Akume, Gbajabiamila, Hadejia: Profiles in Leadership

Kunle Aderinokun and Gboyega Akinsanmi

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Friday began to assemble his team for the implementation of his ‘Renewed Hope’ mandate with the appointment of a former Governor of Benue State, Senator George Akume as the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF); Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila as his Chief of Staff (CoS), and Senator Ibrahim Hadejia as the Deputy Chief of Staff (DCoS).

George Akume

Akume served as the Minister of Special Duties and Intergovernmental Relations between 2019 and 2023.
He has been a leading political figure in the country since the transition to democratic rule in 1999.
 Prior to his latest appointment, Akume was elected the Senator representing Benue North-west just after he completed his second term as the governor of the state in 2007. He served in the Senate till 2019.

 He first contested senatorial election in 2007 on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), though successfully stood for senatorial elections on the platform of the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria in 2011 and All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2015.
 He however lost to Senator Orker-Jev of the PDP in 2019. It was on 23 July 2019 that Buhari nominated him to serve as a minister.

 As senator, the new SGF, who was born on December 27, 1953, and hailed from Wannune, Tarka Local Government Area of Benue State, had assumed the position of the Senate Minority Leader from 2011 to 2015 and the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Army.
Akume had earlier been elected as the governor of Benue State from 1999 to 2007.
He obtained a Bachelor of Science in Sociology from the University of Ibadan in 1978 and a Master’s degree in Industrial and Labour Relations from the same university in 1986.

Femi Gbajabiamila

Born on June 25, 1962, Gbajabiamilia had his secondary education at Igbobi College, Yaba, Lagos and proceeded to the King Williams College, Isle of Man, the United Kingdom for his Advanced Level.
He studied Law at the University of Lagos, Akoka. He graduated with honours in 1983 and was called to the Nigerian Bar in 1984.

Gbajabiamila started his career as a lawyer at Bentley, Edu and Co. in Lagos, where he distinguished himself with an exemplary discipline and good work ethic. He eventually left the law firm to set up his practice, Femi Gbaja and Co.
In 1998, he returned to school at the John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States of America. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from John Marshall and earned for himself a Juris Doctor Degree.

He then went on to write and pass the Georgia Bar exams, after which he set up another thriving law office where he practised until his return to Nigeria.
Gbajabiamila delved into partisan politics and offered himself up for service on the platform of the then Alliance for Democracy (AD) and has thereafter been elected for six consecutive terms to represent the people of Surulere 1 Federal Constituency of Lagos in the National Assembly.
With his 20 years experience at the National Assembly, Gbajabiamila is believed to be well-equipped for the task ahead.

The CoS was always on the side of truth and justice, and his views truly reflected the wishes and aspirations of his constituents.
This was especially evident during the “third term debate” when he was Chairman of the 2007 movement in the House, a group primarily credited for ending the “third term agenda” of the then President, Olusegun Obasanjo.
He served as the Minority Whip of the house, and by the end of his second term in office, Gbajabiamila had sponsored the highest number of Bills in the National Assembly.

Gbajabiamila proposed an amendment to the National Honours Act of 1964 to make stringent guidelines for selection of National Award nominees. He thus became the third and youngest Nigerian to reject National Honours after late Chinua Achebe and Prof. Grace Alele-Williams.

Ibrahim Hassan Hadejia

Ibrahim Hassan Hadejia was born in Kaduna on the 13th of November 1965 and attended sacred heart primary school in Kaduna and Barewa College Zaria after which he gained admission to the school of basic studies at the Ahmadu Bello University for a year-long pre-degree programme leading to a brilliant IJMB qualification.

He immediately gained admission to read law in the same institution in 1983 and graduated with a law degree in 1986 after which he went to the law school Lagos for his Bachelor of Law.
He did his national service in Lagos and worked for a year with Credit and Finance International, a finance and investment outfit as in-house counsel and company secretary.

Two years later he joined Liberty Merchant Bank Lagos where he worked in credit administration, banking operations and international treasury in that order for almost eight years.
He was appointed Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice in his home state Jigawa in 1999 and was promoted to Secretary to the State Government two years later.

 He was appointed the Deputy Governor just before the elections in 2003 and ran as a deputy governor on the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) ticket a few months later and continued in that position till 2007.
Within this period, he also enrolled in a part time diploma course at Oxford University where he obtained a Diploma in Computing.
From 2007 to 2014, he was engaged in private business in the insurance, construction and security consultancy sectors.
 In 2014, he was involved in the formation of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as a state leader of the ANPP, one of the three parties that formed the alliance and was elected deputy governor of Jigawa State on a joint ticket in 2015 becoming the longest serving Deputy Governor at the expiration of the term in 2019.

 He ran for the senate and was elected senator representing Jigawa North East Senatorial Zone in April 2019 for a term of four years. Senator Hadejia is committed to an ICT centric agenda and chaired the committee that developed an ICT policy for Jigawa State, the first state to do so in 2001, which saw the formation of the Galaxy broadband hub, in Jigawa, now Galaxy Backbone Limited and the Informatics Institute Kazaure, among others.