Finally, Nigeria’s ministerial list is out. The four-month-long search for the country’s “impeccable characters” with outstanding records of achievements in business, politics and society came to a quiet end at the end of September.
Senate President Bukola Saraki read out the names of President Muhammadu Buhari’s 21 nominees, the first batch of nominations, for the Senate’s consideration, on October 6.
Constitutionally, the president could end up making more than 2,000 appointments over the next four years of his administration, all things being equal. Every decision, every appointment a Nigerian president makes is subjected to constitutional, political, religious and ethnic scrutiny.
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After a year-long season of political campaigns and elections that left the economy largely unattended to by the Goodluck Jonathan administration, Buhari’s decision not to appoint cabinet ministers in the early days of his administration was a hugely unpopular move.
Nigerians therefore realized very early on that this was going to be a new kind of president.
“Nigeria must first put new rules of conduct and good governance in place,” Buhari told Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper in July.
“Integrity and experience will be central to President Buhari’s actions and decisions,” Babatunde Kwame Ogala, a lawyer and chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party told FORBES AFRICA. “Beyond the need for a few political compromises here and there, you can see that the president is not someone that can be tele-guided by anyone or any interest group. He’s got a totally independent mindset.”
By delaying and downplaying appointments, the Nigerian leader was not only consolidating his hold on power, he was clearly hoping to replace the profligate culture of the past with a new political ethos. Previous presidents had used these appointments to settle political IOUs, compensating cronies, party chieftains and political sponsors. Consequently, the onerous task of nation building wasn’t always left in the hands of the most capable citizens.
This time around, the Abuja rumor mill was abuzz right after Buhari’s inauguration in May with tales of ministerial nominees failing the president’s integrity test. A glimpse of the first batch of ministerial nominees for Team Buhari reveals what political scientists always said about politics – a game of constantly shifting interests and horse trading.
On the Nigerian leader’s ministerial list were five former state governors, namely, Rotimi Amaechi, Babatunde Fashola, Chris Ngige, Kayode Fayemi and Ogbonnaya Onu; a former national chairman of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP); former state commissioners; seasoned technocrats and the current head of the national oil company. The president didn’t assign portfolios to his list.
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Also on Buhari’s list is Chief Audu Ogbeh, 68, chairman of the PDP between 2001 and 2005. Appointed Minister of Communications in 1982, and later Minister of Steel Development, his term of office was truncated by Buhari’s military coup in 1983.
Another nominee, Emmanuel Kachikwu, was in August appointed group managing director of state oil company, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). He is a former executive vice-chairman of ExxonMobil Africa. Within 24 hours of his appointment, Kachikwu received the president’s permission to sack all the divisional heads of the NNPC. His place in Buhari’s economic management team is assured.
Oil exports account for 70% of government revenue. With oil prices dropping below $50 and likely to drop even further when Iran resumes supplies, continuous adjustments in budget benchmarks look certain. The Central Bank has announced a temporary ban on local transactions in dollars. Devalued first in November 2014, and again in February 2015, the Nigerian currency, the naira, still remains under immense pressure as the World Bank continues to counsel for more devaluation. An import dependent economy, a weaker naira will certainly make life more expensive for Nigerians. Analysts say Nigeria is likely to record its poorest fiscal performance in decades this year.
Other folks on Buhari’s list are: Lai Mohammed, a lawyer, businessman and stalwart of the APC; Udoma Udo Udoma, a lawyer, two-term senator between 1999 and 2007 and chairman of several entities, including UAC of Nigeria, Union Bank of Nigeria, Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC); Amina J. Mohammed, the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Post-2015 Development Planning; Kemi Adeosun, a former Commissioner for Finance in Ogun State, western Nigeria; Abubakar Malami; Abdurahman Bello Dambazzau; Aisha Jumai Al Hassan;  Adebayo Shittu;  Solomon Dalong; Dr. Osagie  Ehaneri; Suleiman Adamu; Ahmed Musa Bello; Ibrahim Usman Jubrin and Senator Hadi Serika.
Was the wait for this list worth it? Will this group of ministers, when and if eventually confirmed by the Nigerian Senate, bring a new kind of thinking to the Buhari administration?
Expectedly, the opposition party, the PDP has lampooned the list, saying the president’s proposed cabinet were “a bunch of failed politicians and loyalists who lacked integrity to move the country forward”.
Only time will tell.
<h3>The Faces Of Business</h3>
Babatunde Fashola: The former Govenor of Lagos State did a remarkable job in transforming Lagos over the past eight years. During his tenure, Fashola, a lawyer, boosted infrastructure and made Lagos safer. Based on his track record, Fashola could head the Ministry of Works or the Federal Capital Territory.
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Rotimi Amaechi: The former Govenor of Rivers State was instrumental in getting Port Harcourt back on track during the Niger Delta crisis by securing the city, attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) and developing infrastructure. While in Rivers State, he made education a priority. The Ministry of Education could be a good fit.
Kayode Fayemi: The former Governor of Ekiti State is considered an expert in policy formulation and will be seen as a great asset regarding policy direction and implementation. Fayemi, who has a doctorate in war studies, has also been seen next to Buhari in recent diplomatic visits. He may be chosen for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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Amina Mohammed: She led the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) office in Nigeria. The UN later appointed her in a development capacity role. The Ministry of Health may suit her.
Kemi Adeosun: The former Ogun State Commissioner of Finance made a significant contribution to the development of the region over the past four years. With her background as a banker, she could get a financial position in the next cabinet.
Emmanuel Kachikwu: He was just appointed the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. There is speculation that he will be named as a junior minister for petroleum resources, since Buhari made it clear he will manage the oil and gas sector himself.
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A President’s  Search For Political Saints

In Nigeria, citizens, businesses and investors are struggling to come to terms with the absence of a cabinet to run Africa’s largest economy. When President Muhammadu Buhari took office, from Goodluck Jonathan on May 29, few would have imagined that there wouldn’t be a cabinet in place, or awaiting parliamentary approval, by the end of June.
Buhari himself hasn’t said much, leaving the explaining to his aides. At the beginning of July, Spokesman Femi Adesina said that “at the fullness of time, the ministers will be appointed.”
There has been speculation that there won’t be a cabinet in place until September. If that is true, it will mean that the new ministers will spend the last quarter of the year coming up to speed with their new assignments, and real work will not start until 2016.
The only presidential staff appointments made by the second week of July were three spokespersons (two for the president; one for the vice president), a State Chief of Protocol, and his principal security aides – one of which was replaced weeks later, for undisclosed reasons.
On July 13, six weeks after the inauguration, the President replaced all the military chiefs and the National Security Adviser (NSA). The key positions of presidential Chief of Staff and a Secretary to the Federal Government, who serves as Secretary to the Cabinet, as well as a liaison between the presidency and the sprawling government bureaucracy, however, remain unfilled.
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<h3>Team Austerity</h3>
Amid the uncertainty about the president’s team, there are, however, things one can bet on. One is that it will be a smaller cabinet than his predecessor’s, which had 42 ministers. But, the degree to which it will be smaller is constrained by a constitutional provision that says there must be at least one minister from each of Nigeria’s 36 states.
The Transition Committee that Buhari set up in May, to liaise with the outgoing government and prepare a smooth handover for the new government, recommended a reduction in the number of ministries from 28 to 19. Going by that proposal, only nine of the existing ministries will not be merged or scrapped: Defence, Federal Capital Territory, Education, Trade and Investment, Finance, National Planning, Labour, Justice, and Foreign Affairs.
Ambitious as the plan might seem, it’s not unfamiliar territory for Buhari. As Head of State 30 years ago, he presided over a wide-ranging regime of cuts: laying off thousands of civil servants and freezing wages, abolishing hundreds of local government areas, and rolling out an austerity budget that slashed government spending by 15%.
Considering that the economy he is inheriting is in straits just as dire as then, chances of another austerity-inflected outing are high. Indeed there’s a cost-saving element to a delay in the appointment of a cabinet and advisers, who will have to be paid generously in housing and travel allowances, and armored convoys.
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<h3>Speculation, Inc.</h3>
In the weeks following Buhari’s unprecedented electoral victory, the rumour mills were agog with news of expected appointments. Documents regularly circulated on social media, purporting to list the persons who had been nominated for appointments. All of them turned out to be false. Early into the new administration, it was reported that Chief Ogbonnaya Onu had been named Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Nigeria’s designation for Cabinet Secretary. Weeks later, the speculations shifted to the still-vacant position of Chief of Staff. News filtered out that retired Colonel Hammed Ali, Buhari’s long-time personal Chief of Staff, had been appointed. Again, it turned out to be false.
The two men have been close to the president since he joined partisan politics in the early 2000s and are still very likely to bag important roles in his government. Other long-time associates tipped for important positions include Tam David-West, who served under Buhari as the petroleum minister when he was military head of state in 1984-85, and Abdulrahman Dambazau, a former army chief and head of security for the presidential campaign. Dambazau, widely expected to be named National Security Adviser, may now be in the running for Defence Minister.
Former state governors, Kayode Fayemi (Ekiti), Babatunde Fashola (Lagos) and Rotimi Amaechi (Rivers) are also expected to be named to cabinet or presidential staff positions. The trio played prominent roles in the Buhari presidential campaign – Amaechi as campaign director-general, Fayemi policy director, while Fashola oversaw fundraising.
Party leaders, like former Governor of Lagos State, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, are also expected to nominate candidates for presidential consideration, but there is no doubt where the final decisions lie.
<h3>Policy Direction</h3>
Apart from the 800-page report of the Transition Committee, the new government can also count on another 73-page one; the outcome of a two-day summit that the ruling party’s policy directorate, under Fayemi, convened in May; bringing together technocrats, politicians and public officials.
With the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and management consulting firm, Bain &amp; Company Nigeria, the summit produced detailed recommendations on several sectors of the government: oil and gas, education, healthcare, security, agriculture and foreign affairs, among others. The reports outlined specific plans for the incoming ministers to implement in the short term, medium term  and long term. As things stand, it’ll be more than 100 days from May 29 before a cabinet is in place, and the incoming ministers will have some recalibrating to do.
For business executives and investors, the reassessing will be an unending obligation. As soon as the cabinet is named, the next round of tea-leaf reading – this time for policy direction – begins.

AA_24042015_54756

2016? NO!

The African Development Bank (AfDB) may be about to get its first president from its biggest shareholder – Nigeria.
Africa’s largest country, which holds 9.3% of the AfDB, almost double the total of the two next biggest shareholders, has twice failed to capture the presidency of the bank since its inception in 1964. That may be about to change.
Akinwumi Adesina, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development in the outgoing administration of Goodluck Jonathan, is one of three frontrunners to succeed Donald Kaberuka. Cape Verde’s Finance Minister Cristina Duarte, the first woman to contest the presidency and the first from Portuguese-speaking Africa, and Zimbabwe’s Thomas Sakala, with the backing of the Southern African Development Community, are seen as the other strong candidates. The election takes place on May 28 during the bank’s annual meetings in Abidjan, the commercial capital of Côte d’Ivoire.
Kaberuka’s successor takes over Africa’s only triple-A rated institution that has implemented more than 3,000 programs and projects, worth more than $50 billion. Under Kaberuka, a former Rwandan finance minister, the bank focused on infrastructure, proffered technical advice that some attribute to Africa’s resilience after the 2008 global financial crisis, and has started to attract private capital to help build Africa’s roads, railways and ports.
“Kaberuka has done an excellent job, becoming the leading voice for African development,’’ says Earl Gast, Senior International Adviser at Covington &amp; Burling.  “The ideal next AfDB president will be a global visionary, an inspirational leader, and an outstanding manager of a large, multinational bureaucracy…”
In addition to Adesina, Duarte and Sakala, there are five other candidates: Ethiopian Finance Minister, Sufian Ahmed, who has overseen the economic transformation of Africa’s second most populous nation; former Tunisian Finance Minister, Jaloul Ayed; Chad’s Finance Minister, Kordje Bedoumra; Sierra Leone’s Foreign Minister, Samura Kamara; and Mali’s Vice President of the Islamic Development Bank, Birama Boubacar.
With a PhD in agricultural economics, Adesina, who has led Nigeria’s drive to feed its 170 million people, says he will focus on consolidating Kaberuka’s legacy while building a more cohesive institution to drive Africa’s development agenda through regional integration and innovation.
“I will position the bank into a more nimble and effective institution that can effectively anticipate and address emerging and futures challenges for development of Africa,” says Adesina in his presentation to the bank’s board of governors. “I will transform and revive Africa’s dead economic spaces in rural areas through investments in Africa’s rich agricultural resource and agro-industrial developments that turn those resources into value-added commodities.’’
With regional politics, shareholding, qualifications and language coming into play, analysts say the election is one of the most transparent at a global financial institution and the winner will need to build broad alliances to win both the African vote and the non-regional members’ support.
To win, a candidate must capture 50.01% from Africa’s 53 governments and 50.01% from the so-called non-regional members comprising of donor nations, who hold 40% of the bank’s capital. Africans control 60% and the bank president must always be an African.
Aside from their new initiatives, the next leader of the AfDB will take over the implementation of the bank’s 10-year strategy through to 2022 which focuses on the development of agriculture, fragile states, food security and gender.
They will also need to further other initiatives started by Kaberuka, such as tapping private capital into a new source of funds for developing infrastructure and helping smaller countries utilize their natural resources more effectively and ridding the continent of conflict, says Scott Morris, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Global Development.
Whoever it is, the next AfDB President will be judged on the steps they took to grow Africa’s economy and lift people out of poverty.

Who Should Africa Bank On?

Good things happen. Bad things happen. Ugly stuff also happens. That’s life. Life inside Nigeria today has become a sour mix of the bad and ugly overshadowing the good.
The mind-boggling scale of the latest ugly incident was a daring assault on the conscience and sensibilities of Africa’s largest nation by population. It was a bold question mark on the quality of governance in Nigeria. In the dead of night, on April 14, 276 teenage girls were abducted from their boarding school, the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State in north-eastern Nigeria.
As of going to press, well over a month after the abductions, most of the girls were yet to regain their freedom. About 40 have reportedly escaped.
The anti-establishment Islamist Boko Haram sect claimed responsibility for the dastardly act. In a video released to the media, the leader of the sect, Abubakar Shekau, vowed to sell the girls in the market and marry them off if his cohorts are not released from prison.
For days after the girls’ disappearance, Nigeria’s civil society, military and political elites were engulfed in a blame game. Propaganda was the order of the day, as it took nearly three weeks after the abductions before President Goodluck Jonathan issued a statement. The Nigerian leader’s credibility has suffered massive global and domestic erosion, says Opeyemi Agbaje, a public affairs commentator.
“His administration was left looking callous, insensitive and detached from reality.”
The outrage and protests from all corners of the world have been overwhelming for the Nigerian authorities.
“Facts are that regardless of afterthoughts that we are now being served by federal government, the institutional response to the fate of the girls was indifference,” says Oby Ezekwesili, a former vice president of the World Bank’s Africa division and former education minister in Nigeria.
Ezekwesili has been the most vocal member of the political cognoscenti leading the protests from the frontlines.
“It was only after our social media campaign migrated to street marches &#8211; Chibok women on April 29 and #BringBackOurGirls on the 30th – that we saw motion. Our pressure on the federal government to act… seems to irritate government,” Ezekwesili says.
Nigeria was the top item on global news bulletins for most of April and May – sharing the top spot with the coverage of the South Korean ferry mishap and the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms were abuzz with the #BringBackOurGirls and #ChibokGirls campaigns. The hash tags recorded over one million retweets within a couple of days in May.
On the ground, Bring Back Our Girls solidarity rallies were held in cities across the world, calling on the Nigerian authorities to fish out the girls from the Sambisa forests where they were purportedly being held captive by the militants.
A game reserve once renowned for its wildlife, the 60,000 square kilometer Sambisa forest, straddles parts of north-eastern Nigeria, bordering Chad and Niger. Sambisa village itself is flanked on the east by Gwozo town &#8211; another notorious hide out for Boko Haram insurgents &#8211; and the Mandara Mountains which form a natural barrier between Nigeria and Cameroon.
The online and offline protests galvanized international interest in Nigeria, transforming what was a local war against terror into a global crusade. Amnesty International and UNICEF backed the campaigns. Presidents, politicians, statesmen (and women) and celebrities including United States (US) first lady Michelle Obama and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while musicians Wyclef Jean and Chris Brown also added their voice to the campaign. Actors Sean Penn, Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake and Bradley Cooper also threw their weight behind the campaign with the hashtag: #RealMenDontBuyGirls.
The tragedy of Chibok has been a public relations nightmare for Africa’s recently crowned largest economy. It was a bad time to be dealing with a militant gang with possible links to Al Qaeda-friendly groups in Mali, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Abuja had been eagerly preparing to host the world’s most influential business and political leaders at the 24th World Economic Forum on Africa in May. The forum was meant to be Nigeria’s coming out party. It was however overshadowed by the global angst.
“This is not the time for us to fight or play blame games, because this is really what the terrorists want, they want us to be divided… but if we stand together and fight this together, then terror will lose… world leaders have shown through their massive attendance at this forum that they we will not allow terrorists to dictate our agenda,” finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told reporters on the sidelines of the forum.
Government instructed schools as well as public and private offices in Abuja to close shop during the forum. Foreigners attending therefore saw a different country. They saw a near empty, sober Abuja devoid of its usual political tension, cosmopolitan communities and light traffic.
“Hosting the forum was part of a campaign to open the Nigerian economy to investors… By shutting down Abuja, the president has succeeded in telling the global community that Nigeria is not a good place to do business; that government can cripple their investments at will and without any care in this world,” Kenneth Ugbechie, publisher of the Nigeria Political Economist magazine wrote.
The United Nations (UN), African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have condemned the Chibok incident, urging Nigerian authorities to rescue the girls alive. Analysts say that the government must also begin to revamp the local and national ecosystem responsible for breeding insurgency – the dire social and economic conditions prevalent in most parts of northern Nigeria. Leading nations including the US, Britain, France and China have also offered to help the Nigerian government with security intelligence and technological support.
Beyond the urge to keep impressing upon international investors to look beyond Nigeria’s economic and political pains, it is clear that insurgent activities have had a negative impact on the country’s image and reputation. Amnesty International say that Boko Haram is responsible for more than 1,500 deaths in Nigeria this year alone.
The UN estimates that 300,000 people have been displaced by the militant group’s activities since May, 2009 when the extremist beast first bared its fangs.
<h4>Politics of Doubt and Disbelief</h4>
Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo believes that ambivalence and the political shenanigans of the Nigerian state is responsible for the inability of the authorities to react with alacrity to the kidnapping of the Chibok girls. In a television appearance, he said President Goodluck Jonathan had not truly believed that the girls had been abducted, hence his hesitation to order a rescue operation. 
“The president did not believe that those girls were abducted for almost 18 days,” Obasanjo said. 
“If the president got the information within 12 hours of the act and he reacted immediately, I believe those girls would have been rescued within 24 hours, maximum 48 hours. The president had doubts; ‘Is this true or is it a ploy by some people who don’t want me to be president again?’ I don’t believe he has performed to the expectations of many Nigerians, not just me.”

Tag: Goodluck Jonathan

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

A President’s Search For Political Saints

2016? NO!

Who Should Africa Bank On?

The Shame Of The Bad And Ugly