By Farooq Kperogi

On paper, Professor Ibrahim Agboola Gambari’s choice as Buhari’s Chief of Staff is so far the regime’s most luminous appointment. Gambari is undoubtedly one of Nigeria’s most credentialed and globally visible citizens for whom the position of Chief of Staff to the President is actually a positional, even symbolic, downgrade.

Ordinarily, the office of the Chief of Staff to the President is informal, discretionary, and of no consequence. Its inconsequence is underscored by the fact that the constitution does no recognize it and does not require the president to appoint anyone to perform its duties. That was why Umar Musa Yar’adua didn’t have one.

Home Opinion Ibrahim Agboola Gambari: A Presidential babysitter who won’t be as powerful as Abba Kyari
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Ibrahim Agboola Gambari: A Presidential babysitter who won’t be as powerful as Abba Kyari
written by Admin May 14, 2020
Ibrahim Agboola Gambari: A Presidential babysitter who won’t be as powerful as Abba Kyari
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By Farooq Kperogi

On paper, Professor Ibrahim Agboola Gambari’s choice as Buhari’s Chief of Staff is so far the regime’s most luminous appointment. Gambari is undoubtedly one of Nigeria’s most credentialed and globally visible citizens for whom the position of Chief of Staff to the President is actually a positional, even symbolic, downgrade.

Ordinarily, the office of the Chief of Staff to the President is informal, discretionary, and of no consequence. Its inconsequence is underscored by the fact that the constitution does no recognize it and does not require the president to appoint anyone to perform its duties. That was why Umar Musa Yar’adua didn’t have one.

The only reason the position of CoS to the President has become uncharacteristically visible in the last five years is that Buhari is both too cognitively incapacitated and too splendidly incompetent to function as president, so he needs a proxy or, as I pointed out in my April 22 status update, “a babysitter, a political and intellectual babysitter.”

As a military dictator, Tunde Idiagbon was Buhari’s political babysitter from 1983 to 1985. The late Salihijo Ahmad’s Afri-Projects Consortium (APC), was “the sole manager of the PTF projects,” according to Ray Ekpu’s June 5, 2018 article titled, “Petroleum Trust Fraud.” In other words, Buhari couldn’t even manage a government agency as small as the PTF without needing babysitting. Of course, most people know that since 2015 until his death, Abba Kyari was Buhari’s proxy.

Mamman Daura, on whom Buhari is intellectually and emotionally dependent, “created” Abba Kyari for Buhari but Kyari later grew into a Frankenstein that almost devoured his “creator.” Daura wants no repeat of that and sees a potentially dutiful factotum in Gambari who was Buhari’s external affairs minister from 1984 to 1985.

He seems like a person who would do a good job of concealing Buhari’s cognitive and mental infirmities from the public and from government officials, which is what the position of CoS to Buhari has now been reduced to.

Although Gambari has intimidatingly impressive academic and professional credentials, he has no reputation for lofty, high-minded principles, which explains why he would even accept this position, which relegates rather than elevates him.

He defended IBB’s ruinous invalidation of the June 12 presidential election, justified Abacha’s heartrending judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni activists, and, according to the New York Times of Oct. 5, 1997, opposed something as innocuous as a planned renaming of a New York street after the late Kudirat Abiola who was murdered in cold blood by Abacha’s junta, which Gambari served.

READ MORE: https://thebelltimesng.com/2020/05/14/ibrahim-agboola-gambari-a-presidential-babysitter-who-wont-be-as-powerful-as-abba-kyari/

Clock is tickling

I see

See finishing,so Buhari needs proxy to run everything