Perception and the president’s ministers

The long-awaited list has finally been made public. Names kept tightly under wraps for months have at last been unveiled. If you still don’t realize this was the “list” of ministers Nigerians all over the world waited so long for President Muhammadu Buhari to unveil, then you must have been living on another planet.

Critics who have since unleashed on the president over his choice of ministers actually seem to infer it was His Excellency that had been living on planet Mars, among many other terrestial possibilities. The critics have not stopped asking: why did the president choose to keep Nigerians under suspense for months when he was not eventually going to be unveiling saints as Ministers? Didn’t he realize Nigerians expected that since allegations of sleaze had been made against the likes of Babatunde Fashola and Rotimi Amaechi, for instance, those men couldn’t be appointed Ministers by this President who had promised a clean break from the past?

Not so fast.

It is first of all laughable for anyone to believe Fashola’s illustrious tenure as governor of Lagos State should be buried under an “avalanche” of unproven allegations. About what, even? The allegedly inflated cost of maintaining a website? The operative word here, of course, is not “cost” but “allegedly”. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, Fashola has neither been indicted for any crime nor charged before a court of appropriate jurisdiction. The same goes for Amaechi, on whom his successor as Governor of Rivers State and erstwhile protégé/frenemy, Nyesom Wike, has dumped a mountain of salacious allegations bordering on alleged theft of state funds.

This brings us to the larger issue. It’s often said perception is more important than reality or what is on the ground. So if, for instance, a Fashola or Amaechi is deemed corrupt, or an Audu Ogbeh is perceived as an old politician who has been “recycled” too much for his own good and that of the polity, then the perception will be that a president who campaigned on the mantra on changing the old ways of doing things somehow condones corruption. Or that he is not really serious about change when he brings into government someone who held a ministerial post in the defunct Second Republic, more than sixteen years into Nigeria’s Fourth Republic!

Still, perception is not reality. And thankfully so.

A highly-suspect and conveniently-placed allegation of sleaze against Fashola does not eliminate the reality that he was an astute administrator whose tenure as governor is Lagos is as storied as they come. That he changed the infrastructural landscape of one of the world’s most populous cities and made life much more convenient for its citizens while he called the shots. More important the allegations should not prevent such a person from serving his fatherland at a much higher level nor prevent him from getting the chance to transform the face of Nigeria as minister, just as he did in Lagos. The same goes for Amaechi’s tenure in Rivers. And who can deny that when the history of the change that swept Buhari into power is written or told years and decades from now, Amaechi’s role in bringing about that expected transformative transition will occupy a pride of place?

As for Audu Ogbeh, epithets such as “old” or “much-recycled” do not necessarily translate into incompetence or atrophy. Afterall President Buhari himself is somewhat old, at 73. Yet Nigerians still voted him into office by an overwhelming margin over Goodluck Jonathan, who was a relatively younger 57 years old at the time of the polls. Even the president will not deny he is a form of recycled material in his present coming, having previously served as head of the Nigerian state.

There is still a macro issue, though, which I’m inclined to believe rests on two factors: one, that many Nigerians conflate Buhari 1 with Buhari 2. The other factor I place squarely on the President’s shoulders, which is that in efforts to satiate Nigerians’ quest for change from the erstwhile ways of doing things, he allowed factors external to himself and possibly diametrically opposed to his interests hijack and set his and his government’s agenda.

The first factor is easily explained, one hopes. Buhari’s first coming was as a stern-looking military head of state whose administration’s policies matched the stiff khaki uniform he adorned at that time. When he subsequently preached the mantra of change as a civilian seeking the Presidency, many presumed the resurrection of the same Buhari from more than 30 years ago, who clearly had disdain for the Rule of Law, the Constitution (parts of which he even had to suspend when he got into Office at that time) and due process. But Buhari 1 is long gone, which is a good thing for the Nigerian polity. It may be true that Buhari would have prevented an Amaechi or a Fashola from becoming minister on the strength of unproven allegations, just to sustain the perception (that word again!) that he is a real change agent. Thankfully this new, 2015 version of Buhari did not and should not have brooked such a tendency which undermines the legal and ethical principle that persons accused of a crime are considered innocent until proven guilty.

The second factor is more complicated, but I’ll put it down to the President briefly falling to the lure of perception—and the “expectations” of those who might just be setting him up for a fall, by ensuring he does not utilize some of the best hands available to him. At the inception of the new administration the mantra of change was on everyone’s lips and expectations, perhaps even the opposition’s. Just as many critics insinuated after the official unveiling of the ministerial list, I believe the President probably realized right from inception of office there was a high chance the likes of Kayode Fayemi, Fashola, Amaechi and Lai Mohammed would make his ministerial list. For Mohammed and Amaechi, especially, a fundamental sense of fairness informed by the men’s role in the President’s ride to power informed that expectation on the part of Nigerians.

Then came the crisis of perception with the allegations of sleaze leveled against Fashola and Amaechi, amongst others.

But the same persons who now say the President should not have waited that many months to unveil the names would have accused Buhari of somehow paying lip service to his agenda for change had he announced some names just as charges of sleaze first appeared against them. This possibility then makes the alleged delay in unveiling the list entirely acceptable on the President’s part. He heard the allegations of misappropriation and sleaze against certain of his likely nominees. He and members of his team took time to investigate such allegations and found them non-substantive enough to prevent the allegedly corrupt persons from making it onto the ministerial List. What more do the critics want in this scenario?

Turns out the President took too much time doing the right thing. But at least he ultimately did what was appropriate by unveiling men and women primed to serve Nigeria well and do her proud as Ministers of the federal republic.

Soboyede is a public affairs commentator.