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.
*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
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
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.