round holes. This is much more so in a country where there is a gross deficit of everything that can make for progress; a country with unspeakable and incredible decay of infrastructure. Virtually all sectors of the economy are in need of rehabilitation. However, all that is now history. The point that we can now be emphasising is for the ministers to realise that they do not have time to waste.
While some of the people who made it into the president’s cabinet in the first term were dropped, some others were retained. Of the latter, Mr Babatunde Raji Fashola, the erstwhile Minister of Power, Works and Housing, stands out. Fashola stands out because he was undoubtedly the ‘super minister’ in that cabinet. Each of the three ministries he was overseeing was more than enough to chew. Yet, he was given the onerous responsibility of overseeing the affairs in the three key ministries. At the time President Buhari made the appointment in 2015, I was one of those who commended it and saw it as testimony to what Fashola can do.
May be like President Buhari, I commended his appointment then because of his antecedents as Governor of Lagos State, a position he left shortly before he was made minister. Fashola, as governor, was a workaholic. He left indelible marks in Lagos, in virtually all the sectors where he was made minister – power, works and housing. But, with hindsight, I have since discovered that, as my people say ‘aponle ni fourman (foreman), ko seni to le se ise eniyan merin’ (there is nothing like four-man (foreman), because no single man can do the work of four men). Fashola did try to make impact in those ministries, but then it would not have been as much as he would have made if he was saddled with less, like his present portfolio. Apart from the human element, he also had to contend with all kinds of challenges, from an uncooperative National Assembly, to powerful interests in the power sector who still wanted to do business in line with the decadent old order.
That Fashola would return to Buhari’s cabinet was not in doubt. What I knew was that he would not be saddled with as much as he was in the first tenure. The only disappointment and error of judgment on my part was that I had thought he would return to the power ministry, to complete the good works he was doing there. Nonetheless, it is heartwarming that President Buhari too has realised the need to lessen Fashola’s burden by giving the power ministry to someone else. It is needless being a Jack of all trades, master of none. With Fashola now in the works and housing ministry, it should be easier for him to leave indelible marks in the works and housing sectors, the same way he did as governor. Mercifully, he does not have a hostile National Assembly to work with this time around.
Without doubt, Fashola has a lot to do, especially with many federal roads in terribly bad shape. It is heartwarming that work has resumed on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway after the lull occasioned both by lack of cooperation from the last National Assembly, and paucity of funds. Several other roads are also begging for attention all over the country. They have to be fixed. We have got to a stage in our lives when we have to start thinking about whether the government can continue to maintain these roads or we should start paying tolls to use some of them so that the money can be ploughed back into maintaining the roads. The Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA) has to be rejuvenated for efficiency. The way things are, it does not seem it has the capacity to oversee all the federal roads, not to talk of keep pace with the maintenance required by them. It is suspect as well whether the agency is sufficiently funded.
With regard to housing, the works and housing minister has to look for models that the middle income earners at least, can afford. The rich have the wherewithal to own houses anywhere under the sun or in outer planet; so, the minister should concentrate more on those at the lower rungs so they too can have a taste of democratic dividend. They are the ones that take the pains to vote, so, they should be compensated with some of these good things of life.
Perhaps the minister that all eyes would be on is the new power minister, Saleh Mamman. Although he has a minister of state in the person of Godwin Jedi-Agba to assist him, the two of them would soon discover that they have a yeoman’s task on their hands. As a matter of fact, I do not envy them at all. Theirs is a sector that has known so much corruption that it is even difficult to know how much it had gulped, especially in the eight years of the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency. Various sums, in billions of dollars, have been bandied. Perhaps we would get to know the exact amount Nigeria had spent to procure darkness after the probe panel promised by the government would have finished its assignment.
Suffice it to say that Mamman, a former assistant director in the Federal Ministry of Works, already has his job cut out for him. He has to move at the speed of light to satisfy Nigerians who have been power-hungry in the past decades. Without doubt, Fashola has made some progress, particularly in ensuring that customers are billed only for what they consume; some of the measures he undertook has also facilitated the issuance of prepaid meters to more electricity consumers, a thing the electric distribution companies (DisCos) do not want because of the easy money that they make through estimated or ‘crazy billing’. While Mamman is to consolidate on some of these gains, he also has to do something about the 2,000 MW of electricity that is said to be wasted because the DisCos cannot absorb it. He has to do more in the area of transmission because even now, the about 6,000 MW that is being generated on the average cannot be transmitted due to weak transmission lines that have outlived their lifespan. Mamman has asked Nigerians to pray for him to succeed. He needs it.
No amount of space dedicated to power is too much. Power is central to virtually everything we do, whether on the domestic or industrial level. We need power to run our electrical gadgets – blenders, sound systems, television sets, fans and air conditioners, among others. We also need power to make the machines in our industries hum so they could produce some of the basic things we need to make life comfortable. In short, we cannot industrialise or develop without power supply. The lack of this largely explains our perpetual underdevelopment all these years; it is part of the reasons we have remained a potentially great nation since independence. If power is this pivotal to our existence, then successive administrations that neglected this sector for years until things went this awry owe Nigerians explanations. Unfortunately, ours is not a country where public officials are made to account for their stewardship. Even now that the government is planning to investigate why we are still in darkness despite the humongous amounts of money we have pumped into the power sector, some people are crying foul before the commencement of the investigation. Anyway, one can only hope the Buhari government would do this investigation diligently, sans any form of witch-hunting. The people deserve to know what went wrong and where the billions of dollars went into.
I congratulate the 43 ministers. I have only started with two ministries today, with a view to returning to some of the others sometime in the near future. The point must be made though that President Buhari does not have to wait till eternity before removing any minister that wants to constitute a cog in the wheel of his government’s progress. They should be given specific targets and these should be evaluated periodically with a view to keeping the ministers on their toes. Unlike he did in his first term, when he retained almost all the ministers to the end, things should be different this time. There is no third term for him; because even if he prays for it, God will not grant the request. This is his last opportunity to prove wrong cynics who believe Nigerians have entered ‘one chance’ bus by reelecting him. He should use the opportunity wisely.