MINISTERS’ APPOINTMENT: LEAVE OUR PRESIDENT ALONE
This our Naija people sef, very restless and impatient, always in a hurry. They want everything to happen now, now. They have no time for tomorrow or the next day, but with immediate effect. Perhaps, it’s better to change the name our country to “Rushia” since we like to rush everything.
Who told our Naija people that our President is not fit and capable of handling Nigeria’s problems all alone? Who told them that he must have his Ministers in place before he could move the country forward? Have we not seen the good works he is already doing, the tremendous progress going on in the country, even without the Ministers in place? Who says that our President does not knows what he is doing?
Since May 29 when our President took the oath of office for his second tenure, they have been disturbing this man. They will not let him be. They will not let him have his peace. They have continued to disturb him about appointing his Ministers. They have not stopped calculating the number of days, weeks, and months that passed since our President was inaugurated, and he had not constituted his cabinet or submitted his Ministerial list to the National Assembly for screening.
They will cite example of countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the United States of America, South Africa, and even some small countries like Senegal and Sierra Leone whose Presidents, on inauguration, would make public names of their Ministers in a matter of days, and begin to lament that more than one month after his own inauguration, our own President was yet to unveil the list of his own Ministers.
They equally had expressed reservations that it took our President one full month before he could appoint his own personal staff.
As far as we are concerned, all these hues and cries are balderdash, nonsense. Just only one month after his inauguration, and our Naija people are crying foul and making some useless noise, that our President had not appointed his Ministers. Please, let them leave our President alone.
Why, in the first place, are they comparing our President with the Presidents of these other countries, and our country with theirs? Don’t they know that our President is a very meticulous person? He is very painstaking and careful in all his activities, and in everything he does.
Our President does not like to rush at anything or do anything in a hurry. He does not take hasty decisions, something he will do today and begin to regret it tomorrow. As such, he takes his time in everything he does. That’s why some people foolishly call him “Baba Go Slow”. But that does not tickle our President or bother him at all since he knows that slow and steady wins the race, and he has been winning those races all along.
Who cares, let it take our President one full year or even more, to constitute his cabinet, and at the end, the team will work for only two or three years and begins to pack its bags and baggage, because its tenure has ended.
The other time, they rushed our President, and he forced himself to choose his Ministers in only six months. That was why we had so many round pegs in square holes in that dispensation, people who hardly fitted into the portfolios they were assigned to, or who were out of tune with realities of the time. And yet, they turned round to blame our President, that the regime had not made any meaningful impact on the people, not minding that they were the people who forced our President to make those hasty and wrong appointments.
Take the power sector, for instance. Has the electricity situation in the country improved or deteriorated since the erstwhile Minister was appointed? Was it not while they were rushing our President that he had hurriedly appointed a square peg and put it into that round hole? He then loaded the man with three powerful portfolios – power, works and housing, and in the end, the man could not deliver even a single one.
If they had allowed our President to take his time, say, at least one year, he would have taken his time to find suitable Nigerians that could have successfully manned these important sectors, and everybody would have been smiling. Look at what happened at the end of his first four-year tenure, no electricity, no good road networks, and no houses, no nothing. It is the same across all the other sectors.
Now, we are at it again, rushing our President to make the same mistakes he made in his first tenure, and we will turn round to blame the man, that he had not performed. But we will forget that we were the people who pushed him or who rushed him into making wrong choices.
Therefore, let us not rush this man. Let us not force our President into making those mistakes he made in his first tenure. Let him take his time to pick whoever he wants, that will work with him in this his second and final lap, people who he thinks will deliver the goods, even if it will take him two years to do so.
