By Palladium
Last week, President Bola Tinubu stepped down the nomination of 24-year-old Imam Kashim Imam as board chairman of the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA).
The administration should have foreseen the controversy certain to trail the appointment, even though the first-class mechanical engineering graduate, and son of the president’s associate, was believed to have been nominated by Works minister Dave Umahi. In early August, Kano State nominee Maryam Shetty was also dramatically dropped from the ministerial list hours before senatorial screening, perhaps on account of her dogged and enthusiastic support on social media for the doomed Yemi Osinbajo presidential bid.
Former Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai was also controversially dropped from the ministerial list when the senate declined to screen him until security reports cleared him. The suspicion is that the administration is neither consulting enough nor doing adequate homework.
But just as the Tinubu administration suffered some notable hiccups in appointments, nearly all of them avoidable with a little more spadework, some of the administration’s policies and programmes, suffering from lack of consultations and research, have also suffered unpleasant reversals. Its negotiations with striking Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) were, to put it mildly, inexpert and hesitant, punctuated by embarrassing and sometimes quick reversals.
It has doubled down on its brusque removal of fuel subsidy, a policy it anchored on creative verbal engineering, but probably wished with the wisdom of hindsight it executed that fine policy much cleverer than it managed. The naira float, too, has been problematic, not because it is a bad policy, but because its execution was akin to a peremptory decree.
The administration is in fact still trying to rein in the consequences of naira depreciation. Last Friday, it granted university teachers and resident doctors waivers over the no-work, no-pay policy which had led to the withholding of their salaries. It was kind of the administration; but by paying ASUU half of their withheld wages, and wringing a signed concession from them, the administration exhibited grudging regard for the issues at play. It refused to admit that lecturers do so much more in the universities than just teach.
Apart from the lack of surefootedness in a few of the appointments made by the administration, including the mistiming of the EFCC and ICPC appointments, President Tinubu may be signaling anxiety in the minds of his fanatical supporters while triggering exultation in the camps of his enemies.
He has spent over four months in office, probably enough time to calm down and settle into a far more solid and less seismic method of doing business. Outside the administration, there are questions about whether he is overwhelmed by the newness of his surrounding and the unprecedentedness of his assumption of the presidency.
As far as human calculations go, he was indeed nearly not elected. Succumbing to malignant campaigns against the person, health, and behavior of Senator Tinubu when he was an aspirant and candidate, his predecessor, ex-president Muhammadu Buhari, did his best, including deploying state power and resources, to prevent the ascension of the former Lagos State governor.
The plots would have worked had the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), not snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by splintering into four irreconcilable parts.
But if President Tinubu is not surefooted in some of his policies and appointments on account of the sheer remarkability of his election and the suspicion that it is yet to dawn on him that he is indeed the president, might the reason then be because of the unresolved PDP and Labour Party (LP) suits against his election? It is unlikely.
President Tinubu is an intuitive and perceptive leader. If he is unable to accurately assess the substance of the suits against him, his lawyers, who are among the country’s finest, must have educated him that his defence is ironclad for the simple reason that neither the PDP candidate nor the LP candidate led evidence to show that they won the February 25 presidential poll. Their pleadings were simply gaseous air, with scant evidentiary value, insignificant enough to create doubt in the mind of any jurist, let alone merit victory.
Whatever ails the Tinubu administration can simply not be because he is mesmerised by his new status or because he entertains any fear about the Supreme Court deciding against him.
Nevertheless, whatever factors are causing the hiccups seem potent enough to chip away, slowly and insidiously, at his reputation as a can-do leader. He will need to deal with those factors and neutralise them both for the sake of his reputation and in order to have an easier run at a second term should he choose to take that option when the time comes. He has proved a courageous leader, and it has advanced the cause of national stability that he was elected as president not beholden to any private and powerful interest. What is more, merely looking at his general cabinet, it is evident he seems a great recruiter of talents.
The suspicion overall is that he has simply not got his kitchen cabinet right. No, the problem is not his health, regardless of whatever anyone thinks, and certainly not any demons pursuing him.
Until he puts together a far better and more competent and gifted team to constitute his immediate circle, he will continue to experience needless hiccups and find it cumbersome forging a winning formula out of the rich talents he has assembled.
His cabinet may be a bit bloated and a mockery of the prevailing national economic mood, but it is redeemed by the many brilliant and eager technocrats and politicians among the number.
When he decides on a kitchen cabinet, it will advise him on periodic meetings with men and women of substance, intellect and heft who would look the president in the face and caution him against some of his rambunctious and spontaneous policies over which he is proving adept at flip-flopping. He does not lack such elder statesmen whom he had known for decades.
But there is nothing to indicate that he meets with them monthly. There is also nothing in his policies and programmes to suggest that he has already put in place secret and alternative means of getting honest feedbacks from the public, so that he does not get used to hearing himself and those around him saying and reinforcing virtually the same orthodoxies of their fancy.
President Tinubu should change tack as he begins to recognise and grapple with the complexities and intensities of a culturally and politically variegated Nigeria. He knows he is surrounded by too many enemies who want him to fail.
Source: Culled From PALLADIUM’s Sunday Backpage Column In The Natiön Newspaper.
