President Buhari and the ex-SGF with another aide in-between
By accepting to suspend the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, (SGF), was President Buhari demonstrating his recovery of mandate believed to have been hijacked or he merely bowed to pressure? Only those close to the action point. But even then, not even such an insider’s account can offer an incontestable response. In real life, no one reason can explain any event. Such a major move in government must usually be the outcome of a combination of many factors. The best that anyone could say is that something must have triggered the action, at last.
The worrisome implication of the exit of the former SGF, (unless he passes the tests of the probes and surfaces again, which hardly happens in Nigeria) is the trend in contemporary Nigeria where each successor is worse than the predecessor. The hope and the prayer of many people is that whoever succeeds David Lawal Babachir would be a sophisticated operator in terms of a modernist outlook in combination with the technical proficiency in the domestic-global nexus of public policy today. That has been a key problem with the Buhari regime. Without many key operatives of the government of the day, exercise of power has had no anchor in governmentality but in angry, bitter rules of the thumb reasoning to opponents and critics.
Speculations would remain as to whether the president has not acted before now because of his health distractions or because he really didn’t know how to send the ex-SGF away nicely or, as an approach to management of power, he wanted Nigerians to have exhausted themselves in calling for the exit of his chief strategist of the government. Whichever of these plausible reasons applied, it shocked many people that the president could risk his own credibility by clearing the SGF in writing. It was not about whether the SGF was guilty or not guilty. It was about how a regime that privileged anti-corruption war could do that. The drama might be unfolding in a race against time!
