President Muhammadu Buhari and Yusuf Magaji Bichi
Ordinarily, last week’s appointment of Yusuf Magaji Bichi, a
retiree of the Department of State Services, and the removal of the
acting Director-General, Mathew Seiyefa, would have attracted little
notice, and in all likelihood passed over as a routine exercise of
President Muhammadu Buhari’s powers of deployment. Against the
tumultuous background of the removal by then acting President Yemi
Osinbajo of Lawal Daura, the former Director-General, who authorised an
invasion of the National Assembly, however, the final chapter in a rich
national political drama was bound to attract more than casual
inspection.
Leading the charge against Bichi’s appointment was a group of elder
statesmen from the Southern and Middle Belt states, quoted in the
opening paragraph of this write-up. The group said that the recycling of
Bichi, who hails from Kano State, suggests that “Buhari does not care a hoot about the unity, cohesion and oneness of Nigeria”.
Tireless advocates of the political and administrative restructuring of
Nigeria, the elder statesmen spoke candidly, in a tenor and vigour
appropriate to an election season.
As a preliminary remark, let us remember that there are those like
the late radical historian, Dr. Yusuf Bala Usman, who argue that public
discourse in Nigeria makes too much of political appointments, whereas
they do not significantly alter the material conditions of the majority
of the citizens. According to this line of thought, the questions to ask
are: Did the advent of a President from the Niger Delta region change
the fortunes of that afflicted part of the country beyond creating a
handful of billionaires? Has Buhari’s Presidency altered in any
significant way the economic and social conditions of the deep North? If
one can hazard a guess, the answer will be No, judging by the
voluminous data on deepening poverty in both regions. So, there are
obviously class limitations to the politics of , and hoopla over, elite
political appointments.
That said, we raise the question: Do political appointments count?
Yes, they do, partly because in a fragile nation, waiting to be built,
appointments are symbolic and semiotic resources to build, or to divide
the nation. Appointments can also be used to denote a moral compass, to
the extent that appointees are mirror images of the appointing
authority. The federal character provisions in the 1999 Nigerian
Constitution specifically state that “The composition of the
government of the federation or any of the agencies and the conduct of
its affairs shall be carried out in such a manner as to reflect the
federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and
also to command national loyalty”.
Of course, there is a debate as to whether the application or abuse
of this bridge-building provision has turned federal character into
“federal discrimination” as Prof. Sam Oyovbaire once expressed it. That
notwithstanding, the constitution at least in broad terms envisages
fairness, equity and sensitivity to our ethnic and religious composition
in making key national appointments. That is why the lopsided
appointments in the security department, where close to 90 per cent of
the chief executives in the intelligence department, as well as service
chiefs come from the North, has generated allegations of sectional bias
and insensitivity.
To be fair, Buhari’s spokespersons insist that the extreme
lopsidedness of appointments in the security sector does not represent
the broader base of political appointments in the current
administration. That point is noted, but it still does not answer the
query why the security sector appointments are dramatically skewed,
considering the importance of that sector. So, when Daura who comes from
Buhari’s home town was removed and replaced by Seiyefa from Bayelsa
State, not a few critics of Buhari argued that, in spite of the
transgressions of Daura, the President in all probability would not have
removed him, if he was in Nigeria at the time.
Seiyefa, many felt, constituted a breath of fresh air and
technocracy in an environment dominated by politically oriented
bureaucrats. Interestingly, Seiyefa, in a bid to reposition the
organisation, reached out to the civil society and the human rights
community, to show that the authoritarian and opaque ways of the past
had gone for good. Another way of looking at Seiyefa’s reformist
outlook, is that he had started to give the administration a new image
and had brought into security a liberal outlook, more in tandem with the
national and global human rights communities. Had Buhari retained him,
he would have achieved several objectives, namely, he would have reduced
the heavy concentration of northern appointees even if minimally; he
would have directly associated himself with what can be referred to as
the human and liberal face of the security department, and last but not
the least, he would have endorsed the kind of competence that Seiyefa is
acclaimed to represent.
Those apart, he would have shown that one does not need to be the
good boy of any key figure in the administration to reach the apex job.
There is a broader issue playing out here: Can Nigeria build a system in
which hard work, merit, and of course loyalty in broad terms become the
drivers of success? Is there a system properly so-called in the first
place, that can accommodate high flyers who have no political agenda or
godfathers? Too often, those who get to the top do so through cronysm,
the composition of fawning and adulatory praise songs to the high and
mighty, rather than on their own steam. Is the polity so unstable and
uncertain that it cannot tolerate an outstanding personnel who does not
chant glory to the boss every morning?
That is another way of saying that if we are to build institutions
and if those institutions are to endure, we must somehow find ways of
making them run on auto-pilot, supported by rational and meritocratic
norms. Former President Goodluck Jonathan has obviously fallen on hard
times, blamed for monumental sleaze that characterised his
administration. Nonetheless, he once granted an interview in which he
claimed that he never met Prof. Attahiru Jega, before appointing him the
Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission. Of course,
not all of Jonathan’s appointments were as clean as that of Jega, who
conducted a largely free and fair election that increased the stature of
our democracy.
The point being made is that when important appointments are
directly yoked to serve political interests, the system diminishes. Can
it be true, in this connection, that Seiyefa’s removal and the
appointment of Bichi is the handiwork of a cabal within the
administration, which must carefully scrutinise all key appointments
according to the criteria not made known to the public.
If that is the case, then it will be interesting and important to
see to what extent Buhari will either free himself from, or become
totally captive of this cabal, as he contemplates a second term. That is
another way of saying that for Nigeria to turn around, it must enlist
in a search for respite, all the devices of building credible and
efficient institutions that can assist the journey towards a viable
future.
Written by Ayo Olukotun for the Punch