A source told New Telegraph that the ministerial list was being delayed because the party chiefs had rejected most of those chosen by Buhari to be part of the cabinet, irrespective of the fact that the eighth session of the National Assembly will be inaugurated tomorrow. The party chieftains, it was learnt, rejected the draft ministerial list of the president because most of the persons on the list were neither politician nor did they play any critical role during the party’s struggle to wrest power from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). According to the source, the president believes that the only way he can bring credibility to his administration and be able to fight corruption without feeling guilty is by using competent technocrats as ministers.
“You remember that during the campaigns, President Buhari promised Nigerians that he would make use of technocrats to give his administration the needed boost. He still prefers them to these politicians but the politicians are fighting back seriously. They feel that having worked for the victory of the party, they should be the ones occupying the cabinet positions as a reward for their efforts and investments in the project. “They are not comfortable with this idea of bringing technocrats.
They see them as strangers who want to reap where they did not sow. This is the dilemma of Mr. President because much as he would not want to offend his party, he does not also want to offend his conscience and the electorate who gave him the mandate,” the source said. Some of the technocrats who have been recommended to Buhari for appointment include a former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor, Prof. Charles Soludo; Director of the Lagos Business School, Professor Pat Utomi and a former Minister of Education, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili . But an APC chieftain has faulted the headhunt for technocrats as ministers wondering what makes a person to be a technocrat. According to him, most people who are in politics are also technocrats before they joined politics.
The party chieftain said even in the United States, the president would rarely go outside his party to form government. “If Buhari should drop those that worked for and with him to choose people outside it would send a wrong signal in APC and the country’s politics,” he said. Apart from Buhari’s reluctance to appoint politicians as cabinet ministers, New Telegraph gathered that many of the party chieftains angling to be made ministers had corruption-related cases pending against them at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission( EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission( ICPC). During the campaigns, Buhari had stressed that corrupt politicians would not be part of his government. The source said it was increasingly becoming doubtful if prominent party leaders such as a former Governor of Rivers State, Rotimi Amaechi; his counterpart from Bayelsa State, Chief Timipre Sylva and former Governor of Anambra State, Senator Chris Ngige, who are said to be positioning themselves to be in the cabinet would make it. Amaechi was the Director General of the APC Presidential Campaign Organisation; Sylva was Chairman of the APC Inauguration Committee while Ngige is one of the leaders of the party in the South East.
“Some of the prominent names you hear might not make the ministerial list because there are security reports on them before the president. The security reports have to do with corruption and the president is mindful of what the international community will say about his government if he appoints some of these people into his cabinet,” the source said. In his keynote address at the APC Policy Dialogue on the Implementation of the Agenda for change, former British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair, had urge Buhari to be true to his word and be true to his mandate. Blair who gave example with his administration in Britain, said: “At the beginning for us, there was nothing easy at all. We discovered some important things pretty quickly.
The first thing is that the skills of leadership that take you to government are not the same skills you need to be successful in government. You have to switch from what you were campaigning for when you are in office. You have to switch from a persuader where the tools of your trade are your words to being a CEO where the tools are the deeds and how you extract the best results from those matters. That is the different between being a persuader and being a CEO. One is about words, the other is about deeds.”
-New Telegraph
