President Buhari keeps Nigerian Public In The Dark

Throughout his campaign the newly elected president promised that he would change the way government worked in Nigeria. Part of the change promised was transparency, not just changing the way the government functions and operates, but also making major changes in the way government at all levels engages and communicates with the public. Sadly to say, it does not appear as though this is a priority for the new administration at this time. Throughout his first 2 months there have been a series of miscommunications, conflicting statements, and wild and rampant rumors fueled by the fact that the presidency is opaque and fails to provide information to the public.

There is no need for these ridiculous rumors and inconsistent stories about selling jets, failed security clearances of ministerial nominees, or even conflicting statements about whether or not the president had actually recalled ambassadors. All this is due to the fact that in large part the administration has chosen to be opaque towards the public rather than transparent. As long as the administration continues to adopt an opaque posture when dealing with disseminating information to the public, they will continue to give fodder to the rumor mills and borderline nonsensical headlines that only serve to distract the public from the issues that matter.

One of the key questions the public keeps asking is what exactly is the president doing in his first 100 days? What are his plans and/or goals? Judging from the series of actions taken over the past few months, it appears as though President Buhari has been intently focused on consolidating his grip on power. Shortly after entering office the president dissolved the board of directors of the NNPC, and recently dissolved the boards of every major parastatal within the government. The president also dismissed the top service chiefs in the armed forces replacing them with his own.

The president recently recalled all politically appointed ambassadors serving abroad and some of the midnight appointments and new-hires that occurred under the previous administration have also been reversed. Without a cabinet, the compound impact of these steps is that virtually every major organ of the Nigerian government now answers directly to the president himself and takes their basic marching orders directly from his office. It is not clear precisely who is working within the office of the president assisting him in executing the Herculean task of directly managing the entire government from his office, but perhaps the delegations he has taken with him to the G7, the AU, and the US may offer some clues. Nonetheless, the efforts the new president has taken to consolidate his grip on power are unprecedented.

This may come as no surprise because a change of power from a ruling party to an opposition party through a peaceful election in Nigeria is also unprecedented. The presidents spokespeople have complained about lack of cooperation from the outgoing administration. The administration appears to be intent on purging the government of the operatives left behind by the previous administration. This may in-part be due to the wide ranging probes they intend to carryout or those that may have already commenced. It is entirely possible that the outgoing administration left-behind a host loyal staffers now functioning as double-agents to circumvent attempts by the new administration to investigate the misdeeds of their former bosses, but due to the opaque nature of the current administration we may never know.

In order for the president to implement a trans-formative agenda and make a clear break with the past, he has to remove the old guard, reorganize the structure of government, and bring in new hands to run things. The old guard is not going to let go easily, so not-unexpectedly, the presidency will have to wrestle control of the instruments of government from their hands. From the looks of things, it does appear as though that is precisely what the Buhari administration is doing. Still, making a clear break from the past will not fully occur without a greater level of transparency.

Since there is no cabinet in place, we should not have to keep speculating about who is working as core advisers in the office of the president. Further the wild rumors that cabinet announcements are being delayed from reasons ranging from failed security clearances of nominees to the presidents old age and inability to act quickly could all be done away with, if the presidency simply gave a clear periodic statement as to what it is doing and what their objectives are. In the United States for example, the president gives a weekly address, typically over the weekend, and the presidents spokespeople take questions from the media and gives an address once a week, usually on Friday’s. Nobody would raise any alarm if the Buhari administration simply announced that it was first taking concrete steps to clean-up the bureaucracy and the parastatals and reorganize them and thus would not be moving forward with a cabinet until that was concluded.

What is even worse than the Presidents deplorable communication with the Nigerian public to date, is his recent decision to provide breaking new information on domestic affairs to a foreign media outlet bypassing all the media outlets based in Nigeria! In his Op-ed in the Washington Post, the President officially announced for the FIRST TIME that his cabinet will be nominated in September. This is the same behavior his predecessor elicited when he granted interviews to a foreign CNN journalist when he was interim-president ahead of the Nigerian media. Last time I checked, Buhari and Jonathan were parading around as “Nigerian” presidents.

Clearly they are more concerned about their image to foreign “constituencies” than they are about their image at home. If Nigeria were China, the UK, the US, Brazil, India or even South Africa, and the presidents of those countries dare did what President Buhari just did they would rightfully be reduced to shreds as traitors upon their return home. Just as Jonathan got away with doing the same things, do not expect the colonial slave-minded Nigerian media houses to say anything to President Buhari either. The only reason why our leaders get away which such lack of accountability to the public is because mainstream Nigerian media is even more despicable than this.

Any foolish thing that an unqualified analyst with 1 degree based in US or UK says about Nigeria, every Nigerian newspaper will reprint it and report on it as “newsworthy”. The recent S&P report that Nigeria must devalue the naira, is filled with ignorant errors and miscalculations, all Nigeria has to do is raise revenue from its affluent and everything will be fine. Still every major Nigerian media outlet carried the story as fact simply because it came from abroad. To this day, the editor of This Day wont speak to me because I criticized her for this very behavior. Still, as a contributor, every piece I write on Nigeria I provide first to Nigerian media outlets before foreign outlets, because when it comes to the country, Nigeria comes first. When I wrote my article on states and local governments losing billions of dollars in parking revenue , every major Nigerian media outlet ignored me so I eventually provided it to a UK outlet to reprint it. As soon as I did that, some of the same Nigerian media outlets that ignored the same piece verbatim, published the article . Despite this I still continue my Nigeria first policy.

So why cant the president? As we know the colonial slave-minded Nigerian media houses all simply reprinted and reported on the contents of the Op-ed story and did not question anything about the mode in which the president disseminated key details of his plans, but there is a principle here that even the foreign constituencies that he is trying to impress understand. The message that the president just delivered in Washington is that the Nigerian people are so stupid and incompetent that even their own president has to rely on foreigners to be the first to disseminate information about domestic Nigerian policy. Is this a place you would want to invest, or visit? This is the same problem caused by the “Nigerian” sovereign wealth fund that made its first investments in the US, using foreign banks as custodians, and agents to execute its transactions.

With one side of his mouth the President promoted Nigeria as a place to invest, and with his actions he did the precise opposite. Even if the previous Nigerian presidents did the same thing, President Buhari promised a change. My question for him is, what kind of change is this?

David O. Kuranga, Ph.D.

The author is the Managing Director and Principal of Kuranga and Associates, a full-service investment, political and economic risk consultancy, and asset management firm that specializes in Africa. He is also the author of The Power of Interdependence with Palgrave Macmillan Press.