Maybe you saw it. The list. Others have promised to assist President Bola Ahmed Tinubu pick ministries faster. They released their ministerial list for him on social media. Trending now.
But, even a banana republic would find it unlikely. No sense. According to the list, pundits are excited about Adams Oshiomhole as Minister of Works, Nasir El-Rufai as Minister of Interior, and Nyesom Wike as Police Affairs Minister, among others.
Why so desperate? We don’t want a Muhammadu Buhari resurgence. Buhari formed his cabinet at one-eighth of his first four-year tenure, around the same period as General Murtala Muhammed. As Buhari was scratching his brain, the nation ran on voodoo, psychedelically dubbed body language.
When Buhari eventually did it, particularly in his second term, he chose ministers and non-ministers that made people regret his selections.
Before Buhari appointed ministers, I stopped worrying about cabinet lists. His ministers and appointments made the position laughable. With self-help inventiveness, they made it real business.
In 2017, Buhari appointed three corpses to government boards. I think the people is anxious about the new ministerial list because they want Tinubu to avoid previous blunders.
Despite years of lousy government, Abuja sets the tone for governance. Establishing an early cabinet may assist the nation and its allies understand where it is going and how to tackle the continent’s greatest and maybe most intractable riddle.
President Tinubu must also rapidly choose his cabinet to maintain the pace and momentum of some of his far-reaching choices from day one. But not on the timetable of social media speculators who have selected his cabinet, allocated ministries, and set a restart date.
Through time, I’ve learned to follow state and municipal administrations. Governors who go wild might damage much in Abuja. They’re familiar.
While Ahmed Sani Yerima was Zamfara State governor, we observed how the sum of the parts might harm the whole. “Political Sharia law” in that state and its misapplication sowed extremism in numerous North-West states.
Aside from South-South militancy, President Olusegun Obasanjo spent a lot of time dealing with Yerima’s rascality’s major security repercussions and the former governor’s supercharged testosterone that could not be suppressed until it found a consort in a 15-year-old Egyptian girl. He’s back.
Not hilarious. After Yerima inflamed religious tensions in Gusau, the fires erupted over 12 other states in the North, generating an army of furious individuals, particularly young people, who saw issues common to emerging democracies like corruption and inequality as moral concerns to be handled by the religious police.
Regrettably, a state high court issued a dubious judgement that limited the constitutional rights of non-believers and other religions in the state. After spending billions of naira from Abuja, political elites used “Political Sharia” to avoid responsibility.
Obasanjo’s ministerial blueprint could not have predicted this zealotry’s subsequent monster. Boko Haram, ISWAP, and other insurgencies recruited from this theological powerhouse.
Of course, cautionary stories were not limited to the North. Nenadi Usman, a junior minister in Obasanjo’s cabinet, published a monthly summary of state governments’ federation account receipts, which was a hoax. The billions gathered yielded nothing. Governors throughout the nation had robbed the treasury and stashed the rest overseas.
“Dubai Property: An Paradise for Nigeria’s Corrupt Political Elite” by Matthew T. Page said, “A 2014 study, for example, claimed that Nigerian purchasers accounted for 60% of all serviced apartment purchases in Dubai. In 2012, a Dubai real estate sales manager said Nigerians have spent up to $6 billion in Dubai property over the preceding three years.
Beyond “politically exposed people,” the report’s generic descriptive categories indicated that “security sector chiefs” and “governors” were the top Nigerian Dubai owners.
Although we stress over the ministerial list, we must also watch the states. With rubber-stamp assemblies, it may be helpful to follow governors’ appointments as well as their actions.
Of course, smearing all states is unjust. Lagos, notably after 1999, Ekiti (under Governor Kayode Fayemi), Kaduna, and Rivers have made progress and should continue. I also understand how ministers’ actions or inactions after Abuja-mylitis may undermine state governance, notably in procurement and sovereign guarantees.
Nevertheless, Abuja’s bad image has kept states on a leash for too long. We worry about who will be the next minister.
Tinubu understands better than anybody that despite sharing Buhari’s party banner, he does not enjoy his honeymoon phase. If he makes any mistakes—hopefully not—given the country’s problems, he must swiftly dismiss such appointments instead of nurturing them like his predecessor, as if it were a convoluted conjugal tragedy.
By Tuesday, when the official list is produced and presented to the Senate, social media appointment mongers may move their business to the ethno-religious market, where the tribe and religion of the new appointees will likely become the new commodities.
