On May 29, President Muhammadu Buhari will officially begin his second term in office. But going by his recent utterance, the President may have chosen to keep the plan on how his new cabinet will look like and operate close to his chest.
Buhari didn’t mince words when he told a journalist last Sunday, shortly after arriving from the United Kingdom where he had spent 10 days on a private visit, that he would not disclose the calibre of individuals that would be part of the new cabinet.
It took the President more than five months to unveil his current ministers, after he was inaugurated on May 29, 2015.
Given the elaborate discussions and suspense that heralded that announcement in November, 2015, many Nigerians had expected that the country would stand tall among its contemporaries at the end of Buhari’s first term in office.
Indeed, it is widely believed that Buhari has some of the best brains in his outgoing cabinet, going by their achievements in their respective professions and areas of endeavour.
But with 18 days to the end of his first tenure, there is a general feeling of dissatisfaction among many Nigerians over the performance of the ministers.
These were based on the assessments of several economic and governance-related indices.
Examples included the nation’s economic growth rate, inflation rate and the number of unemployed people, which increased to 20.9 million in the third quarter of 2018, according to Labour Statistics Report of the National Bureau of Statistics.
According to stakeholders, the nation is currently battling with a shortfall in funding, manpower and equipment in many of its health institutions, in addition to the massive brain drain that has hit the health sector.
The situation is not too different in the education sector where relevant stakeholders have also decried the deplorable state of schools, from primary to tertiary levels.
Recently, the National President of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, Prof. Biodun Ogunyemi, described the state of libraries in public universities as worrisome, a situation he said was responsible for the alarm raised by the union over the poor condition of the institutions.
The Pro-Chancellor of the University of Lagos, Dr. Wale Babalakin, at the University of Ilorin’s Third Annual Registry Lecture Series, titled ‘Public Service Rules And University Administration: Re-engineering For Excellence,’ said no Nigerian university was ranked among the top universities in the world.
In the power sector, Nigerians have continued to lament the epileptic state of power supply, amid huge bills thrown at them by electricity distribution companies.
Also, power generation has recorded a continual drop. There are also shortcomings in other areas – including housing, road infrastructure, transportation and security. It would seem that millions of Nigerians have yet to experience any improvement in their living standards.
However, pundits argued that the failure of the cabinet to meet the aspirations of the citizens could be linked to the overriding influence of political actors surrounding the President.
Specifically, political experts were of the view that the actions and inactions of the ministers were traceable to the influence of powerful political actors working with Buhari.
A professor of Political Science at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Enugu State, Jonah Onuoha, said, “The performance of Buhari’s ministers in his first term in office is not satisfactory. There is what we called the Capture Theory in politics; this has to do with a tendency for political jobbers to capture whoever is in power. Once they capture you, you see the world through them, they dictate what you do and control you.
“So, (members of) this cabal are those who helped to bring the man (President) to power. Some of them have invested so much and the President has so much trust in them. These people see Presidency as a means of production.
“They circle themselves around him (the President) and make sure that other ‘competitors’ are pushed away. So, in most cases, it is difficult for whoever is in power to observe this in reality.”
The don, however, expressed the hope that the President would rise above the groups in his second term.
According to Onuoha, the President will choose competence above party politics and will not see ministerial appointments as a form of political compensation.
He also believed that political factors and considerations would not affect the performance of the ministers in the second term.
The UNN professor said, “He (the President) needs to rise above those who brought him to power. They campaigned and did everything possible to put him where he is. Therefore, he sees himself as being obligated to pay them back.
“But we are saying that there are other ways of paying, rather than mortgaging the future of the country in the hands of a very few who cannot manage it. He should go beyond those who had “captured” him, look around and pick credible technocrats who can help him to position the country in an appropriate way, particularly in the area of the economy where the President was rated very low in the last dispensation.
“He needs capable and courageous hands that can help him to manage the economy, create jobs, produce enough food, create industries and make people smile.”
But the National President, Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, Mr. Malachy Ugwummadu, did not subscribe to the belief that the capacity of the ministers to act in public interest was limited by the influence of political actors around the President.
He explained, “I will clearly tell you that it (the ministers’ performance) is a mixed bag; one that does not lend itself to a straight-jacket assessment because as it were, there are very challenging aspects of our national life that suffered serious setbacks and others that recorded minimal efforts. Incidentally and I think, for the first time, we had a super minister who led three ministries of power, works and housing
“It would seem that there were determined efforts on the part of the Minister of Works, Power and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola, on road construction, rehabilitation and, at least, a road map that suggests that if we remain consistent and fix our eyes on the ball, chances are that we could, in the near future, begin to have the kind of renaissance that will improve on our road network and the condition of roads, which will, in turn, impact on the economy.”
Speaking on how the health sector had fared, he said, “The professor who, with due respect, has all the professorial accolades to his name, does not guarantee anything, as far as the complexity of administering health care in a large and complex society like ours is concerned. You hardly hear the ministers of education talk; there is hardly any clear-cut educational position beyond the efforts of ASUU to beat all of us into line.”
The CDHR national president, however, noted that the onus was on the President to deal with the political exigencies and focus on competence and character in the selection of his next set of ministers.
“So, by and large, with what we have seen, President Buhari must retune this time round. There was no doubt that he needed to balance the need for competence with the political exigencies,” he said.
Ugwummadu further stated, “Now that he has the opportunity for the second time, he should deal with the situation. He must focus on the three cardinal principles of leadership, which are competence, character and conviction, such that in the first quarter of his second tenure, the difference ought to be clear.”
In a telephone interview with Saturday PUNCH, A lawyer, Mr Jiti Ogunye, said that the success or failure of the ministers was reflection of the performance of the President.
Ogunye explained, “Under the Constitution, because we practise a presidential system of government, the President of the country is the Head of State, head of government and the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces; he is, indeed, described as the chief executive of the federation. Thus, as the cliché goes, the buck stops at his desk.
“Like a hand, he is deemed to be the controller of the fingers constituting that hand. The fingers can only perform as the hand wants it to perform; the performance or functionality of the fingers is a function of the use of that hand.
“In spite of the self-adulation by regime officials, saying that they have delivered and, in particular, the President’s own assessment during his campaign in which he was quoted as saying that he promised Nigerians to fight corruption, provide security and improve economy and his worst critics telling him that he has delivered, I am afraid that is not what is on the ground in the country.
“At best, if one wants to be charitable regarding the issue of infrastructure, in terms of railway, one can say that for four years, the administration laid a foundation. So, Nigerians are yet to see those promises that were made in 2015 being speedily and efficiently translated into reality.”
The lawyer, however, called for a reinvention of governance. He also advised the Buhari administration to take stock by comparing the position of the country now as against where it was in 2015, in terms of the indices of good governance.
“As it is said, how the evening will be will well be determined by how the morning had been. So, Nigerians can have high expectations and all that but what is important is what the administration is prepared to do; Nigerians in their majority are not satisfied with what has happened in the past four years and nobody can doubt that,” Ogunye added.
For a political scientist at the Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, Ogun State, Dr. Sunday Abang, irrespective of the politics surrounding the appointment of ministers, the President should make governance his priority in the next four years.
“He should look for individuals with good track records and put them in their right positions. I know politicians will like to throw in their names but I think he should not be looking for such things because once he delivers, he has delivered the party and those who will take over from him.”
