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There is a governance style that marks a clear distinction between President Bola Tinubu and his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari. Yes, it is too early to begin to compare one administration to another. Nevertheless, one can’t help but notice a distinct Tinubu governance style that tends to ignore institutional knowledge in policy decision making. This style has intermittently manifested in the actions of the President since May 29, 2023. It is important to draw attention to it, given its implications for getting the country out of its current sociopolitical and economic crises.
By institutional memory, we refer to eight years of facts, concepts, experiences and information held by various Buhari appointees. President Tinubu appears to be in a hurry to chuck them out of office and, in doing so, gives the impression that this knowledge is not important. Is it possible that his advisers are not aware that his government is suffering the impact of these hurried discharges of boards and management of critical MDAs?
On this failing, and as strange as this may seem, Buhari is proving to be more of a technocrat than his successor! But this is not really strange. The Katsina General came into office with federal civil service experience, combined with a two-year foretaste of presidential power. He was, therefore, a bit reticent and overly cautious in his approach to decision-making. In the first six months of his administration, for instance, Buhari hunkered over bureaucratic files, in between shuttling world capital cities in search of a cure for an undisclosed ailment. This undue delay in making decisions, including appointing ministers, taxed citizens’ patience. The burden of waiting for him to get cracking with solutions to economic challenges, insecurity of lives and properties and endemic corruption (his three-point agenda) was such that citizens began to murmur that nothing was happening. His harassed spokespersons eventually asked Nigerians to read his “body language” in order to understand that a lot was happening!
Tinubu, on the other hand, came in with guns blazing, peremptorily discharging intractable policy issues in a fit of bravery (his words). The country immediately convulsed under the impact of fuel subsidy removal and abolition of dual exchange rate. On the former, he fell into a carefully laid trap from his predecessor, and he did so because of this disregard for institutional knowledge. His aides were also not paying attention to what Buhari was doing. After a thorough dissection of the issues, the wily General from Katsina stopped short of imposing subsidy removal for beleaguered citizens, until he was safely out of office. He knew that fuel subsidy was a pivot that hoisted the fragile economy and held it up to prevent it from crashing.
Uncharacteristically, the lack of resort to institutional knowledge drove his successor into a hole. Apparently acting without briefing from his party’s political appointees and senior policy experts, Tinubu’s pronouncement provoked an economic whirlwind that suspended citizens in midair where they currently flail in desperate efforts to find a soft landing. Added to the abolition of dual exchange rate, these twin policies consolidated Nigeria’s runaway inflation and soaring food prices.
The hurried sacking of federal boards will rob the President of a full complement of APC bureaucrats that Buhari put in place and managed for eight years. No one is suggesting that the President should not impose his own men on those institutions. The suggestion is that this should have been a seamless transition, not given to arbitrary actions that shunt aside the party loyalists most likely to point the right way for him on all past decisions of the Buhari regime. Tinubu behaved like someone who was taking over from an opposition party.
There is another sense in which this character trait contrasts sharply with the way his predecessor managed the transition. President Goodluck Jonathan made a number of political appointments on the eve of his departure from office. Citizens expected Buhari to reverse those appointments on assumption of office but he did not. He did this, not minding that he was dealing with opposition appointees. In most cases, he allowed the appointees to run their full term before hitting back with the nepotic appointments that defined his administration in the end.
What is strange, so to speak, is that the current President inherited a bureaucracy that was APC in character, composition and temperament. Some of the management and board appointees had two or more years to run their full term. Tinubu is, however, quickly displacing everyone and constituting new boards. In other words, he is displacing party members with loyalists who sing on his mandate. In many cases, these are wholesale displacements, without retaining those who would serve as institutional memories at the top management and policy decision-making levels. The practice will inevitably prolong the learning curve for the new boards and management, as is evident from the delayed publication and implementation of strategic plans from the majority of his appointees.
A second implication of danger that Tinubu is creating with the impatient replacement of policymakers is the ease with which civil servants have sold dummies that negatively impacted his image and that of his government. In six months, it is beginning to look like the administration is one that pays lip service to corruption and is also given to wastefulness.
Public servants know where the bones are buried. They also know how to get a new or naïve administrator to help dig up the bones – or bury new ones. The high cost of the junkets to New York for UNGA and Doha for COP28 show what can happen to derail an administration when there are no committed voices of caution such as can be provided by those with institutional memory. Digging up and wasting nearly $500,000 savings from wheat tax on a United Nations junket, and the outsized entourage of sightseers, gulping a lot more as we write in the name of attendance at COP28 only help to further rubbish the image of the government. Add to this the well-executed heist that is the 2023 supplementary budget appropriation and one will begin to understand the ramifications of operating with lax financial gatekeeping. Unfortunately, it also gives the impression that the President is coming into office without a clear approach to tackling corruption.
APC’s eight-year institutional knowledge could have helped Tinubu achieve efficiency and streamline governance processes. So many members of the MDA boards and management that he is hurriedly dispensing with will go away with what he needs the most: facts, concepts, experiences and information. He needs this to avoid reinventing the wheel or falling into a trap.
My experience is that only very few departing policymakers will have the grace to leave behind handover notes detailing lessons learned and successful strategies that enable the new administration truly hit the ground running and avoid mistakes while bounding forward.
