Regional triumphalism at work
When Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume came to town, alleging glaring ethnic imbalance in President Tinubu’s appointments, I adopted the attitude of ‘wait and see.’ I thought it was still too early to make such accusations since the president is yet to cover two years out of the allotted four-year tenure. And hundreds of appointments, including […]
When Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume came to town, alleging glaring ethnic imbalance in President Tinubu’s appointments, I adopted the attitude of ‘wait and see.’ I thought it was still too early to make such accusations since the president is yet to cover two years out of the allotted four-year tenure. And hundreds of appointments, including ambassadorial ones, are waiting to be made by the president. Even if the accusations were true, I hoped that the hue and cry raised by the Borno senator would awaken the president’s conscience to abide by the federal character provision in our constitution. Sadly, it seemed that the worst was even ahead. We ain’t seen nothing yet, as the Yankees of yesteryears would say.
The chief of staff was reported to represent the president to inaugurate a high-level committee on the forthcoming national population and housing census. Two things caught my attention. The vice president was in the country and probably in his office, while the COS was representing the president in this all-important assignment. And this is coming at a time when there is a general feeling that the president is not carrying his deputy along. Many have noted that the president has never handed power to the vice president whenever he travels out of the country. The COS was always at hand to calmly step into the void. This gives mischief makers ammunition to speculate and even create stories of dislocation in the State House administration.
The other matter that caught my attention was the composition of the high-level committee. Actually, it was this that caught the attention of the public, and as it went viral was widely debated and condemned for its lopsidedness. The committee, composed of seven members, has a member each from the North West and North Central regions, while the five others came from the South West.
The committee had no member from the North East, South South and South East geopolitical zones. This is the height of triumphal politics exhibited by this president, who has surrounded himself with mostly members of his ethnic group from his comfort zone.
The COS is fast becoming all-powerful in this administration. In a two-part piece published on September 9 and 16, 2024, captioned, ‘Is Gbajabiamila expanding the role of the COS?’ I noted that the COS had a penchant for walking into other officers’ schedules. At that instance, the president was out of the country, and the COS stepped out of his sanctuary in the Presidential Villa to visit some key government agencies.
The agencies he visited included the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), and the National Hajj Commission (NAHCON), among others. The visit, as reported in the Daily Trust of September 2, was ostensibly a “fact-finding exercise and familiarisation tour”, which would have allowed him to conduct on-site assessments of those agencies under the Presidency.
Those agencies he visited have been known to fall under the purview of the Office of the Vice President. I wonder if the vice president, with all the retinue of staff in his office, would send the COS to those parastatals. There was no explanation for those visits, and nothing was fed to the public as a result of the visits. Everyone was left to make their conjectures. Personally, I explained it away as the COS wanting to replicate the oversight function he formerly relished as the Speaker of the House of Representatives in his office at the State House.
Nothing was reported to have come out of that visit. And I guess that his principal did not admonish him for that transgression. Maybe that’s why the COS went a step further to wade into another controversy.
Since the Nigerian federation was formed, the census has always been one of the most contentious affairs embarked upon by successive administrations. Our memory is fresh with those who were fussy about the conduct of the last census in 2006. President Tinubu, then the governor of Lagos State, went to court challenging the figures. In particular, he was challenging why Kano State had a higher population figure than Lagos State.
Nevertheless, if this administration intends to conduct a census before the end of its tenure, then the whole country needs to be involved. It will not do to handpick fawning acolytes to engage in the planning of this all-important assignment. The problems ahead of a census in this country now are enormous. I wonder how a credible census of both humans and houses will be conducted in many parts of the country reeling under the yoke of insurgency. How do you reach those areas of northern Borno where even the governor had conceded that at least three of the local governments are under the control of the Boko Haram insurgents? Ditto in a large part of the North West, where bandits are having a field day in Katsina, Zamfara, Sokoto, Kaduna and Niger states.
The president may still wish to go ahead with the census. However, for him to succeed, he will need to be purged of this regional triumphalism and take all parts of the country along.