In defence of nepotism
By Lasisi Olagunju
Wahala no dey finish for Nigeria. Because President Bola Tinubu appointed an acting Chief of Army Staff last week, my northern friend sent me a WhatsApp message from Zaria: “It comes as a surprise as Oduduwa takes over the lead agencies of the critical safety sector: Army (military), Police (security), DSS (Intelligence), EFCC (anti-corruption).”
My friend was talking fairness. I heard him and remembered the quaint saying about equity and clean hands. So, I replied him: “Can you name those who served in those four positions under Buhari and where they came from?”
John Milton, legendary blind poet of seventeenth century England, said something about truth and falsehood grappling. Truth, the stronger, will always put the weaker to the worse. My friend thought he had the facts on his side, and so, he answered me: “Buhari picked those security chiefs across the north east, north west and north central…”
That was a half-truth, and I’ve heard it said many times that a half-truth will always mean a half-lie. And a half-lie is a lie nicely dressed. I asked my friend: “When you people met in Kaduna earlier on Monday and took a position on VAT, rejecting Tinubu’s tax reform bills, did you meet as three zones? No. You met as one North, one region. Those appointments made by Buhari were for that one North.” As I typed that response, I remembered that ‘One North, One Destiny, One People, Irrespective of Religion, Rank or Tribe’ was the motto of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), the North’s ruling party at independence. NPC may be long dead, but the North has dutifully kept its flame glowing. We still feel the spirit in every inter-regional discourse.
My friend argued more forcefully. He spoke as a northerner. I responded as a Yoruba man, not as a southerner, because there is nothing so called. I told him he was obviously not speaking for the other two zones in the South. I asked him if the North wanted the Chief of Army Staff position to go to the Igbo of the South-East. His response was that there was a time under Buhari when he campaigned for that arrangement. I asked him to speak for time present, not time past. “Would you want a South-East/South-South person to be Chief of Army Staff or Inspector-General of Police?” My friend did not reply me. He did not answer that question. I asked how he would feel if the positions go to the North today. He replied me with silence.
Finally, my friend quipped: “Personally, I pray for Tinubu to succeed but he doesn’t need to be nepotistic like Buhari, the disaster.”
Has Tinubu been unduly favoring the Yoruba in his appointments? Personal aides, yes. Security appointments, no. A list of 22 security appointees was circulated online at the weekend. Fifteen of them are from the North, five from the South-West, one from the South-East, one from the South-South. If anyone would complain of inadequate representation here, it should be the South-East/South-South corridor.
Sixty-four years after independence, Nigeria has remained a very delicate union of bickering partners. Despite several state creation exercises, the division along the original three regional lines has remained very strong. Today, the three arms of Nigeria’s armed forces have their chiefs chosen from the Army (West); Navy (East); Airforce (North). This would be fair enough except we are saying that one service chief is bigger than the others.
Army, SSS, Police, EFCC. For his complaint, why would my friend pick just four out of the 22 identified positions? Read my friend again. He described the four as “critical safety sector.” Buhari set the precedent by filling those posts with northerners; Tinubu has also filled them with westerners. If the East produces a president tomorrow, he will most possibly fill them with his regional brothers. But why?
Adebayo Faleti, late Yoruba playwright and culture scholar, wrote in his 1968 short story ‘Ogun Awitele’ (Foretold War) that war does not kill the coward; it also does not kill the fearless. The one who gets killed by war is the one who is careless (ogun kì í pa ojo; ogun kì í pa akin; aláìfòrànpòràn ni ogun npa). My playwright says war kills the careless. I will use the experience of Buhari’s predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, to discuss this. When Jonathan became president, he, like most of his predecessors, was very careful not to rupture the tenuous tendons of whatever we had as a country. But Jonathan overdid it. He apparently wanted to be another national hero and proceeded to make many strategic appointments which undid him. Jonathan’s 2015 election time Inspector-General of Police was a gentleman from the north. When it mattered most, the falcon refused to hear the falconer. The super cop did not just see his kinsman, Muhammadu Buhari, to victory, he publicly followed him to collect his Certificate of Return from INEC in April 2015. The gentleman officer abandoned his defeated Commander-in-Chief. Blood is thicker than water. The policeman came out three years later to celebrate what he did. He declared that the police under him forced Jonathan to concede defeat to Buhari. Hearing him in an August 2018 interview gives reasons for appreciating the true meaning of blood and water and what made one thicker than the other. The former IGP said: “We forced those who lost elections to accept the results. The Nigeria Police forced those who lost elections to accept the outcome. It was the action of the police that made them to have a change of mind and accept the results. The heroes of that election should have been the police…I attended the presentation of certificate to the president-elect…”
Nigeria was deflowered in 2015. The hymen of innocence, once lost is lost forever. If the police were strategic in determining election winners, what wise president would then hand its rein to ‘outsiders’? Jonathan’s successor, Buhari, learnt from the Ijaw man’s fatal error. He inherited Solomon Arase from Edo State as IGP, kept him for one year and as the stakes were getting high, he quickly took the position ‘home’ and gave it to Ibrahim Kutigi from Niger State. From then on till he left in 2023, the baton passed from one northern state to another. Was Buhari being street-wise to have kept the Inspector-General’s position in his regional pocket for seven out of his eight years in power? If Buhari was not wrong that time, should we expect Tinubu to do today what Jonathan did which burnt his nimble fingers day before yesterday?
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Jonathan’s ‘harakiri’ in politics started long before that appointment. He did several things which no one had ever done before. It was therefore not a surprise that his eyes saw what no one ever saw before. The Ijaw man made Fulani man, Attahiru Jega, INEC chairman in an election in which his main opponent was a Fulani. The man was praised by his nemesis and he enjoyed it. As the West African Pilot of 2 April, 1964 warned in an editorial: “The road to ruin is often smooth. Those who travel it pay the fare.” Three years after he was dusted and ousted, Jonathan wrote in his ‘My Transition Hours’ (page 75): “For some inexplicable reasons, the INEC had been able to achieve near 100% distribution of Permanent Voter Cards in the North, including the North-East which was under siege with the Boko Haram insurgency, but it (INEC) failed to record similar level of distribution in the South which was relatively more peaceful.” Because Buhari was no Jonathan, when it was time for him to replace Jega in November 2015, the Fulani man from Katsina went for a Fulani man from Bauchi. After eight years of uncommon tutorial from Muhammadu Buhari on how to (mis)manage a people’s diversity, it is not possible for any subsequent president (from the south) to do bobo nice again – especially with appointments strategic to their personal and political survival. A new INEC chairman is due for appointment in November next year (2025). Watch out for Tinubu. He will not be a Jonathan.
Key security appointments have become an armour for the president of Nigeria. The lesson taught by history is that a leader, while cuddling his neighbour, must never allow kin-blood to be diluted with water of whatever colour.
The politics of appointment into the head of the army started soon after independence. How did the government of Tafawa Balewa handle it? Sidi H. Ali, author of ‘Power of Powers: A biography of Alhaji Muhammadu Ribadu’, Nigeria’s first minister of defence, wrote about the intense ethnic maneuverings and bitterness that attended the appointment of the country’s very first indigenous head of the army when the last expatriate, Major General Christopher Welby-Evarard, left in February 1965. “The four possible candidates were all brigadiers at the time. They were Ironsi, Ademulegun, Ogundipe and Maimalari. Ironsi was the most senior of all…After all the bickering, Ribadu came out to announce the appointment of Ironsi as the commanding officer of the Nigerian Army. This, of course, was received with mixed feelings…” (page 18). If Balewa were to come back from the dead today and is asked to pick his army chief, would he still go for Ironsi? Among the four gentlemen officers of 1964, who do you think Balewa’s choice would be?
Balewa is not coming back but his democratic successor was Shehu Shagari who came in 1979 and had Lt.-General Alani Akinrinade as his Chief of Army Staff. Shagari soon replaced the Yoruba man with his kinsman, Gibson Jalo. Jonathan inherited a chief of army staff, Abdulrahman Dambazau, from his late boss, Umaru Yar’Adua. He couldn’t sleep until he picked someone from his area, Azubuike Ihejirika, to man that goal post.
Every elected Nigerian leader since the end of the first republic knows why crab does not sleep. What it stays awake doing is 24/7 recce for the safety of its head. Its eyes should be its binoculars – and they are. Even Olusegun Obasanjo as civilian president did not deny himself that wisdom, although he was very nuanced about it. He had three Inspectors-General of Police and all three were from his western region. His DG SSS from 1999 to 2007 was Colonel Kayode Are, his Abeokuta kinsman. For the army, Obasanjo, a southern Christian, in eight years, had four gentlemen as his Chief of Army Staff. He started in 1999 with Victor Malu, a Christian from the North; then he moved south and picked Alexander Ogomudia, a southern minority. After two years, two months, Obasanjo took the position back to the North. But he did not give it to those who might use it to injure him. He picked Martin Luther Agwai, a southern Kaduna minority Christian. Three years down that road, he went south again and picked Andrew Owoye Azazi, another southern minority. It was clear that he was deliberate about what he did. He was wide awake, mixing his nationalist broth with condiments of small nepotism here, a little of altruism there. The Obasanjo experience ended almost twenty years ago. This is the age of reason, apology to Thomas Paine. The gloves are off.
But, I think the people who are reading north and south into today’s appointments had better shine their eyes and see where the real danger is. The fish gets rotten from the head – and it is always progressive. Under Buhari, the president’s wife ran the alternate presidency while a regional cabal revved up the old engine of the man we elected. Today, we are not sure whether it is the man we elected or the wife or the son (with their business friends) that is at the top. After this set, we may have grafted on the trunk of our democracy a hereditary oligo-monarchy.
And we cannot say a president should not have a family – and friends. Wither the way then? Igbó rèé, òna rèé (the bush is here, the road is here). Where should we face?
The founding fathers of the United States feared what we see now. In her review of Adam Bellow’s ‘In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History’, Joanne B. Ciulla says “nepotism was very much on the minds of America’s founding fathers. The last thing they wanted in their new country was hereditary rule.” She writes further (and this is interesting) that “one of the many qualities that made George Washington attractive as the first president was the fact that he did not have any children (who would share his powers or even seek to succeed him). When John Adams ran against Thomas Jefferson, his detractors feared that, because Adams had a son, he might try to start a dynasty.” Indeed, in that election dubbed ‘Revolution of 1800’, Jefferson, who did not have a son, defeated incumbent President John Adams.
But that cautious beginning notwithstanding, America has evolved to mint its own brand of ‘safe’ nepotism. Ciulla writes: “Let’s cut to the 2000 presidential election in the U.S. It pitted a son of a president against the son of a senator. When George W. Bush won, he appointed Michael Powell, son of Colin Powell, to be chairman of the FEC; Elaine Cho, wife of Senator Mitch McConnell, to be Secretary of Labor; and Eugene Scalia, son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, to be the chief labor attorney. In addition to these appointments, Bush made the Vice President’s daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, deputy assistant secretary of state, and her husband chief counsel for the Office of Management and Budget. At the request of Senator Strom Thrumond (and to the dismay of some people), Bush gave Thurmond’s twenty-eight-year-old son the job of U.S. Attorney for South Carolina.” The American system, from the above, draws a line between “bad nepotism and good nepotism.” Ciulla says the US now defines nepotism “not as hiring a relative but as hiring an incompetent relative…”
That is in the US. Here in Nigeria, competence is discounted. The concern is more on the history and the geography of the hired and the motive of the appointing authority.
In all these nepotism matters, the peace of the country and the happiness of the people are the casualties. Every hour spent by the leader ignoring competence but checking the bloodline or the ethnicity of the man for the next post is the hour just before darkness. And, if the nepotist succeeds in burying his long heel in this sand, it is bye bye to peace and amity. As Olusegun Obasanjo said in 2019 at the height of Buhari’s glass ceiling-bursting nepotism: “If you cannot trust me, why should I trust you?…The person who is our leader now is saying he cannot allow another ethnic group to work with him because he cannot trust them. If he cannot trust my tribe or your tribe, of what benefit is he? And he is saying my tribe and yours should come and vote for him. He can ask for our votes, but he cannot trust us to work in good positions. Life is give and take.”
