Since May 29, 2015 when President Muhammadu Buhari came to power, I have maintained silence on his contentious policies except for a Facebook Post I made on my wall on July 2, 2015 to clarify some critical facts and figures that he and his ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) were clearly muddling; something that Senator Ben Murray also wrote about recently .
I held my peace because I felt the President needed to be given some time to settle in and not necessarily because of a strange 100days honeymoon period canvassed by the National Leader of the APC, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Well, I have decided to break the silence of the night because it is now over 4months that this President has been in power, and the much awaited Ministerial List from him was officially unveiled by the Senate few 24hours ago, but sadly enough, it fell short of expectation, considering all the hype that he has made about getting an untainted Cabinet. Aside from the fact that it is a partial List that does not cover the 36 States of the Federation as stipulated in the Constitution, even though he had said the rest will come later without a specific timeframe, when you take a good look at the slate of Ministerial Nominees, you see that they are not in any way different from what the nation has had in the past; you cannot truly vouch for them. And it begs the question: is this the best the President could come up with after 4 precious months in office with wild speculations? A déjá vu List?
First, the President had argued in late July, not at home before his fellow citizens but in the United States that he was taking his time to constitute his Cabinet because he wanted as he said the best and incorruptible Nigerians as Ministers; a point he again made in France just days ago making one to wonder why his countrymen always have to hear from him about crucial policy issues in foreign lands. Indeed, it has become the President’s pastime to make critical pronouncements about Nigeria only when he is on official visits to the West. He so argued, and tried to justify his inability to form a Cabinet that he even had to re-write American history by lying to the world that President Barack Obama also took his time to fully form a Cabinet when he was first elected. In an Op-ed in the Washington Post on July 20, 2015; prior to his official visit to the United States in late July; President Buhari had said, “When Cabinet Ministers are appointed in September, it will be some months after I took the oath of office. It is worth noting that Obama himself did not have his full Cabinet in place for several months after first taking office; the United States did not cease to function in the interim. In Nigeria’s case, it would neither be prudent nor serve the interests of sound government to have made these appointments immediately on my elevation to the presidency; instead, Nigeria must first put new rules of conduct and good governance in place”.
That statement was patently false, and the Americans knew it and must have had a good laugh, but they apparently kept silent because of their vital interests. President Obama never took several months to put his full Cabinet in place and the records are there for everyone to see. On November 5, 2008; a day after Obama won the United States Presidential Election, the Obama Transition Team launched change.gov , the official website of the Transition , which documented all of the announcements of the Obama nominees and other details of the Transition with ruthless efficiency.
In fact, apart from the failed nominations of Bill Richardson , Judd Greg and Tom Daschle due to fundamental disagreements with some issues with the new Administration in the case of Senator Greg, federal investigations into some of his political donors in the case of Richardson, and high speaking fees payments and Advisor’s fees from Healthcare Providers and Healthcare Lobbying Groups in the case of Senator Daschle; a substantial number of Obama nominees including Secretary Clinton, Napolitano and Gates (a holdover from the Bush Administration that needs no confirmation) were confirmed by the United States Senate on or before January 20, 2009; the day Obama first took the oath of Presidential Office, and the rest were confirmed within weeks of Obama’s assumption of office. Aside from the change.gov website, you can look up some of the sources at the footer of this article to confirm this.
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