After days of dithering procrastination, President Bola Tinubu last Wednesday finally assigned portfolios to the 45 nominees cleared by the Senate to be ministers.
The designation of portfolios has been largely received with mixed feelings across the polity. The designation of Nyesom Wike as FCT minister, Dave Umahi in works, Ali Pate in health and Bosun Tijani in communications have been generally applauded.
On the other hand, some other ‘egg heads’ brought in by President Bola Tinubu as his ministers have also been subjected to mockery.
First, unlike the quantitative distribution, which saw the Southeast marginalized with five appointments just as Tinubu warned that they would do with ‘bread and water’ during the campaigns, the region got a fairly good pie in terms of the qualitative distribution of the portfolios.
Indeed, for the first time in more than a generation, an Igbo man is minister of works.
Umahi by universal acclamation was well positioned for the post of works minister having acquitted himself substantially according to reports with the transformation of Ebonyi State. Umahi who surprisingly gave up a Senate leadership position to become an appointee of the president is expected to bring his deft touch to road and other infrastructure around the country.
However, close watchers of Umahi including many former aides will be watching out for the kind of drama that has trailed his relationship with aides. Nigerians will remember how as governor he had a knack for sacking and demoting appointees at the easiest provocation. He once shockingly suspended a commissioner and recalled him and appointed him permanent secretary in the same ministry under a new commissioner!
As minister, Umahi will, however, find that he will have little room to manouver in sacking civil servants as he did in Ebonyi as he will sooner than later discover that he cannot sack even the least of the civil servants.
Another appointment by President Bola Tinubu that has been well applauded is the designation of Wike as FCT minister. The last time a man like Wike came as minister of FCT was Mallam Nasir El-Rufai. Your correspondent recalls that the deployment of El-Rufai to the FCT ministry was upon President Olusegun Obasanjo’s quest for a mad man to sanitise the FCT administration.
El-Rufai to a large extent accomplished in the mad-man’s mission albeit controversially. After years of maladministration especially under the Muhammadu Buhari era, the FCT needs a madder man to reboot the FCT. And there is no doubt that there is no person who fits the bill better than Wike.
In his last assignment as governor, Wike acquitted himself as Mr Project and along the way did some ‘mad things’ including hounding political foes. How far he can go in dealing with his political foes in Abuja is there to be seen. Will he demolish the abandoned PDP national secretariat in the same way he demolished the Bayelsa State housing complex in Port-Harcourt? Or could the FCT Development Control mark out any of Atiku’s mansions in Abuja as being on the right of way for a proposed new bridge he may envision?
Here and there one could also hail the Tinubu cabinet as round pegs in round holes with Wale Edun at Finance, Tahir Mamman at Education, Ali Pate at health, Yusuf Tuggar at foreign affairs, Bosun at communication. However, most of the others in the 45-man list of ministers are a shock to the acclaimed head-hunting capacity of President Tinubu.
A man alleged to have helped milk the country during the Sani Abacha years is appointed to a key area of the economy, another who helped to fester banditry is assigned to defence and a man in his sixties is assigned to the ministry of youths!
After he won the election, President Tinubu was reported to have travelled out of the country to prepare his team for governance. It is shocking that this is what he came out with, populating the Federal Executive Council with questionable characters including some who ran their states aground as governors.
Simon Lalong who is the new labour minister of labour left office with workers in Plateau State on strike on the basis of months of outstanding salaries.
While the egg-heads in the team have been praised and isolated, the assemblage of 45-men as had earlier been reported on this page is more of a campaign team being prepared either for a rerun or for a second term election.
It is the political motif that helped to displace Malam Nasir El-Rufai from the cabinet. While his replacement as energy minister, Adedayo Adelabu is a technocrat with similar capacity, one fears for Tinubu given the alleged bitterness in the camp of El-Rufai over how he has been used and dumped.
Mallam felt so bad about the way he was treated that he ran out of the country and didn’t stay back to witness the marriage ceremony of his son in Abuja last weekend.
With El-Rufai coordinating from abroad, one could well say that Tinubu has his job well cut out for him in his bid to accentuate his political hegemony from Lagos to across Nigeria.
This Tinubu team reminds many of Harry Maguire, the former Manchester United captain whose knack for own goals easily comes out in a google search. Surrounded with some of the best players in the English league, emotions or whatever turned Maguire into a weak link in Manchester United. Whatever, his weaknesses, he became a recurring feature in the team.
That is how Tinubu has brought many men who have been recuring players in Nigeria’s underdevelopment to swamp the few good players he has positioned in his cabinet.
Significantly, Tinubu’s former campaign manager, Dr Abdulmumin Jibrin in February 2022 revealed that the president was at that time a shareholder in Manchester United. One hopes President Bola Tinubu has not brought the Manchester United fixation on Magurie to bear in his appointment of ministers and government.
•Written By Emmanuel Eziken
