Buhari’s parochial appointments

CARRIED to power on a groundswell of goodwill and disgust at the thoroughly corrupt Goodluck Jonathan administration, Muhammadu Buhari appears bent on political self-immolation. While he received massive support from across the country to become President, he is by his appointments, presenting himself as a parochial, sectional leader. For the sake of the country’s corporate survival, he should rise above primordial instincts and become a father to all Nigerians.

In his inaugural speech just over a year ago, Buhari promised Nigerians that “having just a few minutes ago sworn on the Holy Book, I intend to keep my oath and serve as President to all Nigerians. I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody.”  But too often, the pledge has been honoured in the breach. Buhari’s sectionalism is not only unprecedented, it could not have come at a worse time. The reality today is that Nigerians are deeply divided.

Seventeen years of dashed hopes of progress under a democratic dispensation have reopened the deep fissures in the polity and polarised the populace into mutually suspicious camps. Sectarianism and ethnicity have been rearing their poisonous heads.

The presidential election of 2015 was particularly divisive, with some major actors openly deploying base religious and regional sentiments. Add to this the terrible state of the economy that Buhari inherited, headlined by a collapse in global crude oil prices, our main export earner, and the rapacious emptying of the national treasury by previous governments, and you have a seething, discontented people.

It is a sad reality of the Nigerian experience that when crisis − political or economic − hits, segments of the populace retreat into ethnic and sectarian cocoons. It is in this combustible mix that Buhari stubbornly presses ahead with appointments that weigh heavily in favour of his northern regional base.

He struck again last month when he removed Ibe Kachikwu as head of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to put a Northerner; named another, Hadiza Bala-Usman, as managing director of the Nigerian Ports Authority along with three executive directors, two of whom are also Northerners. Before then, he had ring-fenced himself with appointees from his northern constituency at the Presidency, thereby deepening the long-held fears of many Southerners that he has not overcome his well-known insularity.