It is three days to the end of September 2015, the magic
month within which President Muhammadu Buhari promised to appoint his
ministers. It is expected that in spite of his foot-dragging and reluctance, he
will publish the names of the nominees before Friday this week.
We saw him display the same foot-dragging and reluctance in
fulfilling his pledge to make his assets declaration public “within the first
100 days”. After sending his spokesmen to deny he ever made such a pledge, he
and his Vice President unveiled their assets on the 87th day, though Buhari did
not allow us to know in concrete terms how much he is worth.
Mind you, that he unveils his ministerial nominees does not
mean they will start work soon. In fact, it is not certain when the Federal
Executive Council (FEC) will become functional. The president’s open disdain
for the offices of ministers of the federal republic shows he won’t care a hoot
how long it takes for them to fully come on board. The president and some
leaders of his ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) are seen to be
spearheading the rift with the leadership of the Senate, the very body
constitutionally empowered to approve his ministerial nominees. If the
president were eager to have his cabinet in place as soon as possible, he would
have stayed true to his earlier undertaking to work with whoever emerged as the
leaders of the Federal Legislature.
Since Buhari took over four months ago, he has fallen in
love with Permanent Secretaries and Directors in the Federal Civil Service; the
very nest of corruption. No political appointee can take a dime out of
government coffers without the collusion of civil servants. According to him in
an interview with a French television station while visiting France recently,
these dutiful civil servants are the ones “doing the work” everyday. Ministers,
he added, are mere “noisemakers”. Left to him, he will prefer to work with the
civil servants and dispense with ministers.
Some Nigerians have applauded him for this outburst, saying
he was “brutally frank” while some even said he displayed “courage” in calling
ministers dirty names. Unfortunately for him and them, the Constitution of the
Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, at Section 147, directs the president to
appoint ministers from each state of the federation. Section 148 spells out the
functions of the ministers and makes it clear that he must meet them regularly.
Ministers and civil servants have their jobs clear cut out
for them by law. None can take the place of the other. It is strange that a man
who ruled this country thirty years ago as a military officer and had no
problem with appointing and working with ministers is now displaying open
hostility to those offices. During his military days, he suspended the
constitution. He was thus not bound by any law to appoint ministers yet he did
without being prompted. But now that the constitution binds to appoint
ministers, why is Buhari bellicose and spitting fire?
Before we offer our insights into that, let us make it clear
that ministers are very important in every regime, irrespective of the type of
government in place. Apart from the efforts of the Nigerian constitution to
make it a mechanism to carry every state in the federation along even by a
regime that heavily tends to monolithic sectionalism such as Buhari’s, they are
there as agents of the president and his ruling party within the machinery of
governance.
The party (APC) campaigned based on a set of manifestoes and
promises and the electorate gave their majority votes to it instead of renewing
PDP’s mandate. Buhari is expected by the constitution to appoint qualified APC
members from all parts of the country to mann his cabinet as ministers. Though
most people often clamour for “technocrats” (rather than “politicians”) to be
given ministerial jobs, Section 147(5) of the constitution says such nominees
must be qualified to be members of the House of Reps, which means they must be
card-carrying members of political parties.
The implication of these are obvious: the Federal Executive
Council (FEC) chaired by the President with the Vice President as the vice
Chairman is a body made up of elected and appointed members of (largely) the
ruling party. If ministers are “noisemakers”, then so is the president. It is
the same constitution that insists that the president and his deputy must be
politicians that also affirms that ministers must be party members. The job of
ministers is to act as the political heads of the ministries and drive the
president’s (and ruling party’s) domestic and foreign policies, programmes and
visions. They are also to advise the president and carry out any instructions
he may dish out to them in their respective ministries.
Civil servants, on the other hand, are permanent staff of
the state whose job is to carry out instructions issued by the political heads
of their ministries and departments in line with the strict rules of the civil
service. They are forbidden to belong to political parties or betray allegiance
to any political group. This makes it possible for them to serve under the
regime of any president and political party that wins election.
So, why is Buhari suddenly reluctant to appoint ministers
when he showed no such trait as a military ruler? The answer could be discerned
from the way he has approached governance so far. In constituting his “kitchen
cabinet” or the “inner circle”; people whose jobs demand that they see him
every day (Service Chiefs, personal advisers, assistants, heads of sensitive
federal institution that control revenue and the economy, elections, and the
security of state) Buhari picked only people he knows and “trusts”. These
people have tended to be mainly from his own part of the country. He calls them
the “long suffering” loyalists who worked for him even when there was no hope
of success.
He has also, in the past four months, courted and secured
the direct loyalties of top federal bureaucrats, a potentially dangerous aspect
that could predispose them to political influences of the president. These are
the people he now feels “comfortable” to work with.
What about his fellow APC leaders; those who jumped on the
bandwagon in the past eighteen months during which the merger took place? What
about the “new” PDP which swelled their ranks, thus tilting victory to him? He
felt “comfortable” receiving the “rogues” and “saints” among them; accepting
their billions in campaign funding, smiling for the cameras while they dressed
him in borrowed robes to entice voters. He swam in their hyperbolic propaganda.
Everything they brought to help him win he collected; no one who came forward,
and nothing they brought was considered too “dirty”.
As soon as he achieves his objective of becoming an elected
president he reverts to his old mode of seeing “politicians” as “dirty” people,
forgetting that he is now one of them; has been since 2003.
Buhari may well be building a very strong personal power
base, sidetracking the vehicle that brought him to power and using his personal
disciples and the federal bureaucracy to run a civilian dictatorship. Even when
the ministers come, they may find themselves mere figureheads and passengers in
Buhari’s government.
The fact that a crowd of ill-regarded ministers
(“noisemakers”) is brought in might not douse the regional dominance and agenda
(rather than party agenda) that have been unfolding.
It might well be a fostering of the “97%/5%” formula that
makes Buhari a president who belongs to some Nigerians and not to the others.
