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Last Thursday, October 12 2023, the Bola Tinubu-led government announced Mr. Olanipekun Olukayode as the new chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). Mr. Olukayode, former secretary of the Commission, replaced Abdulrasheed Bawa, erstwhile chairman of the Commission, who has not been seen since June 14,2023, when he was suspended by the government and subsequently detained, reportedly by the Directorate of State Security. The government had predicated its suspension of Bawa on the need for him to step aside, so as to allow unfettered investigation of serious allegations against him. Till this moment, Bawa is till explaining. In isolation.
The office of Chairman of EFCC has a tenure, fixed by the Law. Bawa’s term was yet to expire, when the Tinubu government abridged it and did away with him, replacing him with Olukayode. While announcing the change of baton at EFCC, a critical information was sneaked inside the news release, to the effect that Bawa had resigned his appointment. Resigned. When? Where? At what point? Before who? The government did not bother with providing details about that major development. Even news media organs have not raised these critical questions, either. They perfunctorily published whatever the government released to them and moved on. That, to a large extent, is how things run presently in Nigeria.
Bawa’s “resignation”, while in confinement, followed on the heels of a similar “resignation” by the governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele. He too, had a tenured appointment, which was subsisting, before he also “resigned” from the Gulags.
Since resignation from public office does not stand on the same social pedestal with say, formalization of marriage, which by practice, often requires a witness, the new culture of prime public officials resigning from solitary confinement, may well be the latest fad in public service. Surely, no third party is needed to witness a resignation. Any public official, therefore, no matter how highly placed, or whatever the terms of his office may prescribe, even if he is in imposed solitary confinement, stands resigned therefore, once the government says he did so. It is as simple as that. This must be one of those instances, where any person who is not satisfied with the official line, is advised to go to court. Such is the new face and texture of democracy in Nigeria under ‘the ‘renewed hope’ mantra of Tinubu’s administration.
At about the time that Bawa was “resigning” his EFCC chairmanship from his solitary abode, Tinubu also rolled over another tenured appointment. He replaced Umar Danbatta, the executive vice chairman and chief executive of the Nigerian Communications Communication (NCC), who still had a year and half or so, to complete his tenure. It is pertinent to note, that when the law attached fixed tenure to certain public positions, the idea is to shield the affected offices and their occupants from the vagaries of partisan politics and political interferences. That now, has become history. Instructively, the laws relating to tenured appointment into various critical positions in the public domain, have not been amended up to this point. But who cares? It is all quiet on all fronts.
In replacing Bawa with Olukayode, Tinubu remained constant with the trajectory of his appointments. Key appointment into positions in the commanding height of security and financial sectors, remain substantially the preserve of his ethnic group. Having been widely savaged much earlier, even among his Yoruba stock, for his self-centred “emilokan” (it is my turn) doctrine, Tinubu, on getting to the presidency, set out, as it were, to make amends and burnish his standing at base. Consequently, he has moved steadily adjust his guiding philosophy of “it is my turn”(emilokan) to a broader “It is our turn” (ewalokan).Indeed, Tinubu’s appointments are substantially steeped in the Yoruba phrase, “asiko awoni boys” (simply put, it is the time for the boys).
Quite a number of individuals among the Yoruba are uncomfortable with this tendency that run counter to the hitherto broad-minded disposition of governments in Nigeria to federal appointments. Many of these apprehensive persons believe that the prevailing parochial bent of Tinubu in making prime appointments, may yet be a pyrrhic victory. There is no indication, however, that the man gives a hoot.
For all those who make cynical remarks about Tinubu’s Yoruba-centric appointments into prime federal offices, the truth, which must be conceded, is that he, Tinubu, does not have the patent for such distasteful clannish tendency. Credit for elevating cliquishness and provincialism to the level of policy in the governance of Nigeria, goes to the somnambulate Muhammadu Buhari, whose eight years presidency sought, by all means, to corrode the values that had helped, to a reasonable extent, to manage an otherwise restless heterogenous federation.
Tinubu is, as it seems, keeping faith with his curious pledge during the campaign, to continue where Buhari stopped. Whether that loyalty pays will be seen with time.
In terms of mismanaging the spirit of the Nigerian federalism, there is nothing that Bola Tinubu is doing presently, specifically in terms of badly skewed allocation of federal appointments, which anyone can say, in honesty, has not seen in recent time. Buhari took the Nigerian federalism to an unprecedented low, with little or no reprimand from anywhere, for such proclivity to raw cronyism.
This now, is the challenge of those who are grumbling under the staircase about Tinubu’s parochialism. Where were they when his predecessor was ravaging federal principles?
Before Bola Tinubu, there was Muhammadu Buhari. The man from Daura, who consistently waved his Niger Republic roots to the face of Nigerians, will go down in history as the man who, ignobly, struck with all his energy, blows to weaken the values and practices that had held the distinct people of Nigeria together under a federal constitution.
The danger in bad habit is that it only expands. Buhari treated the Nigerian Constitution with disdain. Now, Tinubu is raising the disdain to a higher, more dangerous height. Having prime public officers put in detention without trial and getting them to “resign” their subsisting tenure, from wherever they may be, without anyone seeing or hearing from them, is a new dimension of the assault on constitutional democracy in Nigeria. Even Buhari did not get to that level.
Reserving all prime positions in critical sectors of the commons, for a particular ethnic group, in a multi-ethnic society, may run counter to the spirit and accommodating arrangement that have sustained Nigeria for so long, but the new order may have come to stay. That was Buhari’s legacy. Tt did not stop with him. It will, most unlikely, stop with Tinubu.
The issue of how Tinubu came by his certificates or where he printed them, may still be awaiting resolution, if possible, but no one ever doubted that Tinubu is smart, especially in street games. He is, indeed, another quintessential child of the world. He is playing a game Buhari thought him. It may all be to the detriment of a fragile federation, but do they care?
Taken together in summation, Buhari and Tinubu may yet emerge as a tag team of architects of a mangled Nigerian federalism. The later seems determined to continue where the former stopped. Tinubu has not done badly in this wise, within a very short time.
