The presidential medals of mediocrity

Only one parting gift could’ve been more outrageous than the trending list of nominees for the Nigerian National Merit Award by the Buhari-led government, and that’s the controversial presidential pardon recently extended to convicted politicians, especially governors whose litigations took the Nigerian state over a decade to conclude. The proposed National Honours would leave one […]

Only one parting gift could’ve been more outrageous than the trending list of nominees for the Nigerian National Merit Award by the Buhari-led government, and that’s the controversial presidential pardon recently extended to convicted politicians, especially governors whose litigations took the Nigerian state over a decade to conclude. The proposed National Honours would leave one either rushing to look up the meaning of “honour” and “merit” or wondering if President Muhammadu Buhari or his cerebral Chief of Staff were held at gunpoint to stamp and authorise the release of that dreadful document.  

The Nigerian National Honours used to be an annual gathering of cronies to share medals among themselves, with sprinkles of deserving citizens and residents included to tone down the mediocrity glorified. So, President Buhari’s refusal to approve such pointless jamborees since he took charge in 2015—except when he paused to move Nigeria’s Democracy Day to June 12 in 2018 and conferred posthumous honours on the winner of the 1993 presidential election, M. K. O. Abiola and others who fought for the nation’s democracy—was celebrated as a testament of principled aversion to mediocre investitures.  

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What promised to be a sudden break from that tradition has sparked intense scrutinisation of the 437 nominees listed in the viral document. Among the nominees are some of Nigeria’s outstanding minds, including game-changing tech innovators, high-flying technocrats, buccaneering entrepreneurs, world-acknowledged music superstars, and record-breaking athletes. These deserving nominees are the usual icing on the cake of mediocrity served Nigerians every award year in the name of honouring citizens and residents selected based on merit.   

It didn’t take long before Nigerians identified some of the strange names nominated. They included President Buhari’s Personal Assistant, Sabiu Yusuf; his media aide, Femi Adesina; his aide on domestic affairs, Sarki Abba; his personal physician, Sanusi Rafindadi; the State House chief of protocol, Lawal Kazaure; the State House administration officer, Abubakar Maikano; his in-law, the Emir of Bichi, Nasir Bayero; and his nephew Mamman Daura, among others. It was an unpretentious practice of nepotism and state-sanctioned middle-finger to Nigerians.  

National honours are intended to serve as celebrations and recognitions of citizens’ and residents’ values to the nation and valour in the service of the nation, and there’s nothing spectacular one can attribute to the listed president’s aides for merely carrying out their salaried tasks in one of the most underwhelming governments Nigerians have endured. To even contemplate awarding Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) medals to the personal physician of a president with the longest history of medical tourism, a PA who‘s notoriously involved in state businesses, and a media aide with disastrous records of damning optics mean that the presidency has no feedback mechanism in place.  

The joke didn’t stop at the State House. The Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu, is also listed for the award of the Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON) medal and the reactions of Nigerian students to this attempt to honour a public servant holding the tragic record of the most and the longest public university strikes in the country are enough to dispel the malarial thinking behind his nomination. There are safer ways to provoke students who’ve been languishing at home for the past eight months.  

The response of the Federal Ministry of Special Duties and Inter-Governmental Affairs, which has debunked the trending list, was predictable. But the Ministry acknowledged a ceremony has, indeed, been scheduled to confer various National Honours on “deserving Nigerians and friends of Nigeria” on October 11 and that “the authentic list of nominees is yet to be released to the public.” Whichever the case, the announcement has only energised public interest in the composition of the “edited” version of the list underway.  

The nomination of the president’s aides and ministers, especially unanimously-acknowledged underwhelming ones, echoes past debate on the suitability of honouring serving public servants, and the wisdom of doing so years after their service to the nation. The break after their stewardship, when they have no power to influence the awarding institutions, is enough for the state and the public to weigh their impact and contributions to the nation or sacrifices in doing so and determine their qualification. Otherwise, favour-seeking bureaucrats are going to keep on pandering to influential aides and politicians for a guarantee of job security or accelerated promotions.  

The mediocre nominees in the debunked list have also legitimised the claims of the political opposition that the government has marginalised their figureheads. The appearance of President of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan, as a proposed recipient of the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON) medal has alarmed a certain Coalition of Northern Groups to cite the expulsion of his immediate predecessor, Abubakar Bukola Saraki, as a case of partisan injustice. It’s a fair point because the opposition has always painted the Lawan-led Senate as a rubber stamp, and the Buhari government is also unlikely to honour the head of a legislature who once hounded them.  

The option of rejecting an honour for which one is ethically unqualified or based on a principled stance is a practice scarce in Nigeria, even though some notable voices have demonstrated such possibilities. The foremost novelist, Chinua Achebe, rejected then President Olusegun Obasanjo’s attempt to make him a Commander of the Federal Republic, the nation’s third-highest honour, in 2004. About 11 years later, Achebe refused then President Goodluck Jonathan’s offer of a similar award, arguing that “the reasons for rejecting the offer when it was first made have not been addressed let alone solved. It is inappropriate to offer it again to me”. His grouse was “the chaos in my own state of Anambra where a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom.” 

The tricky part of these bastardised honours is the ambiguity of certain clauses in the National Honours Warrant of Nigeria, which was exploited by President Buhari to confer posthumous honour on the late M. K. O. Abiola and the late Gani Fawehinmi in 2018. It’s hard to tell whether the fierily-principled Fawehinmi, whose family received the honour on his behalf, would’ve opted for the Achebe response—and it doesn’t seem fair to firebrands who didn’t seek honours while alive, especially when their heirs are fawning sycophants desperate for government patronage.  

If the late Dr. Yusufu Bala Usman—who was also nominated to receive an Order of Federal Republic (OFR) medal in the debunked list—were alive, he wouldn’t think twice before rejecting the award. This was a man who rejected serial offers of promotion to the rank of a professor as a distinguished academic at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, arguing that the rank had been frighteningly politicised. His students rose to that rank while he remained a Reader until his death. 

Like the late Fawehinmi’s, I don’t think the late Bala Usman’s family, a member of whom is a part of the current political dispensation, would have the moral courage to reject this posthumous award because of the consequences of embarrassing their political benefactors, especially the president. But turning down the nomination would’ve been their patriarch’s most predictable reaction.