Femi Meyungbe-Olufunmilade had a very good comment on the Yar’Auda’s minsiterial list. In my opinion, it was very unbalanced. All the top posts were awarded to northerners while the less powerful posts were awarded to the southerners.Read his comment below:

Yar’Adua’s cabinet gaffe
By ‘Femi Meyungbe-Olufunmilade

SINCE my letter “President Yar’Adua and The Ministers List” appeared in The Guardian of Sunday, July 29, 2007, my mail box has been inundated with rejoinders from diverse walks of life – both home and abroad. That has precipitated the need for me to add some footnotes to the letter. Before then, however, I wish to reproduce the entire text as I have absolutely nothing to correct from it.

Most of the letters concurred with me, one of which came from the editor of internet-based Nigeriannews.com and conscienceDaily.com. The letter goes: “Dear President, I went through your list of ministers and was alarmed about its lopsidedness in terms of ethnic\geo-political balancing. The Yoruba, for instance, have no major portfolio. Major portfolios in Nigeria’s context refer to senior ministerial posts in: Defence, Finance, Energy, Foreign Affairs, Interior and Transportation. How could you make such a great error when you’re talking of Government of National Unity (GNU) and had given the impression that the delay in constituting your cabinet is to ensure you carry all of us on board? I’m afraid what we just got is like the pregnancy of an elephant giving birth to a rat!

“Again, how come a northerner is still the National Security Adviser and you now appoint another northerner the Minister of Defence. Both positions were held by northerners under President Obasanjo. Like it or not people expect that what is good for the goose is also good for the gander. Now you’ve positioned another northerner, Taminu Kurfi, as Deputy Chief of Staff to take over from another northerner, Gen. Abdullahi Muhammed, who was in the saddle throughout Obasanjo’s administration as Chief of Staff. Why is the FCT minister perpetually a northerner?

Is Abuja not the home of all? Why then sustain the impression in people’s psyche that it is an exclusive northern territory – you in whom we had invested hope of change? Afterall, your dad (a northerner of northerners) of blessed memory was the Minister of Lagos Affairs at the very nerve-centre of Yorubaland. This is the kind of insensitivity or oversight that made it difficult for past northern leaders to succeed only in galvanising southern opposition instead of mobilising all for national development.

I wish we have a country where merit is the watchword and the issue of one’s place of origin is down-played. However, that will for a long time to come be a pipe-dream. Even in the U.S. people still talk of who is a Jew or Black in cabinet appointments. The issue is about giving people a sense of belonging in a government. Some northerners even complain that the key portfolios for the north are in favour of Fulanis!

Believe me, Your Excellency, I am a good friend of my country and that makes me your friend. If you do not embark on an adjustment immediately, you may end up failing to achieve your set goals but have saboteurs aplenty, who don’t see you as representing their interest but the arrow-head of Fulani oligarchs and their narrow agenda. You may have good intentions but public perception must be favourably married to such intentions. A stitch in time saves nine!”

That aphorism ends the letter. Let me now add the footnotes, which are five in number. One, as one whose ambition from secondary school has been to become the president of Nigeria, later proceeding to study political science towards that end, I realised early that in a heterogenous country like Nigeria you need to acquire the persona of a father-of-the-nation in whom each ethnic group sees its interest as represented if you want to succeed in mobilising them to achieve the as yet unattained goal of national development. In acquiring this persona Federal Character must not only be reflected in your appointments and allocation of resources, but must be seen as reflected. Otherwise, you will be running a thug-of-war kind of government where instead of pulling in one direction, you find people flexing muscles in opposite ways. That has been the curse upon Nigeria since independence. That is the error I wanted Yar’Adua to avoid. The contents of my letter only represented the feelings of many Yoruba people of my acquaintance and Southerners in general. It is only President Olusegun Obasanjo and Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, whom I know quite well, that tried to be truly Nigerian in their public postures to an appreciable extent.

Secondly, I want a father-of-the nation persona for Yar’Adua because I wanted nothing to hinder him from succeeding as president. Despite my reservations on the flawed election that brought him to power, I am impressed by his legacies as the Governor of Katsina State. I conducted a vox populi in Katsina city en route Abuja from Niger Republic, where, through an invitation via His Excellency Elhadji Ibrahim (Niger’s Ambassador to Nigeria), I was a guest of the government of President Tanja Mamadou at Republic Day’s celebration (14-18 December, 2006), shortly after the PDP primaries that produced Yar’Adua as the party’s presidential candidate. I was impressed about the level of infrastructural development, staff welfare, agricultural progress, thrifty management of resources, etc Katsina had witnessed under Yar’Adua.

I was surprised that unlike his colleagues in other states, many of whom have turned out to be thieves of public money, he did not set much store by publicity. I was glad and told myself that, whichever way the pendulum swung in the April presidential polls, Yar’Adua’s way or Gen. Buhari’s who was my man for the job, Nigeria was going to have an upright and resourceful president. In a nutshell, I am presenting people’s view on Yar’Adua’s cabinet to him so that he would not fail. No Nigerian, be they Yoruba, Ijaw, Fulani, Hausa and what have you, stands to gain anything from his failure as president. His failure, God forbid, would be Nigeria’s failure, which we can ill afford, having failed often. Personally, Yar’Adua has made history to have attained the office of president. But we as Nigerians need him much more to make history for us by transforming our country into a developed nation. The least we can do to help ourselves in this regard is to warn him when he falters.

Thirdly, I feel constrained to state that I am not merely posturing as having goodwill towards Yar’Adua presidency. Prior to this time, I had sent him series of position papers on the dual subjects of peacemaking in our fractured polity and accelerated industrial development through his sister-in-law, Zainab Yar’Adua, and our mutual friend, Former Head of State, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, apart from forwarding same straight to his personal email. But I had to go public with the letter at issue, which I copied him, because it requires urgent action, and reactions have proved my judgment right.

Fourth, the arrogance of some of our northern folks in boasting of northern imminent reclamation of so-called lost grounds under President Obasanjo requires vigilance as Yar’Adua is human and not altogether immune from influences around him. These are times that reverberate the wisdom of my late mentor and boss, Chief Bola Ige (whose killers while serving as Attorney General and Minister of Justice of Nigeria under Obasanjo, are yet to be brought to justice), in warning that Nigeria may never know progress till the country is restructured into a proper federation via a Sovereign National Conference.

I know for sure that lots of ethnic pressures are piled on Yar’Adua daily from his kinsmen, but he is supposed to belong to all of us. So people like us cannot but be vigilant. Voltaire says, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”. A Yoruba adage also says, “If a man hears shouts that a lethal load should be dumped somewhere, and fails to join the dumping gang, the load might be dumped in his backyard”.

Finally, what is wrong in Yar’Adua appointing southerners as Senior Ministers of Defence and Federal Capital Teritory Administration (FCTA), as well as National Security Adviser? Afterall, he was prompt in appointing a northern political figure in the person of Ambassador Babagana Kingibe as the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, a position hitherto held under Obasanjo by Chief Ufot Ekaete, a Southerner from Akwa Ibom State. Is anything really bad in giving to the goose what was good for the gander?

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