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Message
Jonathan And The Scramble For Political Appointments
By Reuben Abati the Guardian
Sunday, 15 May 2011 00:00
“JONATHAN, PDP Governors in cold war over ministerial list,”;
“Nomination tears party apart in Osun” (The Nation, May 14,
p.1); “Ministerial Posts and Federal Appointments: Fresh Crises
hit PDP state chapters…Reps kick against Ekiti ministerial
nominees” (Punch, May 14, p.1)…How sad. The biggest
enterprise in Nigeria after every election is not necessarily
the work of the election petition tribunals, nor an educative
stock-taking of the electoral process, but the mad, utterly
mindless struggle for political appointments. The sociology of
it beggars belief, for it is rooted in the Darwinian struggle
for survival, where the strong and the smartest outwit every
other competitor to get a place in the new dispensation. And it
has started. President Goodluck Jonathan, and all elected
Governors are under pressure to appoint this or that person to a
public position. In the National Assembly, even ahead of the
inauguration of a new Assembly, ambitious elements have started
scheming, and wheeling and dealing and trying to protect their
selfish interests by proposing to amend the Standing Orders. In
this search for political appointments, there has been over the
years, a set of strategies which Nigerians never fail to deploy.
These include the following:
(a) The name dropping strategy: This is
how it works. Make sure your name gets dropped in the
appropriate places. This is done in the hope that you may well
be noticed. But it is not enough to name-drop, it has to be
associated with something that is sellable. May be you were very
active as a votes mobilizer in the last election, and so His
Excellency the Governor or the President only needs to be
reminded that you are one of the reliable party men, who can be
trusted with higher responsibilities. Suggest it to him or those
who are close to him. It doesn’t matter at all that all you did
during the elections was to snatch a ballot box, or co-sponsored
a paid advertisement in the papers congratulating His Excellency
on his victory at the polls. For your name to gain the
recognition that could translate into the good fortune you seek,
you may also need to be regarded as a man who knows a lot within
the party, even if the only thing you have going for you is your
false pretence. In Nigeria, these are the kind of people who
easily get government jobs. It helps if during the elections,
you were generally seen sweating all over the place and assuring
the inner circles that you and the boys were in charge. INEC
Chairman Attahiru Jega and his team, the security agencies and
the monitors/observers and party agents were in charge of that
election, but it doesn’t matter: Nigerians would lie with their
mother’s names just so they can get a government appointment.
And of course, if you are a woman, you don’t even need to drop
any mane, play the beauty game, the oldest trick in the books!
(b) The Godfather strategy: This is a well
tested Nigerian strategy. Around this period, there are many
Godfathers who may have donated money to the campaign causes of
their Excellencies, and who without expressly saying so expect
returns on investment. It is the fashion that Godfathers
recommend people for appointments. The Godfather could be your
biological parent. If you are one of those lucky ones who since
1999, have been occupying one major public position or the
other, for no reason other than that their father is an
influential man of means in politics, you stand a very good
chance. Daddy will do it again! It is amazing the number of
complete non-starters who have served as Ministers,
Commissioners, Deputy Governors, Directors-General simply
because they have a popular family name. Where the relationship
between the Godfather and the appointee is not filial however,
then a client-master relationship can be established. You will
have to assure the Godfather that you will be a good boy, a very
good stooge in the corridors of power, his dependable proxy.
Too many people out there want a job in government so
desperately, they wouldn’t mind, so why should you waste the
opportunity? It is the Nigerian way. You could even be made
Minister of Petroleum Resources even if the only thing you know
about petrol is that it is sold at filling stations.
(c) Prepare a CV: We are in the CV
season, right now in Nigeria. Political appointment seekers are
busy hawking their CVs all over the country. One Governor in the
East, overwhelmed by the number of applications for political
jobs, once had to announce that those who wanted to be
commissioners would have to sit for a test and attend
interviews. If the Governor thought this would discourage the
applicants, he was mistaken. More applications and resumes
landed on his desk. The tests were organized and all kinds of
shameless people showed up to write it. Where on earth do people
take exams for the position of a Commissioner in government? In
Nigeria! With the kind of pressure that President Jonathan is
now facing for example, were he to announce the exam option for
would-be Ministers and Directors of Departments and Agencies, he
will receive more than enough applications. There will be a
terrible scramble that will be worse than the scramble for the
partitioning of Africa. If the application attracts a fee, the
applicants will be more than willing to pay, including paying
the officials in charge to create an artificial scarcity in
order to shut out other competitors!
(d) The Traditional Ruler strategy: This is
certainly a very busy season for our traditional rulers who at
moments such as this receive a lot of pleas from persons who
want a word in the right ear on their behalf. The assumption is
that a traditional ruler is entitled to a certain quota of
public appointments which the Governors and the President in
Abuja must acknowledge. And if the traditional ruler who is
willing to give you a note is as influential as he makes out
(traditional rulers like to think that they wield enormous
influence!), you may get the job you want. But if you do, the
traditional ruler expects that he will automatically be placed
on your pay roll for as long as you are in that position. He is
a traditional ruler yes, and everybody in his kingdom is his son
or daughter, but he is also a Consultant and he consults for
government, because he also needs to “eat”.
(e) The wives/relatives strategy: Every
man in government, Governor or President, has a wife, or wives,
siblings, relatives, parents where he is not yet an orphan, and
all of these people play very key roles in determining who gets
what position, at all levels. The elections have just been
concluded, family members usually have access to their brother
or sister in power, and they can be trusted to put in a word.
Only God knows how many of them have already received resumes
from persons who just want any job in government. The wives are
special targets. A First Lady, in any of the states or in Abuja,
although not a government official, is regarded as a major power
broker. She is the apple of the big man’s eyes, and so she
should be able to get what she wants. Once a woman becomes a
First Lady, she becomes the mother of the community and
virtually everyone wants to get close to her: women who want
appointments or contracts for their husbands or sons, or for
themselves; men who want access to her husband through her
recommendation and so on. Is anyone surprised therefore, that
Mrs Patience Jonathan is regarded as a very powerful woman in
Nigeria today? Or that Turai Yar’Adua was once so powerful she
held the whole country to ransom, when she denied Nigerians
access to their President? We used to hear of Ministers and
Special Advisers appointed by Turai and who belonged to her
kitchen cabinet. Mrs Jonathan obviously also wants a cabinet in
her kitchen and there will be many willing maidservants saying:
“Madam, I am here to serve you and your husband”.
(f) The media strategy: Every
year, some media houses play the funny game of compiling a list
of Ministers for the President, and even Commissioners for state
Governors. The persons so identified are described as
pacesetters, men and women of vision who will take Nigeria to
the future and transform it. The usual footnote is that these
are the names being considered for leadership positions. In the
last two weeks, such names have been circulated via SMS,
advertised as names that came up during President Goodluck
Jonathan’s post-election retreat at the Obudu Cattle Ranch. How
the names came up? Or how they were considered, nobody can ever
tell. But Nigerians believe such stories all the same and those
whose names are mentioned actually look forward to an
appointment. You better believe it: pastors and prophets and
imams also get involved in this appointments game: they offer
prayers and make predictions. One pastor wanted to be Vice
President in April and failed, some other Pastors turn
themselves into the President’s official prayer warriors and
star gazers.
(g) The Diaspora game: It has become
fashionable these days to wave the diaspora card too. Once you
live anywhere abroad, you are almost at liberty to pretend to be
better than everyone at home: Stupid, unpatriotic thieves who
don’t have regular electricity supply, no access to quality
healthcare, or potable water, so you put down everybody, and
with a President who has a Facebook platform, you can visit the
site everyday and sound off as much as you can; if you sound
disagreeable enough on the internet you may just be noticed.
Then you can put on airs. You have all the solutions to
Nigeria’s problems. “We should join the civilized world. Nigeria
needs to be transformed and we need quality people.” This is how
they talk, the Diaspora set, so try the same style too. Nobody
needs to know that you have many unpaid bills, and that you are
barely struggling to survive in the matchbox where you and your
family are holed up in some downtown quarter. Make big claims.
You could get a job in Abuja, may be not as Minister, but you
can take a Special Assistantship position and start rebuilding
your life from there.
Why the desperation? Why not? Serving commissioners and
Ministers are currently busy lobbying to be retained: if they
supported the Governor or the President during the 2011
elections, they too should be retained so the self-serving
argument goes. In fact, a major phrase in Abuja at the moment is
“continuity”, don’t bother to ask continuity of what, it has
worked after all for Senator David Mark who seems set to reclaim
his position as Senate President. If the Speaker of the House,
Dimeji Bankole had won his re-election bid, he too would
naturally have returned to his seat as Speaker. Would-be
former Governors who have completed two terms in the states are
also lobbying furiously to become Ministers in Abuja, and those
who lost out during the election would like to be rehabilitated
by the President with a Ministerial appointment. If that works
out, Governor Adebayo Alao-Akala could soon show up in Abuja as
Minister of Education and Governor Ikedi Ohakim as Minister of
National Planning.
The reason for the desperation is not far to seek. In Nigeria,
the only job that pays premium dividends is a political job.
Everyone wants a bite out of it. Even those who are not
interested encourage their friends to show interest in political
appointments: have you sent your CV? Have they called you? Why
don’t you ask someone to put in a word for you? If they call
you, you must not say No oh? It is considered a taboo for anyone
to reject the offer of a political appointment. It is seen as
the ultimate meal ticket. It is all about what people can get
for themselves not what difference that they can make. One of
the interesting developments in the past week for example, is
the plan by some persons who had left the PDP just before the
elections to return to the same party, in order to take part in
the sharing of political appointments, and should they receive
an offer, they will not only jump at it, they will rationalize
it and we are all expected to understand. This is the way it is.
But it is also the reason Nigeria has not been able to make
progress. Persons are offered leadership positions for the wrong
reasons. They get to high positions for which they are
ill-suited. The PDP Governors and party leaders who are engaged
in a “cold war” with President Jonathan over the Ministerial
list are not acting in the national interest: they want to
impose their own nominees on the President, usually the flotsam
and the jetsam from their states definitely not the best (state
Governors would rather send their errand boys to Abuja and not
potential stars who could become a threat to them). Most of the
people who are shopping around with their CVs just want to
“chop.” When President Yar’Adua assumed office in 2007, most of
his Ministers were appointed for him by the state Governors. He
didn’t know many of them. He had no idea who they were, and he
never really knew them till he died.
How will President Goodluck Jonathan walk the tightrope then? It
will be unrealistic to think that he can ignore the Governors.
He owes them: in his relationship with the Governors, there are
IOUs that he needs to pay. The Governors stood by him during the
PDP primaries; they also worked for him in their states during
the Presidential campaigns. There are also Godfathers that
Jonathan may not be able to ignore. But this is where his first
major leadership challenge lies.
Since his victory in the April 16 Presidential polls, nearly
every political commentator has stressed the point that Jonathan
must depart from tradition and appoint only the best and the
brightest into his cabinet. He is required to embark on business
unusual, look the fortune-hunters straight in the eye, and
disappoint them. This is what he must do. He should beware of
the strategists and their tricks. To save Nigeria is a job that
must be done; only the best is good enough, this time, Jonathan.
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