BY REUBEN ABATI
“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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