Nigeria is a great country with a complex history. Our unique history has left us with a very large population, the largest in Africa and one of the largest in the world. To say that we are heterogeneous will be an understatement. We have at least 250 tribes with two main religious groups. Despite being multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious we have been able to live relatively peacefully. This is not by accident. We have carefully managed what makes people in many other African countries fight – power. This, we were able to do by adopting federalism in which each federating unit is carried along in running the affairs of the nation. Our constitution is clear on the appointment of ministers. Each state must produce at least one.
When our colonisers decided to bring us together in what is known as the 1914 amalgamation, little did they know that what they hitherto called Northern and Southern protectorates were going to be a blessing for us in disguise. Today, we have established the culture of power division between North and South to such a level that if the president is from the North the vice-president will come from the South and vice versa. The same rule applies with respect to the religious affiliations of the president and the vice-president. Although these rules are not written in our constitution, any political party that breaks them will not likely make it at the polls.
But the president and vice-president are not the only important offices in government. Government as we have it in Nigeria is made up of three arms, viz. executive, legislature and judiciary. I will talk about the executive and the legislature; appointments into the judiciary are only for the learned who have gone through formal law institutions and party politics play very little role in them.
Three pairs of offices can be identified in both the executive and the legislature for which, if power is to be truly divided in such a way that Muslims and Christians, Northerners and Southerners will have a sense of belonging then regional and religious factors must be considered. These are President/VP, SGF/Head of Service and Senate President/Speaker. The first two pairs are in the executive while the last is in the legislature.
As bad as the PDP may be, it has been able to share these offices among the two parts of the country and the two religions over the 16 years it was in power. Thus in 1999-2007 we had Obasanjo/Atiku, Ekaete/Yayale and Igbo (a good number of them)/Buhari- Naabba- Masari. When ‘Yar’Adua took over we had Yar’Adua/Jonathan, Kingibe-Yayale/Okeke and Mark/Bankole. The same formula was maintained after Yar’Adua except for 2011-2015 when there was no acceptable Muslim candidate for the office of the speaker from the South and Tambuwal was supported to become the speaker. Many saw it as a compensation for the North-west after Buhari was rigged out at the polls.
Of important note in PDP’s power sharing is the rotation of the offices of the President, SP and SGF with power shift. Thus when Obasanjo was in power these offices went to the South and when power shifted to the North, Northerners occupied them. We can also remember that the six offices mentioned above were distributed among the six geopolitical zones.
It is noteworthy that PDP has never announced or debated their sharing formula in public but Nigerians including people like me who are not in partisan politics could see what was happening and were largely satisfied.
What we saw over the last four years was President/VP (N/S, M/C), SGF/HOS (N/S, C/C) and SP/Speaker (N/N, M/C). This is vividly a wrong arrangement for a number of reasons. One, there are three Christians in the four most important offices in the executive. That is why when the President was away for medical treatment, there was visibly no Muslim in the executive corridor. But Nigerian Muslims are easy going; they did not make noise. The question here is, would the Christians ever accept that? Of course it would not happen in the first place. No Christian president will appoint Muslims to occupy the offices of the SGF and HOS at the same time. Secondly, both the speaker and the SGF are Christians from the North East where Christians constitute a minority.
Yes, the Chief of Staff is a Muslim from the North-east. But he is only an aide to the president. That he is allowed to become prominent is not good for the personality of the President. Not many of us can remember the names of Chiefs of staff of past presidents even though they were always there.
If APC wants to retain power beyond President Buhari, and many of us will be happy it does, it has to put its house in order and take care of our diversity at the highest level of power play. There is no better time than now that the incoming Federal legislators were supposedly carefully selected to be loyal to the party.
I do not derive any pleasure in pointing at these mistakes and wish the APC had taken care of them and saved Nigerians from public discussions on things that divide them.
Professor Jibia writes from the Department of Mechatronics Engineering, Bayero University, Kano.
