Ever since the presidency confirmed that Bola Tinubu, Nigeria’s ineffectual president, would reshuffle his utterly incompetent cabinet, speculations have been rife about who would be in and who would be out.
The Guardian newspaper set the hares running with a front-page story titled, “11 ministers, senior officials may go as Tinubu reshuffles cabinet.” Then, Dr Doyin Okupe, a former presidential spokesman and director-general of Peter Obi’s presidential campaign, now a fawning Tinubu loyalist, said that Tinubu’s two-week trip to Europe was not, contrary to the presidency’s claim, a holiday but “an essential break to carefully consider changes in his cabinet without undue interference.” Nigeria is probably the only country where a president must cocoon himself in cosy foreign hotels to “wilfully separate himself from officials, friends, and associates” in order to appoint or reshuffle his cabinet.
“And if you have a president like Tinubu who exercises power arbitrarily based on his hunches and predilections, everyone just has to accept and live with the consequences.”
Of course, Nigeria is a global outlier, exceptional in many perverse ways. Here’s a country where a president can do anything he wishes, and where the citizens are indifferent to whatever their president does. In his book titled Reclaiming the Jewel of Africa, Dr Olusegun Aganga said that then-President Goodluck Jonathan once remarked that “the Nigerian president was vested with so much power that it was best to check oneself in the exercise of those powers.” In other words, in Nigeria, only the president can check himself, no one else can check him. And if you have a president like Tinubu who exercises power arbitrarily based on his hunches and predilections, everyone just has to accept and live with the consequences. For, let’s face it, there is no accountability for bad executive decisions or failures in Nigeria.
Think about it. A key test of leadership is judgement. A leader must exercise sound judgement and make good decisions. Poor judgement and bad decision would cost any leader in many organisations. But Tinubu persistently fails the tests of leadership and judgement. Truth be told, if Nigeria were a true democracy, with proper checks and balances and accountability mechanisms, Tinubu would be held to account for the way he has mismanaged Nigeria through poor judgements and bad decisions since he assumed power as president. Held to account? How? Well, first, peaceful protests are legitimate tools of democracy. Nigeria needs more of them. Second, the media should be fiercely intolerant of bad governance and call it out. And, of course, third, the National Assembly should never be the presidents poodle
But what’s the situation in Nigeria? Well, the public and the media are all bark and no bite. Nigeria is one of the few so-called democracies where leaders ride roughshod over media and public opinions. As for the National Assembly, it is utterly supine: It simply rubber-stamps everything Tinubu does and rewards his failure. For instance, it was recently reported that the National Assembly wanted to establish a university and name it after Tinubu. Earlier, the National Assembly named their library after Tinubu. And the Niger State governor, Umar Bago, renamed the federal airport in the state “Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Airport.” All of these within sixteen months of Tinubu being in power! What an extractive state that serves the interests of a small elite, where being a president is about self-service, not self-sacrifice!
Dr Aganga added in his book that “the Nigerian presidential constitution vests so much power in the president that only conscious and conscionable exercise of these powers can save the holder of the exalted office from themselves.” Surely, if Tinubu wants to save himself from himself by exercising presidential powers consciously and conscionably, he will reject any attempt to deify him. He will know that he has done absolutely nothing transformative and life-enhancing in his sixteen months in office to deserve an airport, a university or even a library being named after him. It is a mark of Tinubu’s self-entitlement and utter insensitivity that he is making the presidency about self-glorification and personal comfort. A recent report said that “the Presidency spends N16.06 billion to buy foreign currencies for international trips in one year.” That’s the extent of Tinubu’s profligacy and extravagance amid excruciating pains across Nigeria.
All of which brings us to the so-called cabinet reshuffle. Now, if a president has to reshuffle his cabinet within one year of constituting it, what does that tell us about his judgement in the first place? Everyone knows that Tinubu was not thinking about good governance when he formed his cabinet. Rather, he was thinking about his personal and political interests. As result, his ministers fell into three categories: those, like Nyesom Wike, that he appointed to return political favours and shore up support for his re-election bid in 2027; those, like former Governor Adegboyega Oyetola of Osun State, who lost elections and who, for personal reasons, Tinubu wanted to rehabilitate; and his longstanding acolytes in Lagos State, who are supposedly technocratic but are personally too close to him to be genuinely technocratic.
Last year, I wrote a column titled “Tinubu’s ministers: A bunch of deplorable politicians and servile cronies” (BusinessDay, August 14, 2023). I argued that if Tinubu really cared about good governance, he would have appointed ministers from the pool of Nigeria’s brightest and best; rather, he appointed people whose integrity is questionable, who lack demonstrable competence. Put simply, Tinubu put party, politics and self above country. It took Tinubu three months in office before picking his ministers. Yet, he came up with such a hollow cabinet. Those now hailing him for wanting to reshuffle his cabinet should, in fact, be questioning his judgement and leadership.
As Tinubu was swearing in his ministers on August 21, 2023, I was being interviewed on News Central TV along with Dr Elijah Onyeagba, Nigeria’s ambassador to Burundi. Dr Onyeagba said it was Tinubu who really mattered, not his ministers, because he was in charge. I was aghast. I told him that a president is as good as his team, and that a cabinet reflects the president. If a president is visionary and focused on problem-solving, he will assemble the best possible team. If he is fixated on politicking and the next election, he will assemble a mediocre team of yes-men and yes-women, who see their positions as political favours and owe loyalty to their benefactors. Tinubu’s cabinet is full of such people.
Take Heineken Lokpobiri, the minister of state for petroleum resources. Not long ago, he said he owed his appointment to Wike. Of course, nothing qualifies him for the position beyond cronyism. He demonstrated that unfitness recently when he said that Nigeria “is expecting $50billion worth of investment in the oil sector before the end of the year.” At a time when international oil companies are deserting Nigeria in droves, and when western governments are refusing to invest in fossil fuels projects in developing countries, Lokpobiri was saying that foreign investors would pour $50billion into the oil sector by December. The thoughtless comment so irked Dr Rueben Abati that he upbraided the minister on Arise TV, telling him to “keep quiet” if he “has nothing to say”. But, as I said, a cabinet reflects the president. Tinubu himself makes extravagant claims about his government attracting several billions of dollars of FDI within one year: yet there’s nothing to show for it!
So, let’s face it, Tinubu is the problem, not his inept ministers. Matthew Parris, a British writer, once said that every government needs “the presiding intellect with the intelligence to grasp the problem.” That requires good leadership and sound judgement. Tinubu has demonstrated neither as president. That’s why reshuffling his cabinet will change nothing. A fish rots from the head down!
Olu Fasan
Political Economy
