Matters Arising from Tinubu’s Partial Ministerial List

Postscript by Waziri Adio

President Bola Tinubu’s much-anticipated list of ministerial nominees finally arrived the National Assembly on Thursday while the Senate was in session. The last legislative day of the week, Thursday was a day shy of the hard limit imposed by the constitution. The list of nominees, despite all the drama and the suspense around it, landed ‘not with a bang but a whimper.’ Save for the presence of a few clearly exceptional nominees, the incomplete list left many Nigerians with a hollow feeling: ‘is this it—is this the list that took the president almost all of the allowed time to compile and send, is this what we have been anxiously waiting for?’ The list, to put it mildly, is underwhelming. 

It is not all downers though. On the positive side, a quarter of the nominees so far is female. It is still far below the minimums prescribed by the 2022 National Gender Policy and the National Development Plan 2021 to 2025. But it is some progress over recent cabinets, if the pattern is maintained or surpassed with the remaining nominees and if all the female nominees scale through Senate’s confirmation. Still on the bright side—there is a 36-year-old on the list and at least two others in their early to mid-forties. For a country of mostly young people, having a sprinkling of ‘youths’ on the list still falls short but it is some improvement on the last two cabinets. We can also drag this into the plus column: the list has a good mix of established politicians and a few accomplished technocrats, including some people who straddle the classifications.

However, these few positives do not redeem the overwhelming feeling that this, in the main, looks like a settlement/compensation list. With this list, Tinubu comes off as placing more priority on rewarding those who, within and outside his party, worked for his victory and the long-term aides who need to be compensated for staying the course with him. To be sure, presidents usually have political/electoral IOUs to settle and our constitution forces the president to choose at least a nominee from each state of the Federation. But even with these constraints, Tinubu could have found better credentialled and more accomplished ministerial nominees in each of the states and among his loyalists and supporters, and he could have acted with greater urgency.

Before we go on to address the substantive issues around the list, it is important to state that by our constitution anyone with a high school certificate can be a minister and there is nothing wrong with giving a chance to fresh faces or allowing people the opportunity to prove what they can offer. But this is not a regular season for Nigeria. Our country is at a critical pass at the moment, and we need the most capable and tested hands in the land to pull our country away from the brink. Right now, we don’t need a set of ministers to go and learn on the job or try out their luck. On the contrary, we need a cabinet bulging with high achievers. We need a cabinet packed with people who have had compellingly illustrious experiences in the private and public sectors and international arena, whose antecedents match the gravity of the serious tasks at hand, and whose names unquestionably inspire confidence and hope from citizens and critical stakeholders.

This is not my impression of Tinubu’s list, and I don’t think I am alone. This is not the kind of list that induces an involuntary wow from fans and traducers alike. Most of the names on the list are at best average in terms of comparable experience, practical accomplishments and extensive networks that can be leveraged for the turnaround of the fortunes of a country in dire need of a major makeover. In his most consequential political appointments so far as president, Tinubu seems to have, with his own hands, taken a shine off one of the most enduring myths around him: his ability to assemble a highly competent and credible team. It is possible that it has been a myth all along or that  he will restore the myth with the complete list or that some of his nominees will end on putting up pleasantly surprising shifts as ministers. We wait.

For now, only a handful of names on the list really, really stand out and, sadly, they are in the minority: Professor Muhammed Pate, Ambassador Yusuf Tuggar, Mr. Olawale Edun, Mr. Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, Senator David Umahi, and Mallam Nasir El-Rufai. Most of the other nominees at best should be heads of federal agencies or chairpersons of boards or ambassadors or should be gaining more experience at the state level or in another arm of government. This is not necessarily about age or gender: there are much younger and female Nigerians who have better accomplishments and more solid work experience and greater credibility than some of the names presented by the president to the Senate.

 And in terms of credibility, it is not clear how much due diligence the presidency and the DSS carried out on some of the names that ended up on the list. There have been question marks on the qualifications and the performance of some of the nominees in the past. This is in the public domain and a simple Google search will oblige a lot. It is possible that the president and his team had looked into those allegations and found them to be flimsy or irrelevant. But it will be grievous if, with all the resources available to it, the presidency is unaware of and embarrassed by the allegations and claims around some of these nominees.  

Let’s graciously concede that the president, in consultation with party officials and the states, has the prerogative to choose whoever he wants as ministers. Afterall, executive powers fully rest with the president: the ministers and other heads of the executive branch of government only exercise powers delegated by the president. So, if the president thinks his ministerial picks are good enough for him, so be it. But he could have saved himself and the country some ample time by submitting these same names immediately after the inauguration of the National Assembly or after the Senate returned from the three-week recess of the Eid holidays. Apart from Professor Pate who needed to give enough notice to the board of GAVI to turn down a plum CEO offer, there is no other person on Tinubu’s list to justify the delay and the drama.

An amendment of sections 147 and 192 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria compels the president and the state governors to, within 60 days of their taking oaths of office, submit the lists of their nominees for ministers and commissioners to their respectively parliaments. Yes, the amendment was signed into law about two months to the swearing-in of Tinubu and 28 governors on May 29^th. But this is enough notice. The constitutional amendment was not secretly done. After passage by the National Assembly, the amendment was approved by at least 2/3 of the state parliaments before it was sent for the signature of former President Muhammadu Buhari. Besides, Tinubu was declared winner of the presidential election on 1^st of March 2023. That was three months before inauguration.

Tinubu therefore has no excuse to wait out almost all the 60 days allowed before submitting a partial list of largely middling nominees, especially given the enormity of the tasks at hand and his pledge to hit the ground running. Submitting his list of nominees about five months after being declared the winner of the presidential election and about two months after being sworn in as president is not exactly my definition of hitting the ground running. We need a president who gets the urgency of the moment and embodies it in all ramifications.

Not surprisingly, most of the state governors waited till the last day to submit their lists of nominees too. This is not to give them an easy pass, but it can be argued that some of them didn’t submit their lists on time so as not to make the president look bad. Probably, they didn’t want to outdo the ‘boss.’ This reinforces the need for the president to always lead from the front, especially on constitutional matters.

It is important to note that Tinubu failed to meet the constitutional requirement. The 60-day deadline is for the full list, and that deadline expired by midnight on 28^th July 2023. Yes, the amendment did not say the president should submit all the names at once. But the deadline means that the president must submit all the names of his nominees to the Senate by the end of Day 60.

According to Section 147 (3) of the constitution, the president must appoint a minister from each of the 36 states of the Federation. While three states have two nominees each (Bauchi, Cross River and Katsina), only 25 of the 36 states have ministerial nominees so far on Tinubu’s list, leaving out 11 states. Not submitting a full list of ministerial nominees within the time allowed is a clear breach of the constitution. Under no circumstances should anyone, including the president, be allowed to take liberty with the constitution, the supreme law of the land. It is a wrong thing to do, a wrong way to start, a wrong precedent to allow. In the least, a National Assembly alive to its responsibility will strongly censure Tinubu for this serious breach.  

Tinubu conveniently stayed with the unhelpful tradition of submitting names of ministerial nominees without attaching portfolios. The explanation provided by his Chief of Staff is just an excuse, and a lame one at that. Sometimes, it is better to say nothing. Senate confirmation hearings are not meant for presidents to decide where to place the ministerial nominees. They are designed for the senators to grill the nominees.

Without portfolios attached to the names of nominees, senators will be left with asking general questions or with just groping in the dark while the nominees will happily be auditioning for their preferred portfolios. It is a hollow and sub-optimal approach. Let’s hope the senators will redeem what has, a priori, been reduced to a perfunctory exercise, and not further trivialise things with their predilection for vacuous questions or the comedy of errors of ‘take a bow and go’. That approach will not do justice to the nominees and the country.