I recently surveyed President Muhammadu Buhari’s top appointments 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.
This piece was written by
Okey Ndibe. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the
author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of
letstalkng.blogspot.com
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 characterised 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
Defence 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 Defence Corps, Abdullahi Gana Muhammadu; the
Comptroller-General of Customs, Colonel Hameed Ibrahim Ali (rtd.);
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 (rtd.).
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 Defence Staff (a
Yoruba) and the Chief of Naval Staff (from Cross River), Nigeria’s
entire defence 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 organisation 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 North-East, resurgent militancy in
the Niger Delta, the agitation for Biafran secession in the South-East,
and intermittent deadly attacks by Fulani herdsmen. The scale and spread
of these crises demand a security team that is representative of the
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 fertilised
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.
This article was written by Okey Ndibe. You can follow him on twitter @okeyndibe
The
views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the official policy or position of letstalkng.blogspot.com
