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.
Of course, Nigeria is a global outlier, exceptional in many perverse ways. Here's a country where a president can do anything, 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 likes to exercise 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. Tinubu fails that test. Truth be told, in 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. Held to account? How? Well, first, peaceful protests are legitimate tools of democracy. Second, the media should be fiercely intolerant of bad governance. And, of course, third, the National Assembly should never be the president's poodle.
But what happens in Nigeria? Well, the public and the media are all bark and no bite. As for the National Assembly, it simply rubberstamps 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. And some states have named airports after him. What a country! Why is being a president in Nigeria not about self-sacrifice but about self-service?
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 consciously and conscionably exercises presidential powers, he will reject any attempt to deify him. He will know that he has done absolutely nothing transformative and life-enhancing in his one-and-a-half years in office to deserve an airport or a university being named after him. It is a mark of Tinubu's self-entitlement and utter insensitivity that he is making the presidency about his self-glorification and personal comfort. According to one recent report, "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? 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, 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 political rewardees and cronies" (Vanguard, August 10, 2023). I argued that Tinubu should have appointed ministers from the pool of Nigeria's brightest and best, but 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 all about Tinubu, not his ministers, because he was in charge. I was aghast. I told him a president is as a good as his team, and 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.
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For instance, not long ago, Heineken Lokpobiri, the minister of state for petroleum resources, said he owed his appointment to Wike. Of course, nothing qualifies him for the position beyond cronyism. That unfitness was evident when, recently, Lokpobiri said that Nigeria "is expecting $50 billion worth of investment in the oil sector before the end of the year." At a time when international oil companies, IOCs, are deserting Nigeria in droves, and when Western governments are no longer investing in fossil fuels projects in developing countries, Lokpobiri was saying that foreign investors would pour $50 billion 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", adding that "he doesn't know what he is talking about, and constantly puts his foot in his mouth."
But I repeat: a cabinet reflects the president. Matthew Parris, a British writer, once said that every government needs "the presiding intellect with the intelligence to grasp the problem." That requires leadership and judgement. Tinubu has demonstrated neither as president. That's why reshuffling his cabinet will change nothing. A fish rots from the head down!
