Media reports on the just concluded Mid-Term Ministerial Performance Review Retreat featured several angles including one which mooted a state of panic over imminent sack, gripping several ministers in the administration of President Muhamadu Buhari. Meanwhile, the President had since congratulated the Secretary to the Federal Government Mr Boss Mustapha, the organiser for a job well done. The exercise was ostensibly organised to assess how far service delivery by the ministers had been actualized, especially with respect to the nine areas designated as priority by the administration.
Under normal circumstances a state of uneasiness among the ministers was expected as the President had last September fired two of them namely Minister of Agriculture Sabo Nanono, and Minister of State for Power Saleh Mamman. That was the first of such developments since Buhari’s first advent in 2015. However, while the circumstances of the recent performance checks may have featured the ministers as gripped with panic, the bigger burden of uneasiness could actually be hanging like an albatross, on the neck of the President himself. Infact, if his recent proclivities are anything to go by, he can be consider as having unsuccessfully masked a tinge of uneasiness in his disposition to official duties, as his inner fears are becoming manifest.
Given the not so impressive track record of his administration in the past six years, and with less than two years left of his second and last tenure, it is not difficult to appreciate that he may be haunted by contemplations of a harvest of inchoate legacies which may not stand the test of time, when he leaves office come May 29, 2023. As for the ministers, most of them had sipped the metaphorical elixir of impunity and indulgence to the extent of being irredeemable for any reforms in their performances. Hence, except for a total restructuring of his cabinet through a substantial weeding out and replacement of a wider cross section of them, there is little he can achieve in changing the narrative of his administration. Nigerians have to live with the situation – warts and all, hopefully until May 2023.
To place things in context, the Kalabari Ijaw ethnic nationality have a proverb which says that ‘a tree with a twisted trunk, matches the topography of the soil on which it stands’. This should clarify the state of the Buhari ministers who in the course of serving in office for several years without strict supervision by him, may have become too ossified to change their ways. This situation also puts paid to any high expectation from the midterm performance exercise, as even with his congratulatory message to the SGF, Buhari himself is not unaware of their serial failures, with his eventual lot to inherit their sins and vacate office not as a leader who came, saw and conquered the challenges he met, but as one who was not only overwhelmed by the rigours of leadership, but even added to same by further acts of indiscretion.
For the purpose of clarification, the appraisal of the ministers was against the backdrop of the government’s nine priority areas namely the improvement and transformation of the economy into sustainability, enhancement of social inclusion and reduction of poverty, enlargement of the agricultural sector to guarantee food security and provide for export, attain energy sufficiency in power and petroleum products as well as expand transportation and infrastructure in general. Other priority areas are expansion of business growth, entrepreneurship and industrialisation, expansion of access to quality education, healthcare and productivity of Nigerians, consolidate the fight against corruption, as well as improve the quality of governance and upgrade the security situation across the country.
Against the backdrop of the lofty aspirations of the government with respect to the aforementioned priority areas, only the super-bigoted apologists of the administration will score it a pass mark on any of these targets. Even with a cherry picking disposition, any area picked at random betrays failure of the administration in bold relief. For instance, in the area of insecurity, it is no exaggeration that every inch of the Nigerian territory has today become a killing field that has tasted blood, or will likely do so in the foreseeable future. This is in spite of humongous largesse deployed by the administration in that area. Talking of healthcare is to ridicule the administration given that even the President has no faith in domestic medicare, as he frequents foreign hospitals for even the slightest health challenge. As for quality of governance and social inclusion, the fact that Nigeria has never been so divided (even during the unfortunate 30 month Civil War of 1967-70) as it is now, testifies to the government’s lip service to this target. As things stand, due to the fallouts from the tendentious policies and actions of the Buhari administration, centrifugal tendencies in the country like IPOB and other fellow travellers, now constitute significant threats to subsequent polls like the November 6, 2021 governorship elections in Anambra State, and the general polls in 2023.
Seen in context at least two factors seem to be driving the administration in its dalliance with sub-optimal performance in office. Firstly is the denial by its leading lights, of the daily expanding threshold of awareness and political education of the Nigerian citizenry, especially as facilitated by their equally bludgeoning access to social media usage. This self-imposed blindness of the administration denies it the benefit of reconciling with the imperatives dictated by the trending expectations of the mainstream of the society. Hence the wide margin of incontinences in the track record of the administration.
The second factor seems to tally with a widely discredited, seeming mindset of President Muhamadu Buhari, which may be leading him to see himself as a knight in shining armour, with a divine mandate to shore up the interests of his own clique of the Northern oligarchy. This, many people believe is responsible for the undeniably, lopsided appointments made by him to offices in the federal government, which features a preponderance of nominees from that narrow clique of his arch-loyalists. The pain here is that, he is not even carrying the entire North along.
In the final analysis, while whatever comes out from this retreat may appear satisfactory to the President, it may not be so for most Nigerians. In that case, even here, he may have missed out on the peoples’ expectations.
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