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Honourable Minister of Petroleum Resources President Muhammadu Buhari 16 Nov 2015

In one breath, President Muhammadu Buhari was expected to assign portfolios to his ministers and unveil his restructuring of the federal ministries. When he eventually assigned the portfolios, there were sighs of relief. But nobody seemed to have exhaled at the aftermath of the much-anticipated restructuring of the federal civil service. The discussion points were on how Babatunde Fashola emerged as a “triple-barrel” minister; Rotimi Amaechi getting a “juicy” portfolio of transport; the subordination of a professor to a journalist in the supervision of Ministry of Education; and concerns over having “inexperienced” Kemi Adeosun as minister of finance.

The restructuring that President Buhari promised ended as a stillbirth. His tinkering with the ministries made sense only from the standpoint of reducing the number of the ministries as we had it in the last administration, ostensibly to save cost. Beyond this, it seemed like what we have emanated from a failed policy thought-process or experiment. Yet, the restructuring of the ministries could have been the first fundamental reform President Buhari would have undertaken.

Budgeting has been excised from the functions of the Ministry of Finance. By that stroke, President Buhari significantly rid the ministry of its policymaking status. The function of budgeting was transferred to the enlarged Ministry of Budget and National Planning. With the finance ministry left with just about treasury functions, who superintends fiscal policy?

A weakened finance ministry is a policy blunder. For five months of no cabinet, it had been difficult to engage Nigeria, and, indeed President Buhari, on economic policy and business talk. To now have a finance minister without policymaking clout would only make it clumsier in engaging Nigeria for business. What we now have is the anomaly in which the Nigerian finance minister is a figurehead with regard to fiscal authority.

Last year, I wrote an article in which I recommended that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala should be transferred to the National Planning Commission, if President Goodluck Jonathan secured second term of office and she was keen to continue in his cabinet. The recommendation was made to strengthen the national planning function and not to weaken the finance ministry. The reform President Buhari has carried out now will, arguably, strengthen the planning function. Bringing budgeting under the ambience of national planning would make the new ministry more influential in policymaking. The new minister of Budget and National Planning, Udoma Udo Udoma, cuts the image of a “senior” minister. His experience traversed legislation (being a two-term senator), market regulation (having served as Chairman of Securities and Exchange Commission), and the private sector where he has chaired the boards of two of Nigeria’s biggest quoted companies, apart from running a successful legal practice. But this is a zero-sum gain.

President Buhari might have deliberately annexed the finance ministry to the Presidency. In effect, the President is the substantive finance minister, in addition to his self-assigned, official role of Minister of Petroleum Resources. What this portends for a president that waited for over five months to appoint his ministers is that the wheel of government will continue to move very slowly. The President can be expected to bid his time in sorting the files that would be coming to his table from unnecessarily too diverse sources.

It would have been understandable if President Buhari had created a “Ministry of Infrastructure” and brought power, works and housing under it. He didn’t do that. Instead, he created an agglomerated Ministry of Power, Works and Housing. This nomenclature exposes disconnection from development lingo, and perhaps, 21st century thinking.

I have asked myself why President Buhari created this mega ministry. The logical answer I got was that power, works and housing are very important to him. The economic transformation he promised cannot be delivered without much improvement in the currently epileptic power supply. But as an anticorruption crusader, he knows that the sector has been riddled by corruption for years. The rampant corruption may not have been dealt with completely merely by the successful privatisation of the state-owned power monopoly by the last administration.

President Buhari is also well-acquainted with the importance of public works. He was chairman of the defunct Petroleum Trust Fund that upgraded Nigeria’s road networks and healthcare infrastructures. The President also has personal affinity with the housing sector, where he has announced a programme to build one million low-cost housing in the northern region where Boko Haram insurgents have destroyed homes and livelihood.

Whatever is important to Buhari he takes care of it personally; otherwise, he entrusts it to a trusted ally. However, it was Buhari the realist, as opposed to the anti-corruption idealist, that won the presidential election. Consequently, he has even rewarded his campaign benefactors with “juicy” portfolios. But in appointing Babatunde Fasola as minister of the new ministry, President Buhari is more than rewarding a generous supporter. Fashola has a reputation of a top performer, given his achievements in urban renewal in Lagos State in the eight years of his administration. His appointment, which brushed aside allegation of corruption while serving as Lagos State governor, is very popular with Nigerians who have dubbed him a “super minister.”

The restructuring of Federal Ministry of Transport and Federal Ministry of Aviation into one combined Ministry of Transport seemed to have gone awry at some point. While a ‘senior’ minister in the person of Rotimi Amaechi was appointed to oversee the “consolidated?” Ministry of Transport, a ‘junior’ minister Hadi Sirika was appointed as Minister of State for Aviation. This is a departure from the norm whereby the minister and the minister of state jointly but unequally supervise a ministry with the same nomenclature. It is now left to be seen if, in fact, Rotimi Amaechi is Minister of Transport and Hadi Sirika is Minister of Aviation. The very basis of the misunderstanding that is anticipated between the two would be the failed restructuring of the erstwhile two ministries.

The biggest anomaly in the restructuring of the ministries and appointment of ministers by President Buhari relates to the Ministry of Petroleum Resources. And the issue there is two-fold. The first part is whether President Buhari is really a minister or he is not. Press reports have been citing 36 ministers. In which case, the President is not thought to be a minister. He ought to be the 37th minister, since he says he is the senior minister of the Ministry of Petroleum Resources. What would be the right protocol when the president attends a function in which he is meant to be the minister, like the meeting of OPEC? Perhaps, he would send a “junior” minister to represent Nigeria at such important meetings for senior ministers.

The second part is this: Is the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu, who is also the Group Managing Director of the national oil company – Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) – earning two salaries for obviously two jobs he is now saddled with? The same question also applies to the president whether he is also earning the salary of petroleum minister.

What the foregoing indicates is that the reform of the ministries by President Buhari was quite whimsical and unprofessional. By reducing the number of the federal ministries under his administration, the president might save some pennies. But the inefficiency thereof would cost pounds. This restructuring cannot be seen to constitute a respectable civil service reform. I, therefore, expect a succeeding administration to revisit the restructuring.

By the way, I asked a friend, “Who are the ministers without portfolio President Buhari promised?” “Perhaps, Kayode Fayemi,” he answered. I immediately remembered there was a deathly silence in the hall that included his well-wishers when the portfolio of Solid Minerals was announced for the man with a doctorate in war studies.