Mamman Daura Seeks ‘Competence’

By Lasisi Olagunju

Leader of the 'unseen' persons ruling us, Alhaji Mamman Daura, spoke last week. He said enough of turn-by-turn presidency for Nigeria. He decreed that North-South rotation of the presidency of Nigeria should be dead; from 2023, the most competent among contenders would be put in the Presidential Villa.

*Daura 

The Afenifere reacted sharply; the North is silent; the Ohanaeze spoke hard. Leaders of the Niger Delta also kicked against Daura's executive order banning zoning of the presidency. But what can their puny noise do to a people who built their confidence on solid rock? When a man whose lips rarely move decides to speak out, you had better drop all you are doing and listen carefully. The man who spoke is not known to be a flippant person.

President Buhari’s Appointments, Seiyefa And DSS

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

When posterity reflects on this dark political epoch whose principal actor is President Muhammadu Buhari, it would be racked by the disappointment that some people were so swayed by self-interest or naivety that they made him their number one citizen.

Perhaps, it would be dissuaded from unleashing a harsh judgement on its forbears after the realisation that the emergence of Buhari as the president has eternally served to demystify him. Stripped bare of his much-trumpeted integrity as cases of official sleaze cascade around him, he has irrevocably rendered himself unfit for the pantheon of statesmen.

Buhari And His Divided Government

By Rotimi Fasan

President Muhammadu Buhari sits atop a government that is very divided. The administration is apparently in confusion with close members at war with one another. The confusion that has resulted in Buhari’s warring and, one might say, fumbling administration began, it can now be said with insight, when the president decided to form a so-called kitchen cabinet of close associates and relatives, persons directly or indirectly connected to him by marriage, blood or religion.

 

*Buhari 

These people feel answerable only to the president and exploit their closeness to the president to wrongfoot his policies including his arrowhead anti-corruption war. The president’s self-inflicted injury was exacerbated by a National Assembly that was dominated by a divided All Progressives Congress, APC, whose members elected a leadership that has enjoyed neither the support nor trust of the party leaders.

The frosty relationship that this would engender between the legislators and the executive arm of the administration (particularly the presidency and anyone thought to be connected to it) can be seen in the fate that has befallen Ibrahim Magu in his failed bid to be confirmed as chair of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.

But I’m a bit ahead of my explanation. So let me return to how President Buhari brought all this upon himself and what this now implicates for his government. Muhammadu Buhari The first appointments made by Buhari were of a nature that got many Nigerians complaining given its lopsided arrangement. The appointments, mostly of his immediate minders, were almost to the last person made up of Muslim men of northern extraction. It both reflected as well as demonstrated a tendency for mind-closure and parochialism.

But this was apparently lost on the president who couldn’t be bothered about it, not even the fact that the Igbo presence in the government is almost of cipher value. He ignored all questions raised about this and, when he chose to respond, simply went ahead to defend the appointments, explaining it all in terms of the pattern of votes that got him elected.

Pres Buhari, Take A Hard Look At Nigeria’s Map

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 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.