By the time you are reading this, the Federal Executive Council, with its full retinue of ministerial nominees, should be rounding up its retreat called at the instance of President Muhammadu Buhari. Quite a number of people at the social and even the official levels have wondered why such a retreat, at this inauspicious time when everybody is weary of waiting for the constitution of the cabinet, describing it as a ploy by the president to further buy time in order to reengineer his intention to have ministers without portfolios, a group that Daily Trust columnist Mahmud Jega calls “siddon look ministers.”
In explaining the imperatives of the retreat, the Chief Press secretary to the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, sitting in for the convener of the retreat gave an RSVP phone number but all attempts to reach the person behind the line simply didn’t get a response. When finally someone picked up the line it simply said the retreat was in progress and the outcome would be communicated to the general public in due course.
Short of calling it a wishy-washy way of handling tax-payers who deserve an explanation, I know for a fact that such a retreat is necessary because of the peculiar situation in which the administration finds itself. It is the first time a different political party is occupying the seat of power after sixteen years of PDP rule. This means that the public service would have to adopt a different ideological leaning and alter its way of doing things, even though the difference between the All Progressives Congress and the People Democratic Party, especially the composition of its key protagonists is as different as six and half-a-dozen.
Indeed the absence of ideological variables in this case has been further worsened by the uniformity of operatives in the two governments, very unlike the case in countries like Jamaica where every change of government is accompanied by the change of policy denizens, thus making it unnecessary to debrief the incoming crowd.
I remember that throughout the first year of the Obasanjo government there were several talk shops and workshops which were designed to help sensitize the civil service on how best to manage its relationships with officials of the in-coming government. Such workshops became imperative because of the necessity that arose from the politicians desire to restore public confidence in civil administrations. In one such workshops, Dr. Hakeem Baba Ahmed, then Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Commerce admonished that the mandate of an elected administration is sacrosanct and must be respected by all institutions and individuals, adding that pervasive military interventions had created a negative and pejorative impression of politicians because it served the military then according to Dr. Baba Ahmed to denigrate politicians in order to find acceptability and legitimize their rule.
But this is a whole new era. The era of change. Apart from contemplating the application of “Siddon Look” ministers, the president has mentioned, at several fora, a dire need to rid the government of sleaze and also do away with the old practices of graft that have become synonymous with the departed administration, practices that have no place in today’s Nigeria, and which certainly should not find accommodation in the thinking and conduct of Buhari’s ministers.
For the records, the People’s Democratic Party led administration had a myriad of syndromes that took the nation’s eye off the ball, leading to several incurable diseases that have today become cancerous to the nation. Who will forget in a hurry the impunity of the Petroleum Resources Minister Diezani Allison Maduekwe or the rapacious indulgence of Abba Moro in the Interior Ministry, which caused the untimely death of hundreds of job seekers in an exercise that neither provided the jobs nor left the youths to keep their coins? Who would forget the fibs from Mr. Labaran Maku’s fertile imagination or the desperation of Dr. Precious Gbeneol who imposed herself on the MDGs project through the window? All these constitute the points of departure from which new ministers are expected to jumpstart service delivery in this period where the average Nigerian sees himself as a stakeholder who must be served not abused.
How do we expect the ministers to take off? Symbolically we expect shorter convoys on our roads as enunciated by crisp messages of Senator Ben Murray Bruce while making sense of commonsense. We expect leadership by example. We would like to see ministers bringing their wards to public schools and keeping tab on the PTAs by attending them and sharing their opinions and experiences. It would be nice to go to the same government hospitals with ministers and ensure that prescriptions from the doctors are not bugged by referrals to the pharmaceuticals owned by the doctors. But that is not all. President Muhammadu Buhari himself had been spotted several times in Kaduna queuing up to purchase fuel in his car when he was out of power. If current ministers are not doing the same, it would be nice to have them respect traffic lights at least in Abuja where beating lights have become the notorious pastimes of top government functionaries and principal officers in the legislature.
Nigerians would like to see a return of the days when ministers had initiatives of their own and left legacies in their trail. Ministers must be accountable, not just to the president but to the people. There has to be a starting block. And the time is now.