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DELICATE ART OF ‘BALANCING’

Category: Monday column Published on Monday, 06 July 2015 04:00 Written by Mahmud Jega mmjega@dailytrust.com 08054102925 (SMS only)

As last week ended, inter-regional bickering threatened to creep back into national politics with hordes of social media warriors leading the cavalry charge against what they said were President Muhammadu Buhari’s regionally lopsided
appointments.

Buhari has made preciously few appointments since his inauguration more than a month ago and, if the “sources” that spoke to several media houses last weekend are correct, he is not about to make any major appointments for another two months. Which is why it is doubly troubling that the few that he made should sail into an e-ocean of controversy.

A page 3 story in Saturday Punch summarised the bone of contention. Punch’s story was titled Appointments: Uproar as Buhari favours Northerners. According to the story, President Buhari has so far made nine appointments and all of them except Special Adviser on Media and Publicity Femi Adesina are northerners. They include Director General of the Department of State Services Lawal Musa Daura, Acting Chairman of INEC Hajiya Amina Bala Zakari, Director of the Department of Petroleum Resources Mordechai Dantani Baba Ladan, Accountant General of the Federation Alhaji Ahmed Idris, Aide de Camp Lt Colonel Mohamed Lawal Abubakar and Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu.

Many other things were said by the e-warriors to further muddle up matters. They mentioned the slightly untidy transfer of power at INEC, where the Presidency failed to designate an acting chairman in time until the outgoing chairman handed over to one of the national commissioners, only for the presidency to designate another acting chairman later that evening. Social media regional warriors also made much of the fact that the new DSS boss is from the president’s hometown; to boot he retired from DSS two years ago, only to be brought back as DG. The Punch threw a few more petrol canisters into the flame by pretending to observe in passing that the president, Senate President, House Speaker and the Chief Justice of Nigeria are all northerners. It would have been fair to add that Buhari did not appoint the other Big Three. In fact, he was visibly displeased by the emergence of two of them.

Anyway, inter-regional controversy regarding appointments is the last thing the fledgling Buhari Administration wanted in the midst of the unresolved leadership crisis in the National Assembly, which has created a credibility problem for the All Progressives Congress [APC] and its Change agenda. Nor was the administration helped very much by the army of youthful Northern social media warriors that rushed to its defence. Their main line of counter attack was that former president Jonathan did the same thing. Some e-warriors compiled a [selective] list of what they called Jonathan’s regionally lopsided appointments including key ones such as Central Bank, NIMASA, Accountant General, Federal Inland Revenue and Army Chief. The list nicely omitted all Jonathan appointments of Northerners, which was a desperate way to make a point.

I am not by any means holding up Jonathan-era appointments as a model of inter-regional balancing. But if they were skewed as the Northern social media warriors argue, do they wish to place President Buhari on the same moral pedestal? Are they saying in effect that Southerners had their turn in marginalising Northerners, therefore it is our turn to marginalise Southerners in key appointments? If that is the guiding philosophy, where then is the Change mantra and are we saying this philosophy of turn-by-turn marginalisation should become the accepted ethic in all future public service appointments?

Now, not all the social media commentators leapt before they looked at the consequences of what they were saying. At least a few said, common sensically, that the president should not be judged from only a few appointments since he is due to make hundreds of appointments during his four year tenure. At least that sounds better. In statistics, a result is not reliably declared if the sample is too small. While the chances of a fair sided coin landing heads or tails is exactly fifty-fifty, this ratio may not be achieved if you toss the coin only a few times. You must toss it hundreds or even thousands of times before you achieve a full fifty-fifty ratio. It is up to the Buhari regime to prove in subsequent appointments that it is a statistical fair-sided coin.
Still, I was wondering why the Buhari presidency failed to take into consideration likely public perceptions before making these appointments or, at any rate, before making them public. There are many reasons why President Buhari should be very sensitive to matters of inter-regional and inter-religious balancing. In 1983 when the Supreme Military Council announced that Buhari was the new Head of State and Brigadier Tunde Idiagbon was the Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters some commentators in the Lagos newspapers rushed to say that the ticket was not balanced because both men were Northerners and both were Muslims. While most Nigerians, I think, later came to see the Buhari-Idiagbon combination as a patriotic national salvage team, some of the things they did were seized upon by critics and attributed to their regional origins. It was said, for example, that they kept President Shehu Shagari in comfortable house detention but sent Vice President Alex Ekwueme to Ikoyi Prisons for regional reasons. The NSO’s invasion of Chief Awolowo’s home in 1984 to cart away files and newspaper cuttings was also alleged by some to be sinister Northern agenda, while the 53 suitcases scandal was also given a regional colouration.
Some of the problems of misperception that dogged Buhari since he entered party politics in 2002 stemmed from that era [as well as some subsequent events]. During three failed tries for the presidency he was dogged by allegations that he was a Northern and Muslim parochialist. It was only in 2015 that this misperception underwent a tectonic shift. Too many Jonathan/PDP foibles assisted that, as did the adroit politics of Bola Tinubu and Rotimi Amaechi, among others. Clever APC strategists also silenced those Northern groups agitating for power shift back to the North. They instead sold the Buhari project as a national enterprise. The worst thing that can ever happen is a return to the old perception of parochialism.

While I have personally reached a stage in life where I do not care a hoot about the regional, ethnic and religious origins of anyone, regrettably most of our countrymen have not yet arrived there. A ruler must worry about perceptions, not just hanker after the ideal. I recall one episode of Dr. Tony Iredia’s Point Blank television interview with Dr. Chuba Okadigbo in 2002 where he was asked why senators speak in terms of juicy committee chairmanships. Okadigbo said, “It is not only senators. Nigerians generally think in such terms. A Nigerian will look at the portfolio assigned to a minister from his state and say, ‘Oh, is that the only one they gave us?’”
It could be that the lack of a full complement of staff in Aso Rock is responsible for this problem. I mean, if there is a very strong Chief of Staff and the president sends down a paper saying “appoint this man as so-and-so,” he could say, “Mr. President, given the last two appointments you made, if we announce this one it could make some people to say you are appointing only Northerners. Therefore, I will hold this one for a few days and I suggest that you approve some more appointments to so-and-so organisations so that we can announce them together.”

The old ploy used by Nigerian rulers over the years to give the appearance of inter-regional balancing is to group certain Federal Government agencies together and to ensure that if a Northerner heads one, a Southerner must head the other one. It is not ideal, but it saves the ruler from political trouble. The compatible agencies here are DSS and NIA, NTA and FRCN, NPA and NIMASA, NYSC and FRSC, Customs and Immigration, Central Bank and NNPC, WAEC and NECO, NUC and JAMB, BPE and BPP, Army and Police etc. The Chief of Staff or the SGF should be the custodian of this intricate balancing act but so far Buhari has neither.


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