Beyond the Uproar in Buhari

PeeCeeJay

Jideofor Adibe

Beyond the Uproar in Buhari’s Appointments

Twitter:@JideoforAdibe

Buhari’s recent appointments have excited our primordial adrenalins, leading to ethnic and regional finger-pointing and a need, by some, to aggressively defend the ‘homeland’. Amid the anger in many parts of the south about the President’s recently announced skewed appointments, something very positive is happening – which continues to sustain the hope in the Nigeria project: some prominent figures and public intellectuals from the north are actually leading the criticisms of the appointments made so far. Apart from those who have publicly expressed their disapproval, I am sure there are many more whose profiles may not permit them to condemn such appointments publicly but who will probably have privately passed a message or two about the appointments to the presidency. It should be remembered that the current chairman of Arewa Youths Consultative Forum Yerima Shettima and Chairman of the Northern Elders Council Alhaji Tanko Yakasai were as critical of the appointments as were several other articulate columnists of northern extraction – Mahmud Jega, Farooq Kperogi, Moses Ochonu, Jafaar Jafaar etc.

In the same vein, in the run-up to the 2010 PDP’s presidential primaries, many people from the south (including my humble self) also took the principled position that it was wrong for Jonathan to contest the 2011 presidential election because that would be against natural justice and the spirit of a gentleman’s agreement said to have been reached by the PDP and which reportedly agreed that power should revert to the north after Obasanjo had served two terms of eight years. Again in the run-up to the 2015 presidential elections when there appeared to be plots to sack the then INEc chairman Professor Attahiru Jega and disqualify Buhari from the race (on allegations that he did not have his secondary school certificate), several Nigerians, including those not naturally sympathetic to the two, came to their stout defence.

My interpretation of acts such as the above is that there is a spark of divine in all of us that sometimes pushes people to go for justice and equity even at personal risks or against their own private or communal interests. I have seen husbands divorce their wives for maltreating their housemaids; people have quit their jobs in sympathy with their colleague who was unfairly treated or sacked and strangers have come together in inclement weather to protest police brutality against a stranger they do not even know. There is perhaps a divinely-driven auto- correction mechanism in any attempt to mete out injustice to others. Some will call it nemesis. You can ask former President Jonathan.

This is why it is worrying that one piece of bad politics from the presidency should lead to as much vitriolic ethnic and regional finger pointing as we are witnessing now. And in this, every region and ethnic group is as much a prey as they are predators - even though in the usual Nigerian manner, it is always the other side “that is causing the whole trouble”. My fear is that the tendency to ossify every disputation into ethnic and regional binaries robs us of the critical allies we need in seeking meaningful redress to our grievances. True, a group’s noise value could play a role in political bargaining. But noise alone, without critical allies and coalition of support groups from a broad spectrum of the population, will at best only win marginal concessions to a group.

Another unfortunate development from the uproar that attended Buhari’s latest round of appointments is the tendency for some Nigerians to play the ostrich. In a bid to protect their in-group’s privileges, they are willing to contrive reasons why others should not even be given the opportunity to ventilate their grouses. With this zero-sum- game mentality, any expression of a group’s grouse and call for redress is interpreted as an attempt to disequilibrate the extant ethnic/regional balance of privileges. And so every group goes into the archive to dig up perceived past historical injustices that have not been redressed, and which must now be urgently attended to before any other group is allowed to articulate its own grievances. For instance in complaining about the skewed appointments from Buhari the Igbos will often gloss over the advantages they enjoyed in appointments in the economy and financial sectors under both Presidents Obasanjo and Jonathan. They will also ‘forget’ that as the most diasporic group in the country, they are disproportionately represented in other ethnic enclaves and regional institutions. In the same vein, some soldiers of the ‘northern homeland’, in defending Buhari’s appointments will remind the Igbos of their domination of appointments in certain sectors under Jonathan - Minister of Finance and the de facto Prime Minister, Secretary to the Government, Deputy Senate President, Deputy Speaker, Governor of the Central Bank etc – and conveniently ‘forget’ that historically they have overwhelmingly dominated the country’s security architecture, including the location of strategic security infrastructures in the country. They will also conveniently ‘forget’ that until 1999 central political power was their exclusive play field. In the same vein, the Yoruba, while rightfully complaining of exclusion under the Jonathan regime will find creative ways of rationalizing their alleged dominance of the country’s bureaucratic and financial life. I believe this tendency to play the ostrich makes many of us hypocrites.

One other proneness thrown up by the controversy over President Buhari’s recent appointments is Nigerians’ tendency to be ‘short-termists’. For instance some who have tried to defend Buhari’s appointments have argued either that the appointments were all on ‘merit’ ( forgetting that ‘merit’ is a subjective concept in a polarized society like ours and that ‘merit’ is not incompatible with ‘reflecting the ‘federal; character’) or that they do not believe in ‘federal character’ (forgetting that there are justifiable reasons why there are different cut off marks for different states in the JAMB admission examinations to universities and in entrance examinations to federal government colleges). It was the same ‘short-termism’ that in 2010/2011 made some of Jonathan’s supporters to dispense the PDP’s zoning and power rotation arrangements ( championed in the first place by southern politicians to prevent the north from using its population to perpetuate its political domination of the country). Both zoning/power rotation and federal character principle are essential affirmative action principles in a diverse country like ours. And the conditions that led to their adoption as part of the efforts at nation-building still exist today. In fact without the ‘federal character’ principle federal universities and civil service jobs will today be overwhelming dominated by people from a section of the country – just as Obasanjo and Jonathan would probably not have become presidents without some consciousness of zoning and power rotation principles.

The truth is that in many diverse countries like Nigeria, skills and resource endowments are rarely evenly distributed among the different cultural areas and regions. Rather they tend to be complementary. It is essentially the complementarities in skills, attitudes and cultural dispositions of the constituent nationalities in a country like Nigeria that make many smart private employers to embrace a diverse workforce. The paradox of ethnic politics is that the same ethnic entrepreneurs who champion the defence of the ethnic homeland will often be heard in another breath exclaiming, “My people are terrible”.

Honestly there have been some avoidable self-inflicted distractions by this regime. Apart from the recent issue of skewed appointments, (which the regime had a chance to avoid following the uproar over the previous appointments) and managing the politics from it, I am also not convinced that the excessive focus on the Jonathan administration is smart politics. Apart from winning sympathy for the former President, nearly 100 days after the regime was sworn to power, there are few policy initiatives to form the fulcrum of robust conversations. This dearth of policy initiatives, in my opinion, is largely responsible for the very unwise decision by the APC to deny that Buhari ever promised to accomplish anything in 100 days. The truth is that the denial itself is an indirect admission that very little has been accomplished as the regime nears the 100-day mark. The social capital from Buahri’s aura may have helped public servants to sit up (leading for instance to improvements in electricity supply), however auras from charismatic leaders need to be anchored on a programmatic thrust for them to serve any meaningful purpose.

I am aware that just like it takes a plane a while after take-off to reach a cruising height, new regimes often start with fumbling before they find their rhythm. I will like to regard the regime’s missteps occasioned by its appointments so far and obsession with talking about probing the Jonathan regime (rather than carrying out the probes if it must) as part of the inevitable fumbling many new regimes face. There are still some promising signs that the regime may eventually find its rhythm and begin actual governance. This is why I believe that more time may be needed for the regime to find its bearing. But in giving it more time, the regime should also bear in mind that goodwill is easily expendable. All it takes for our current goodwill in the international community to evaporate is a critical op-ed by a top Western politician in any influential paper such as the Washington Post, New York Times or Financial Times of London. The international community is watching closely our politics as it unfolds. It will be puerile for us to take anything for granted or blow the current opportunity we have.