By Okey
Ndibe
I recently
surveyed President Muhammadu Buhari’s top appointments recently and was left
wondering when last he took a long, hard look at Nigeria’s map. Before the president
makes another important political appointment, he would do well to spend some time
looking at the map of the country that’s under his charge.
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*President Buhari |
President Buhari’s
disdain for geopolitical spread and religious diversity in his appointments is
so stark as to constitute a scandal. As far as appointments go, it’s as if the
man believes that Nigeria
is reducible to one half of its geography, the north, and one major religion,
Islam.
As a presidential
candidate, Mr. Buhari was frequently characterized as a man given to excessive
clannishness. Some critics alleged that his fealty to the northern half of Nigeria and partiality to fellow adherents of
the Islamic faith trumped his belief in Nigeria and commitment to treat
people of other faiths with fairness.
Since his presidential
ambition aroused such anxiety, Mr. Buhari might have taken care to reassure
Nigerians—as he stated in his inaugural speech—that he belonged to all of them.
Instead, he seems to have gone out of his way to validate his critics’ worst
fears. His personnel decisions as president have suggested a man whose mindset
is as sectional as his political instincts are terrible. In one
year as president, his appointments have deeply disappointed many
Nigerians’ expectations of equity. He has operated as if unaware of the
longstanding requirement that important political appointments ought to reflect
the country’s federal character.
I believe every section
of Nigeria
has a pool of talented people. Therefore, the president’s default stance,
choosing candidates for major positions from his own geographic area and
religious group, is troubling. Is Mr. Buhari’s vision so blinkered that, each
time he looks at Nigeria,
he sees (mostly) Muslims and Northerners? And has he no handlers and advisers
willing to speak honestly to him, to save him from his parochial instincts, to
tell him, quite simply, that his appointments don’t tell a flattering story
about him?
During Mr. Buhari’s first
few months in office, some excused his lopsided appointments on the ground that
he needed to surround himself with people he knew closely, whose loyalty he
could count on. But even that apologia was untenable. Here was a man who ran
for the Nigerian Presidency four times before he got elected. I don’t recall
him professing that, if elected, he would fashion himself primarily into a
Northern president. Surely, we should expect that a man who spent so much time
and energy seeking to govern his country would have made some effort to broaden
his base of loyalists.
Besides, a president
never relies entirely—or even primarily—on his own wits when it comes to
matters of appointment. He has his contacts within a party to draw from. He
also has the apparatuses of the state to help him make judicious appointments.
A man who runs a country—and one as complex as Nigeria—should not simply hand jobs
only to people within his circle of familiarity.
Last week, several
acquaintances emailed me a piece by Segun Odunuyi x-raying the sectional
character of President Buhari’s appointments in the security sector.
Mr.
Odunuyi began by stating, “With the recent appointment of a new
Inspector-General of Police,
Nigeria's
entire security architecture took on a distinct sectional shape.” He then gave
a breakdown of the heads of the various security departments, showing that
virtually all of them were Northern Muslims. They include Defense Minister,
Mansur Dan-Ali; the Director General of the Department of State Security,
Mamman Daura; Chief of Army Staff, General Tukur Buratai; Chief of Air Staff,
Abubakar Sadique; IG of Police, Ibrahim Idris; National Security Adviser,
Babagana Monguno; Controller General of Immigration, Muhammed
Babandede; Commandant General of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defense
Corps, Abdullahi Gana Muhammadu; the Comptroller-General of Customs,
Colonel Hameed Ibrahim Ali (ret.); Comptroller-General of the
Nigeria Prisons Service, Ahmed Ja’afaru; chairman of the Economic and
Financial Crimes Commission, Ibrahim Magu, and Minister of the
Interior, General Abdulrahman Bello Dambazau (ret.).
I’m willing to hazard
that no previous Nigerian head of state, military or elected, ever had a record
as clannish as the current president’s. As far as appointments go, he has
utterly failed to demonstrate any broadness of spirit.
“Save for the Chief of
Defense Staff (a Yoruba) and the Chief of Naval Staff (from Cross River),
Nigeria's
entire defense structure with its command and control systems is controlled by
one section of the country. Save for the Navy (whose operations, of course, are
mainly coastal), Northern Muslims command every security organization where men
lawfully bear arms in Nigeria,”
wrote Mr. Odunuyi.
Apparently, his piece has
been widely circulated on the Internet. I must state that I identify with his
deep concern.
Forget the question of
whether these appointees are competent and above board. Even if the case could
be made that they are a bunch of stellar performers, one can nevertheless raise
the question: Are there no men and women from other parts of Nigeria and
from different faiths who could have acquitted themselves well in these
positions? Another question: Does President Buhari see Nigeria’s
security machinery as the near-exclusive domain of northerners and
Muslims? Is it the case that he regards Nigerian Christians and those who hail
from the country’s southern half as collectively disloyal, untrustworthy, even
potential or real enemies of the state?
Nigeria is beset by numerous crises,
including Islamist insurgency in the northeast, resurgent militancy in the
Niger Delta, the agitation for Biafran secession in the southeast, and
intermittent deadly attacks by Fulani herdsmen. The scale and spread of these
crises demand a security team that is representative of country’s
ethno-religious diversity. I suspect that the sectional composition of
President Buhari’s security team, the president’s initial hectoring response to
militants in the Niger Delta, and the Nigerian state’s trigger-happy assaults
on pro-Biafran agitators, have fertilized the perception that the Buhari
Presidency was bent on an agenda of conquest.
A climate of mutual trust
among Nigeria’s
constituent ethnic units and religious groups is essential for repairing the
country’s torn fabric. And that sense of trust is particularly shredded by
President Buhari’s costly policy of looking inward, or northward, any time he
has an important appointment to make.
Apart from creating the
impression that his vision of Nigeria
is a deeply fractured one, President Buhari’s record of appointments has proved
disastrous in other ways. Just last week, the Police Service Commission
announced the retirement of 21 Assistant Inspectors General of Police, all of
them senior to Mr. Idris, the president’s choice for acting IGP. Unless Mr.
Buhari can demonstrate that the acting IG is something of a police genius and
all the retired officers were deadwoods or worse, his decision to elevate Mr.
Idris over many of his superiors has cost Nigeria the service and experience
of too many officers who were not statutorily due for retirement. It’s called a
waste of manpower.
It may be the case that
the president is incapable of broadening his horizon when he has a job to fill.
In that event, it behooves those closest to him—especially the Muslims and
Northerners whose counsel he is likely to listen to—to point him to higher
ideals of fairness. These advisers ought to alert the president to take a hard
look at the map of Nigeria—especially
its southern half—when next he must make a significant appointment.
Prof Ndibe could be reached with okeyndibe@gmail.com
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