President Muhammadu Buhari’s inaugural address was too drab for such a
momentous occasion. But it had a singular line that mercifully redeemed
the entire speech: ‘’I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody’’.
That line –easily the sole memorable and quotable part of that
address –intrigued Nigerians. It had the disguise and the mystique of a
proverb. And the Nigerian commentariat worked feverishly to decode it.
They proffered interpretations that were mostly similar. The phrase,
they hazarded, had to be Buhari’s promise that he would not be beholden
to his ethnic group, religion or political party. He would be an
impartial leader. He would be fair to all.
Some speculated that the line was Buhari’s declaration of personal
independence. It was his genteel warning to the wealthy individuals who
bankrolled his campaign in the hope that he would be their pliant
stooge. He meant to tell them that he won’t be their puppet. He would be
his own man. He would be loyal to the generality of the Nigerian
people.
At the peak of this discourse on 'I belong to everybody and I belong
to nobody', it would have taken an extraordinary amount of cynicism to
predict that Buhari would need only one year in office to create an
all-time high record in nepotism!
But that's a present day reality.
In this relatively short time, Buhari has managed to accomplish the
feat of populating his administration with more family members than any
past Nigerian head of state, military or civilian, ever ventured to
attempt.
In a PUNCH interview published
last Saturday, Dr. Junaid Mohammed reeled off appointments that bear
out President Muhammadu Buhari’s peerless record in nepotism.
President Buhari appointed Abba Kyari, the foster child of his nephew, Mamman Daura, Chief of Staff to the President.
Buhari appointed Duara’s son Personal Assistant to the President.
Buhari appointed Lawal Abdullahi Kazaure, Daura’s son-in-law, the State Chief of Protocol.
Buhari appointed Mohammed Lawal Abubakar, the husband of his elder sister’s granddaughter, Aide de Camp to the President,
Buhari appointed Sabiu ‘Tunde’ Yusuf, his sister’s grandson, another Personal Assistant to the President.
Buhari appointed Aisha Abubakar, the daughter of the younger sister
of Daura’s wife, the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment.
No Nigerian leader has pushed nepotism this far. No Nigerian head of
state has had the shamelessness to embarrass himself on this scale. None
of them deigned to turn the rare privilege of holding the highest
position in the land into an excuse to openly prioritize their family
members in appointments –like Buhari.
The president has the constitutional power to staff the executive
branch of the government. That is not in doubt. But it is a most
embarrassing trivialization of that power, the most extensive vested in
one office in Nigeria, for a steward of that authority, a person elected
to exercise it on behalf of the generality of Nigerian people, to make
it an instrument for advantaging the members of his own family.
Buhari’s overreach in nepotism is mind-boggling. It beats common
sense. And it is reflective of his lack of bigheartedness and narrow
field of vision, important factors that will guarantee his
underachievement as president.
It is sheer foolishness for a president with a constituency of 175
million citizens to make his inner circle the sum of the capacities of
some of his relatives. Buhari’s inner circle ought to reflect the riches
and diversity of Nigerian talent. His reduction of the presidency to a
family affair is self-deprivation. With a crowd of family members at the
center of his official orbit, he is without a healthy debate climate
and multiform perspectives. He is at the mercy of the groupthink of his
relatives, people whose overfamiliarity with him and sense of
entitlement would be a liability.
A small country, a dot on the world map, can afford an incestuous
presidency. But it is a potentially expensive experiment to try in the
most populous and heterogeneous country in Africa, in a fragile
Nigeria. It is dangerous to have a real-life arrangement wherein the
president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria spends all his work hours
surrounded by a hedge of closest aides that are his family members.
It is hostage taking. It gives these folks the opportunity to wield
outsize influence over the president and his decision making. It gives
them the room to sedate and manipulate him, to shield him from outside
alternative views, to make him a prisoner of their own worldview.
The optics of this gratuitous nepotism is too ugly. Buhari’s inner
circle has the appearance of a conspiracy. A cabal. A brotherhood bound
by blood and history.
This is damaging. It serves to repudiate the argument in favor of the
furtherance of a vulnerable Nigerian idea that is, at the moment, being
vigorously challenged and attacked by disaffected secession canvassers
and anarchist ethnic militias. It fortifies the case of promoters of the
dismemberment of Nigeria. They ask: If the president is
unapologetically privatizing power within his family circle when his
urgent tasks should be calming the agitating parts of Nigeria and making
gestures of inclusiveness, why should anyone remain invested in
preserving Nigeria’s unity?
During the last presidential campaigns, Buhari lent himself to a
brand makeover operation aimed at rebutting the myth of his clannishness
and making him likable enough to be electable. He consented to the
inconvenience of being costumed in various ethnic outfits because he was
desperate to make a success of his fourth run.
He knew that the trivial issue of his readiness to parade himself in
an exotic cloth mattered to the average Nigerian voter. The experience
of his three consecutive failed bids had taught him that it was the
measure by which the electorate judged the cosmopolitan outlook of the
presidential nominee of a major political party. And that he would
jeopardize a winnable election by clinging to his babaringa.
After winning the election, Buhari has retrieved himself from his
image managers. He has cleaned his wardrobe of those election season
wears and renounced the symbolism of that pageantry. He has retreated to
his life of ethnic snobbery. And he is currently doing his level best
to actively assault the sensibilities of Nigerians with it.
Right now, Nigerian security agencies are headed almost exclusively by Northerners.
It didn't happen by wild coincidence. Buhari made it so. He is disposed
to appointing people from his neck of the woods and throwing in one or
two more outsiders into the scheme of things ...as an afterthought!
In the early days of his administration, Buhari raised hopes that he
would compose the most competent Executive Council of The Federation in
Nigerian history. He was the candidate of ‘change’. He would jettison
the old order of cronyism. He would set a precedent for meritocracy. He
would nominate Nigeria’s finest technocrats and professionals.
Buhari promised that he won’t appoint garden variety politicians as ministers. He said he was ‘looking for’ people of integrity.
He would need ample time to make a thorough search. Nigeria was a moral
wasteland. Only a few upright citizens that could pass his integrity
test.
It was a false claim and a collective insult. Still, Nigerians did
not take offence. They thought he had set high standards for his
prospective picks. The nominees would be clean Nigerians with compelling
resumes, track records of notable achievements and a leaning towards
twenty first century ideas.
That was not to be. Buhari did not deliver. He nominated… his friends!
It was a wretched anticlimax. The protracted hide and seek culminated
in Nigerians being introduced to a largely familiar and mediocre cast.
It was a veritable scam. Buhari took two months to recall the names of
his friends and another two months to pen them down for senate
confirmation hearing!
Here’s an instance of a nepotistic misjudgment that you would never
have imagined a sensible Nigerian president would make in this hour:
Buhari, who appropiated the portfolio of the Minister of Petroleum, recently constituted the
board of directors of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. He
loaded the dice with Northern names and grudged a token mention to the
oil producing region of the Niger Delta.
Such a skewed board composition for any federal agency would have
been improper at any time. It is even more so for NNPC in this moment
when Niger Delta militants are bombing oil installations and crashing
Nigeria’s oil revenue earnings in the name of protesting against the
marginalization of the Niger Delta people.
Buhari, nonetheless, did more. He added insult to injury. In a show
of abject indiscretion, he injected Abba Kyari, his Chief of Staff, into
the board!
The Chief of Staff to the President is ideally the busiest man in the
presidency. His office is the engine room of the administration. His
job is to manage the president's schedule, regulate his routines,
control access to him and supervise staffers of the president’s office.
His is a position so strategic and demanding of complete focus and
devotion that he is the most ill-suited person to be permitted the
luxury of moonlighting!
Yet, Buhari went on to give Kyari a second job…as if Nigeria was so
poor in human beings that he couldn't find anybody more qualified than
or as competent as the foster child of his nephew!
The reckless pick was a gift to the militants and their 'cause'.
Their propagandists and sympathizers made capital out of it. They framed
it as a confirmation that Buhari is a defiant nepotist that puts his
family ahead of the country.
To the discerning, it would be obvious that Buhari effectively handed
over the NNPC board to Kyari. Kyari's membership of that board means
that other directors would tend to defer to him. As the most influential
personality in the room, one with the weight of the president’s proxy,
they will be inclined to avoid any argument with him. This will ensure
that Kyari has the last word most of the time.
Buhari has the winner-takes-it-all syndrome. He considers his
election a personal triumph and the power of the president a license to
dispense patronage. His crass nepotism represents his attempt to reward
his family and friends for keeping faith.
His vaulting nepotism is a shame. It is beyond the pale. Love for
family and friends should not move the leader of a democratic republic
to concentrate power within the circumference of his personal shadow.
He is setting a very atrocious example. For example, under his watch,
the heads of the Central Bank of Nigeria, the Federal Inland Revenue
Service and the Nigerian Prison Service have conducted scandalous backdoor recruitments that
favored only the scions of the privileged. He offered no reprimand. He
sanctioned the three cases of apartheid employment... as though he
desires to count the institutionalization of nepotism in Nigeria as part
of his legacy.
This is quite a shame. It’s a big shame that the man who stood before
his countrymen and an attentive global audience and proclaimed ‘’I
belong to everybody and I belong to nobody’’ is today making a show of
belonging to nepotism!
immaugwu@gmail.com
@EmmaUgwuTheMan
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