Hot potatoes on Buhari’s plate

I actually accepted his advice and I am somewhat sorry that since the world didn’t end on Saturday last week, I must now return to a diet without eggs, fried foods, ample sugar, fizzy drinks or full cream milk. The 15 million people that voted for him in the election are busy popping up drinks […]

I actually accepted his advice and I am somewhat sorry that since the world didn’t end on Saturday last week, I must now return to a diet without eggs, fried foods, ample sugar, fizzy drinks or full cream milk.
The 15 million people that voted for him in the election are busy popping up drinks and riding rough on motorcycles but President-elect Muhammadu Buhari is taking a hard look at the many hot potatoes lined up on his dinner plate. He might already be feeling that life as an opposition leader is not bad after all.
The first hot potato that he must pick up with bare hands is the selection of men and women to man important offices and deliver on the promise of change. While Vice President-elect Yomi Osinbajo looks like the kind of guy who genuinely believes in change, the same cannot be said of the rest of Buhari’s entourage. It was his image of uprightness and incorruptibility that propelled Buhari to become the politician with the largest personal following in Nigeria. Yet, in three tries for the presidency he realised that that was not enough to put him over the top. In order to overcome the tremendous obstacles placed in his path by “the largest party in Africa” he had to team up with formidable regular politicians. Trouble is, the President-elect and his new-found allies might interpret their hard-won mandate differently.
Within 48 hours of Buhari receiving his certificate of return, newspapers exploded with stories of the jostling for positions in the National Assembly and in the incoming cabinet. This is the first time since 1999 that the opposition is taking over control of both chambers of the National Assembly. APC must therefore evolve a sharing formula, and this would be heavily influenced by PDP traditions. The reality of APC’s limited national spread complicates matters. The most obvious limit is the dearth of APC senators and MPs from the South East and South-South. These zones might have to be compensated with executive positions.
President-elect Buhari has already frowned at the number of ministers in Nigeria. As military head of state, Buhari had only 20 ministers. Now, the constitution requires that at least one minister must be appointed from every state, a minimum of 36. Unless this constitutional provision is expunged or modified the cabinet will continue to be large and unnecessary ministries must be created to accommodate these ministers. The added problem is that in this dispensation party members expect ministers to be appointed based on personal contributions to the party. State party branches will insist on making the ministerial nominations. Many party men have already been offered ministerial positions during the scheming in the states to produce governors. The President might find that many of these nominees do not meet his requirements especially for the biggest jobs at hand such as education, defence and finance. It was not for nothing that President Obasanjo created the precedent of appointing an additional six ministers, one for each geopolitical zone. The President gets to select these ones himself and these are often the nominees that get to occupy the biggest cabinet positions.
The hottest of hot potatoes on Buhari’s plate is Boko Haram. Since President Jonathan is no longer in a position to benefit politically from the army’s gains in the North East, it is in the incoming regime’s interest to encourage him to finish up the war and extirpate Boko Haram once and for all. That would remove the single biggest problem facing the Nigerian nation. The next big task is to ensure that Boko Haram does not resurface in another form
page  anytime soon. Buhari is ideally suited for this task. He can prod the Muslim community in Nigeria to undertake a thorough soul searching as to why violent extremist sects keep recurring in this land. A way must be found to curtail extremist interpretations of Islamic injunctions within the limits of constitutional rights. And then he should end almajirci once and for all.
The next hot potato on Buhari’s plate is power supply. Before Boko Haram came along epileptic power supply was this country’s number one governance problem after corruption. If there are still power cuts by this time next year, many people will begin to grumble that Buhari is not the miracle worker they expected. He must also mind the mistake made by his younger brother President Umaru Yar’adua who promised to declare a state of emergency in the sector only to say a year later that he was still studying the problem. Lest some people say that I am an armchair critic who does not offer constructive advice, let me repeat here a crackpot advice that I once offered to President Yar’adua which he never took. Why not go to Ukraine or Belarus and hire a floating 4,000 megawatt power station, tow it to Lagos, connect it to the national grid and then sit back and study the power problem? Matters are not helped by the fact that Professor Jerry Gana announced a donation of N5 billion during PDP’s fundraising dinner allegedly on behalf of gencos and discos owners.
Just like power sector, unemployment is a hot button issue. Millions of young school leavers have been without jobs for years since leaving school. If they are still unemployed by this time next year, their enthusiasm for change could begin to wane. The highly inflammable issues of fuel imports and fuel prices must be solved together, including whether subsidy will be maintained, whether government will retain ownership of the refineries and whether fuel prices will be deregulated so that owners of licenses will build new refineries.
Add to the volatile mix the issue of decaying infrastructure. Apart from inse-curity and epileptic power supply nothing discredits the government in ordinary folks’ eyes as much as potholed roads. Also very damaging are incessant strikes by public sector workers. The most notorious in this regard are higher institutions staff, health workers, oil workers and more recently judicial workers. It is time to break the vicious cycle that people only get their dues when they go on strike.
President-elect Buhari’s political reputation is essentially built around his anti-corruption credentials. Right now, many Jonathan era scandals are begging to be probed, including the missing NNPC money and the N10 billion jet charter issues. If Buhari does not probe them his anti-corruption credentials will suffer. Yet if he probes them some people will say that he is embarking on a witch hunt after saying that Jonathan has nothing to fear from him. There are many other battles to fight. For example, will President Buhari allow the National Assembly to continue to collect an annual budget of N150 billion, most of which goes to pay each member N50 million every quarter outside his salary for various fraudulent claims?
Alot of changes are also required in this country’s political culture. It is one thing for INEC to ensure through the instrumentality of PVCs and card readers that the votes that are cast by voters are the ones that counted. The next task is to ensure that votes are cast for the right reasons i.e. to reduce the overbearing influence of money in our politics. Most APC chieftains are old PDP members and the danger is real that they will import into it many of their old party’s political traditions.
Anyway. The newspapers reported at the weekend that the president-elect met privately with President Jonathan on Friday, apparently to start the transition. A transition meeting such as the one they held is a tricky business. It reminds me of an old American television comedy when Jimmy Carter held his first transition meeting with Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan was inattentive when Carter was briefing him on economic issues but when Carter showed him the US President’s nuclear war button, Reagan suddenly paid attention and rushed forward to press it. Mercifully, Carter pushed Reagan’s hand away.