Punch reports:
There was an outrage in
the ruling All Progressives Congress on Thursday over the announcement of new
appointments by President Muhammadu Buhari.
Leaders of the APC, who
spoke to The PUNCH,
complained that the appointments tilted in favour of the North and said the
party must move fast to cope with the backlash of expected rumblings in the
polity.
“The President does not
consult before making most of these appointments and I can tell you that
Nigerians are going to term the party and the President as a northern party and
the President of Northern Nigeria,” a leader of the party said to one of our
correspondents late on Tuesday.
Buhari, according to a
statement by his Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr.
Femi Adesina, on Thursday approved the appointment of Babachir David Lawal from
Adamawa State as the Secretary to the Government of the Federation.
He also named Mr. Abba
Kyari from Borno state as his Chief of Staff.
Other appointments
approved by the President, according to the statement, are those of Col. Hameed
Ibrahim Ali (retd.) as the new Comptroller-General, Nigerian Customs Service;
Mr. Kure Martin Abeshi, Comptroller-General, Nigerian Immigration Service; Senator
Ita Enang, Senior Special Assistant on National Assembly Matters (Senate); and
Suleiman Kawu as SSA on National Assembly Matters (House of Representatives).
Both Ali and Kawu are
from Kano State and Abeshi is from Nasarawa. Enang from Akwa Ibom State is the
only one from the south geo-political zone.
Adesina said all the
appointments would take immediate effect.
Three top national
officers of the APC, who spoke with one of our correspondents on condition of
anonymity shortly after the announcements were made, wondered why the President
was appointing only northerners to positions to the detriment of the
southerners.
They said that the
President was already giving the party a bad name among Nigerians. They said
they had hoped that he would learn from the criticisms that trailed his first
appointments where more northerners were appointed into sensitive positions
than southerners.
Before the latest
appointments, the President had also named only one southerner among the
initial nine appointments he made.
The northerners in the
first appointments are the Director-General of the State Services, Lawal Daura;
Acting Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Mrs. Amina
Zakari; the Director, Department of Petroleum Resources, Mr. Mordecai Danteni Baba
Ladan; and the Accountant-General of the Federation, Alhaji Ahmed Idris.
Also in the first
appointments are the President’s Chief Security Officer, Abdulrahman Mani;
State Chief of Protocol, Mallam Abdullahi Kazaure; Aide- De-Camp, Lt. Col.
Muhammed Abubakar; and the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity,
Mallam Garba Shehu.
Only the Special
Adviser on Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina, hailed from Osun Staten in
the South-West.
Another APC leader said
the party must devise a way of managing the backlash that would follow the
appointments.
He said, “Though the
President did not get much votes from the South-East but we must not neglect
the zone in key appointments.
“Even the South-West
that supported and was the backbone of the party, what are we giving the zone
in appreciation? We need to be careful before the party is destroyed.”
It was gathered that
some leaders of the party were already thinking of having an enlarged meeting
where the appointments would be reviewed.
But another senior member
of the APC said such a meeting, if it would hold at all, would have to wait
until the party holds its Kogi State governorship primary on Saturday.
A member of the state
executive of APC in a South-West state, said the appointments were lopsided
against the South.
He said, “When
President Olusegun Obasanjo took over, you saw balance in appointments as he
reflected federal character. President Goodluck Jonathan too reflected a
semblance of balance. Buhari is pursuing a northern agenda. This is the same agenda
pursued by the late Sir Ahmadu Bello, when everything was pro-North. Buhari
made six appointments at a go and five of them are northerners.”
The Speaker of one of
the Houses of Assembly in the South-West, who spoke on condition of anonymity,
also described the new appointments as shocking.
The Speaker, who is a
member of the APC, said, “This is shocking. It doesn’t speak well at all. The
South-West has been completely neglected and the South-East too. The South-West
was neglected during the President Goodluck Jonathan years. The South-West must
rise up against this.”
Similarly, an APC
chairman in another South-West state, who also spoke on condition of anonymity,
said the list of the new appointees had left him perplexed.
The chairman said,
“This is not good at all. Why should he choose everybody from the North? I am
sure he did not confide in anybody before drawing up the list and making the
announcement. We will continue to watch. It is condemnable.”
In the same vein, an
APC member of the House of Representatives, said the leaders of the party in
the South-West were shocked by Buhari’s latest appointments.
“He didn’t tell
anybody. We are all shocked. The real shocker would be when he is going to
appoint ministers. The only thing that would save us is that he is mandated
constitutionally to choose from all states, otherwise, he would have chosen all
the ministers too from the North,” the female member of parliament said.
The new SGF graduated
from the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in 1979 with a Bachelor of Engineering
degree and worked with the Delta Steel Company, Aladja, Nigerian External
Telecommunications Limited and Data Sciences Limited before establishing his
own ICT and Telecommunications consulting firm in 1990.
Kyari, the new Chief of
Staff to the President, holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees from the University
of Cambridge and the University of Warwick in Law and Sociology.
The new
Comptroller-General of Customs, holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Criminology.
He was military administrator of Kaduna State from 1996 to 1998.
Government of the North by the North and for the North
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