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| President elect Trump and President Buhari |
Less than a week after his victory, the newly elected American
president, Donald J. Trump, as bad as he is, assembled his transition
team. Still less than a week after the victory, Trump appointed
Republican National Committee Chairman, Reince Priebus, as the chief of
staff for the new administration. In the same day, Trump appointed the
editor-in-chief of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon, as chief strategist
and senior counselor.
Forget the nepotistic and racist themes that the new Trump team
paint, the point at stake is the timeliness of the appointments and
understanding of the basic credo that power abhors a vacuum.
If Trump, of all people, knows when to make key appointments, why
shouldn’t our ‘all-credible’ President Muhammadu Buhari know? Why make
procrastination, trial and error and indecision become the hallmark of
the Buhari administration?
On June 3, 2015, barely five days after inauguration, President
Muhammadu Buhari’s request to appoint 15 advisers was approved by the
Senate. The Senate, thinking the president would hit the ground running,
approved the request within 48 hours. But the president pocketed the
approval, appointing not more than six advisers intermittently in nearly
two years. It still beats me why it took our own ‘Trump’ three months,
plus a two-month transition period to boot, to appoint his chief of
staff and Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF). While the
president ran the nation without a cabinet, civil servants had a field
day, files clogged up, agencies were left at crossroads, the naira fell,
the fuel crisis started, and before you say ‘Jack Robinson’, we were in
recession.
It is baffling that President Buhari’s office is still running
without a private secretary. This is a close aide who coordinates the
president’s correspondences, receives phone calls on his behalf, drafts
letters, paginates memos, assembles briefs, binds council extracts,
crosschecks and documents approvals, works with the State House Chief of
Protocol to manage the president’s schedule, etc. No wonder we see many
errors in the letters the president personally signs, delays in
replying correspondence and some glitches and u-turns in a number of
government decisions.
President Buhari’s economic adviser is still as unclear as his
economic policy. A few months ago, a statement from the presidency said
Dr. Adeyemi Dipeolu is the President’s economic adviser but would be
domiciled in the office of the vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, who the
presidency described as the “principal economy architect”. The
president’s ears needed no “economic noise”. No wonder the economy is
“shaking and blinking” with a lawyer as “principal economy architect”.
A former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Charles Chukwuma
Soludo, once said of his former principal: “Obasanjo was his own
coordinating minister of the economy and chairman of the economic
management team — which he chaired for 90 minutes every week. I met with
him daily. In other words, he did not outsource economic management.”
No wonder Obasanjo left about $60 billion in foreign reserves after
negotiating a debt cancellation with $12billion. It is dismaying that
this government is enslaving our future with a proposed whopping $30
billion debt.
The president is yet to select any competent Nigerian to be his
speechwriter. I’m not surprised his speeches are infested with hanging
sentences, solecism and — shamefully — plagiarism.
It appears our president is awaiting the appearance of eschatological
Mahdi to appoint a minister from Kogi State to fill the void created by
James Ocholi’s death in March. The president, so far, spent eight
months thinking about replacing ONE minister. Will somebody tell Buhari
it is a constitutional requirement that each state must have a minister?
The political adviser to the president is also a key to democratic
government. The political adviser, being a cabinet position, attends
Federal Executive Council meetings, and gives perspectives on political
issues deliberated during the meeting. Adverse effects of the absence of
this key adviser are clear.
The party is at war with itself. The Executive is at war with the
Legislature; the national chairman of the party, John Odigie-Oyegun, is
at war with the national leader of the party; El-rufai is sparring with
Atiku; Ganduje is fighting with Kwankwaso; Bindow is brawling with Nyako
and; the party leaders are disgruntled. Nobody seems to advise the
president on how to keep his house (party) in order.
Critical bodies like CBN, BOI, NERC, among other,s still work without
Boards. Even the Boards of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and
Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), approved in
August, have not been inaugurated till date. It should be noted that
heads of agencies with statutory boards have certain limitations without
a constituted Board, and absence of Boards breeds abuse of power.
It may be too late for the president to redeem his political image,
but it is not too late to fill these important voids for the nation to
move forward.
Jaafar Jaafar, a public affairs analyst and media practitioner, writes from Abuja.
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PLEASE BE POLITE