APC leaders angry as Buhari appoints more northerners
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THERE was an outrage in the ruling All
Progressives Congress on Thursday over the announcement of new
appointments by President Muhammadu Buhari.
Leaders of the APC, who spoke to The PUNCH,
complained that the appointments tilted in favour of the North and said
the party must move fast to cope with the backlash of expected
rumblings in the polity.
“The President does not consult before
making most of these appointments and I can tell you that Nigerians are
going to term the party and the President as a northern party and the
President of Northern Nigeria,” a leader of the party said to one of our
correspondents late on Tuesday.
Buhari,
according to a statement by his Special Adviser to the President on
Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina, on Thursday approved the
appointment of Babachir David Lawal from Adamawa State as the Secretary
to the Government of the Federation.
He also named Mr. Abba Kyari from Borno state as his Chief of Staff.
Other appointments approved by the
President, according to the statement, are those of Col. Hameed Ibrahim
Ali (retd.) as the new Comptroller-General, Nigerian Customs Service;
Mr. Kure Martin Abeshi, Comptroller-General, Nigerian Immigration
Service; Senator Ita Enang, Senior Special Assistant on National
Assembly Matters (Senate); and Suleiman Kawu as SSA on National Assembly
Matters (House of Representatives).
Both Ali and Kawu are from Kano State
and Abeshi is from Nasarawa. Enang from Akwa Ibom State is the only one
from the south geo-political zone.
Adesina said all the appointments would take immediate effect.
Three top national officers of the APC,
who spoke with one of our correspondents on condition of anonymity
shortly after the announcements were made, wondered why the President
was appointing only northerners to positions to the detriment of the
southerners.
They said that the President was already
giving the party a bad name among Nigerians. They said they had hoped
that he would learn from the criticisms that trailed his first
appointments where more northerners were appointed into sensitive
positions than southerners.
Before the latest appointments, the President had also named only one southerner among the initial nine appointments he made.
The northerners in the first
appointments are the Director-General of the State Services, Lawal
Daura; Acting Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission,
Mrs. Amina Zakari; the Director, Department of Petroleum Resources, Mr.
Mordecai Danteni Baba Ladan; and the Accountant-General of the
Federation, Alhaji Ahmed Idris.
Also in the first appointments are the
President’s Chief Security Officer, Abdulrahman Mani; State Chief of
Protocol, Mallam Abdullahi Kazaure; Aide- De-Camp, Lt. Col. Muhammed
Abubakar; and the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity,
Mallam Garba Shehu.
Only the Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina, hailed from Osun Staten in the South-West.
Another APC leader said the party must devise a way of managing the backlash that would follow the appointments.
He said, “Though the President did not get much votes from the South-East but we must not neglect the zone in key appointments.
“Even the South-West that supported and
was the backbone of the party, what are we giving the zone in
appreciation? We need to be careful before the party is destroyed.”
It was gathered that some leaders of the
party were already thinking of having an enlarged meeting where the
appointments would be reviewed.
But another senior member of the APC
said such a meeting, if it would hold at all, would have to wait until
the party holds its Kogi State governorship primary on Saturday.
A member of the state executive of APC in a South-West state, said the appointments were lopsided against the South.
He said, “When President Olusegun
Obasanjo took over, you saw balance in appointments as he reflected
federal character. President Goodluck Jonathan too reflected a semblance
of balance. Buhari is pursuing a northern agenda. This is the same
agenda pursued by the late Sir Ahmadu Bello, when everything was
pro-North. Buhari made six appointments at a go and five of them are
northerners.”
The Speaker of one of the Houses of
Assembly in the South-West, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also
described the new appointments as shocking.
The Speaker, who is a member of the APC,
said, “This is shocking. It doesn’t speak well at all. The South-West
has been completely neglected and the South-East too. The South-West was
neglected during the President Goodluck Jonathan years. The South-West
must rise up against this.”
Similarly, an APC chairman in another
South-West state, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the
list of the new appointees had left him perplexed.
The chairman said, “This is not good at
all. Why should he choose everybody from the North? I am sure he did not
confide in anybody before drawing up the list and making the
announcement. We will continue to watch. It is condemnable.”
In the same vein, an APC member of the
House of Representatives, said the leaders of the party in the
South-West were shocked by Buhari’s latest appointments.
“He didn’t tell anybody. We are all
shocked. The real shocker would be when he is going to appoint
ministers. The only thing that would save us is that he is mandated
constitutionally to choose from all states, otherwise, he would have
chosen all the ministers too from the North,” the female member of
parliament said.
The new SGF graduated from the Ahmadu
Bello University, Zaria, in 1979 with a Bachelor of Engineering degree
and worked with the Delta Steel Company, Aladja, Nigerian External
Telecommunications Limited and Data Sciences Limited before establishing
his own ICT and Telecommunications consulting firm in 1990.
Kyari, the new Chief of Staff to the
President, holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees from the University of
Cambridge and the University of Warwick in Law and Sociology.
The new Comptroller-General of Customs,
holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Criminology. He was military
administrator of Kaduna State from 1996 to 1998.
Source: Punch
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