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Staffing is an important organising function of management. This function starts with determining the amount of work required to carry out a predetermined objective formulated at the planning stage. The function proceeds with dividing the work into different parts, and appointing capable qualified personnel to carry out such work. The success or failure of the task is determined by the quality of the personnel employed to do the job.
As a matter of leadership style, President Tinubu has not been a manager with any demonstrable quality of making appropriate appointment of qualified staff to work for, and with him. It’s laughable for a President who has an insecurity challenge that is threatening the fabric of his country to appoint two ministers without any prior security experience to man the Ministry of Defence. One of the ministers told the world that there’s no need bombing the forests infested with terrorists because bombs cannot penetrate the forest. The second one told the world that negotiating with terrorists is not a bad idea. This same Minister of State governed a state that was the worst hit with terrorism in his entire ill-fated first and only tenure, because he was rejected by his people for lack of performance while in office. To be sincere, his people never voted for him in the first place. He was declared winner by the court when the ruling party went to court against itself and asked the court to nullify its own election. The court gladly did and returned a man who lost by a landslide as winner. His people confirmed their rejection of him when they booted him out during his attempt at second term. This is who Tinubu considered qualified to be his Minister of Defence, knowing full well that he is a square peg in a round hole. To worsen the whole thing, both the Minister and the Minister of State are from the same geo-political zone, despite the national spread to the issue of insecurity.
It’s bad enough to make unfit appointments, but catastrophic not to make appointments at all. Tinubu’s lethargy was full blown in the making of political appointments as President. During Campaigns prior to 2023 presidential elections, the President demonstrated lack of energy and enthusiasm, mental and physical, in all the activities for the election. He was so fatigued that he never attended any debate with his fellow contestants. During rallies, the gaffes were uncountable. It was not surprising that after the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Tinubu President, he couldn’t compose his cabinet within the 60 days constitutional limit for such exercise.
Even at the clock of 60 days, the lists of ministers were trickling in in bits. When they were made, the lists were full of very unqualified men and women who needed to be schooled on what it took to be in that position. It was inexcusable that the President made his two most important decisions which will define his regime for ever when he had not made any ministerial appointment. The first was “fuel subsidy is gone” while the second was the incompetent devaluation of naira. As there were no experts to handle the situation at its embryonic stage, the economy went bad and nearly collapsed, with fuel price heading to more than N1,000 per litre and naira heading to N2,000 per dollar before he hurriedly assembled the incompetent cabinet which has not found the solution to the economic malaise till date.
If the delay in appointing ministers to supervise the economy was terrible enough, the delay in appointing ambassadors was unpardonable. Nigerians saw with helplessness as our foreign relations degenerated gradually with passionate pleas by diplomatic experts to Tinubu to appoint ambassadors to stem the spiral decline to diplomatic abyss to no avail. Our embassies started decaying with the infrastructure in embassies declining to a state of disrepair. Toilets smelling and staff unpaid in months. Nigeria was becoming a pariah state on the strength of self-inflicted incompetence.
It was obvious that Tinubu was not going to appoint ambassadors throughout his regime until Trump, the table shaker, appeared in the horizon, and threatened to invade Nigeria, with gun a-blazing to wipe out terrorists who are killing Nigerians. Tinubu suddenly woke up from the inertia and slumber and remembered that no qualified person could represent or speak for him to the Americans in the capacity of an ambassador. For the first time in almost three years of his regime, Tinubu realised the depth of international crisis he has led the country into. He had to send staff from Nigeria to go to America to start mending fences with them when a qualified ambassador, if there was any then, could have walked two streets to the White House to sort out the problems.
Having been woken up from the diplomatic slumber by Trump, one would have thought that Tinubu would make impeccable ambassadorial appointments to restore the dignity of Nigeria in the eyes of the international community. Guess what, his ambassadorial list showcased names that appear like the list in Jeffery Epstein file that should actually be hidden, not exposed, because its exposure will bring both the appointees and the nation to public ridicule. Imagine! The name of Professor Yakubu Mahmood was on that list. This is a man that raped our democracy repeatedly that Nigeria became a laughing stock in the international community, and is still bleeding from the unfortunate electoral rape. Novel words like technical glitch, prefilled election result sheet, go to court came into our democratic electoral lexicon. The word technical glitch actually came out from Yakubu’s mouth when he found it impossible to explain his order not to electronically transmit the presidential election result to deny the collation officers the ability to verify the correctness of the manually collated election results before announcement of winners. Yakubu himself wrote the rules of engagement in the conduct of elections and failed to keep his own rules. The National Assembly wrote the laws that electronic transmission of results is compulsory and even gave INEC the choice on the electronic devise to use in the transmission. Yakubu made the choice of BVAS, yet on election day, some Presiding officers of the polling units said openly that they were told not to transmit the polling unit results of the election electronically. Some presiding officers raised alarm that the Senatorial and House of Representatives transmission were going with the codes given to them but the presidential election result transmission wasn’t going with the code given to them.
When confronted with these obvious inconsistencies with the promised outcome and the eventual performance as regards to the electronic transmission of results, Yakubu shamelessly told the complainants to go to court. Even the decision of the Supreme Court indicted him. Justice Inyang Okoro who read the leading judgement said, truth be told, the non-transmission of polling units results electronically reduced the confidence of Nigerians in the election. Who is that President who knows his onions that will appoint a man to an office whom everyone, including the courts, have no confidence in what he did? A man who couldn’t obey his own rules, how can he be trusted by the international community?
The verdict of the international community, which Tinubu intends to send Yakubu to, gave a more damming castigation of Mahmood’s election at INEC. European Union said that “the 2023 general elections did not ensure a well-run transparent, and inclusive democratic process as assured by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Public confidence and trust in INEC were severely damaged during the presidential poll and was not restored in state level elections.” The International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) (Both from United States of America) organised a joint international election observation mission (IEOM) for the 2023 Nigeria general elections and narrated that “the elections fell short of Nigerian citizens’ legitimate and reasonable expectations, as significant logistical, technological, and communications failures by INEC, … instances of vote manipulation, political violence, and marginalization of key populations marred the electoral process, and disenfranchised voters.” ECOWAS said “incidents of violence, killings and disruption were recorded in several states.” Other international observation missions said the same thing.
Moreover, the idea that a sitting President would appoint an immediate past Chairman of INEC, who declared him President in questionable circumstances, for a political position smacks of the reality that he is being rewarded for a hatched job well done for the President. If the rubber stamp National Assembly approves his appointment, the government of Nigeria should not complain if the international community officially recognises Nigeria as a country of particular concern in election rigging, manipulation, and fraud.
I don’t want to dwell on the list of loquacious, inconsistent, abusive characters that made Tinubu’s list. Appointing a man who in front of the whole world declared the President to be a drug baron means that the President has wholeheartedly accepted that he is one in the eyes of the international community. The President should not cry if the international community starts behaving towards him as a person who deals in drugs. Also if the President appoints a person who referred to Donald Trump as a scumbag in his official social media account, let him not complain if Donald Trump reacts negatively to it. Nigeria is boxed into a corner, both nationally and internationally, because we are administered by unqualified persons picked by an ill-prepared President Tinubu, whose only lifetime ambition is to become President of Nigeria, and nothing else.
