9 November 2009
editorial
PRESIDENT Umaru Yar'Adua has risen up to the complicating consequences of fracturing feuds that are part of his administration.
There are no indications of an easy solution to the acrimony that ministers have managed to cultivate in their relations with each other.
They, as the President admitted, have hurt the performance of government. He has warned, for the first time, that he would not tolerate further disputations among ministers over territories.
Are these feuds new? They are as old as the administration. Some preceded the aggregation of men and women of different convictions into a cabinet that is so large, that there are times its membership is not very clear.
There are enough rooms for confusion. Layers of concentric circles of conspiracies that are common in this government are advisers, special advisers, honorary advisers, senior special assistants, and some personal aides of the President, who sometime wield more powers than their fanciful titles tend to suggest.
Early in the life of the administration, the Presidency said there were no junior ministers. This followed protests from some ministers over the treatments they got from their cabinet colleagues, who had assumed the position of senior ministers in ministries with two or more ministers, relegating their colleagues to nothingness.
The position that all ministers were equal worked only in words. Some of the senior ministers ensured their colleagues were irrelevant, got no offices, limited access of their aides to information on the ministry, in addition to seeing that the most important assignments went to the main minister.
A memo from the Secretary to the Government in July 2007 tried to manage the matter. It allocated specific parastatals and functions in a ministry to the different ministers. The understanding too was that the financial provisions for a parastatal or a unit of the ministry would be under the management of the particular minister without recourse to the other minister.
Some ministers had told the President that the constitutional rights of their states to representation in the cabinet was abridged by rating them junior ministers, as if any state was junior to the other.
It did not work. Not all ministries are equal, nor do all the parts of a ministry hold the same potentials for being fertile grounds for the promotion of the causes a minister supports.
The Ministry of Information and Communication brought the feuds to public attention. The ministry was allocated as follows: Information to Professor Dora Akunyili and Communication to Alhaji Ikra Aliyu Bilibis. Prof. Akunyili took over the ministry. Decisions Alhaji Bilibis made were reversed. One of them was the auction of the 3-G licences which Alhaji Bilibis presided over as he superintended the Nigerian Communications Commission.
Other Ministries also feuded. Hopefully, the President's threat to punish serial infractions of his orders would whip ministers and other aides into line. The threat would have been unnecessary if ministers understand ministership was a call to serve others.
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