Governor Nasir El-Rufai, in a rare memo to President Muhammadu Buhari,
told him how bad the nation is faring under him, how the president’s policies,
actions and
in-actions have contributed to the nation’s woes, and what could be
done to steer Nigeria back to greatness.
El-Rufai sent the 30-page memo, published by SR on Thursday, to Buhari on
September 2016.
In the memo, he touched several areas, ranging from the ailing economy,
the dynamics of the nation’s politics, lack of coercion within the ruling All
Progressives Congress, APC, and the poor relationship between the president and
the national leader of the APC, Bola Tinubu, and other party leaders, including
the APC governors.
He said Mr. Buhari was yet to have control over the party structures and
blamed the situation partly on the people who were advising the president.
He said many of the party leaders – like Mr. Tinubu, the former Vice
President Atiku Abubakar, and Musa Kwankwaso – were feeling aggrieved that they
were most often not consulted by the president or by those that the president
assigned such duties to.
“This may not be your intention or outlook, but that is how it appears to
those that watch from afar,” Mr. El-Rufai said.
“This situation is compounded by the fact that some officials around you
seem to believe and may have persuaded you that current APC State Governors
must have no say and must also be totally excluded from political
consultations, key appointments and decision-making at the federal level.
“These politically-naive ‘advisers’ fail to realise that it is the
current and former state governors that may, as members of NEC of the APC,
serve as an alternative locus of power to check the excesses of the currently
lopsided and perhaps ambivalent NWC.
“Alienating the governors so clearly and deliberately ensures that you
have near-zero support of the party structure at both national and state
levels.”
Mr. El-Rufai said Mr. Buhari’s closest aides like the Secretary to the
Government of the Federation, SGF, and the president’s Chief of Staff weren’t
fit to manage the president’s politics.
“The SGF is not only inexperienced in public service but is lacking in
humility, insensitive and rude to virtually most of the party leaders,
ministers and governors.
“The Chief of staff is totally clueless about the APC and its internal
politics at best as he was neither part of its formation nor a participant in
the primaries, campaign and elections.”
The governor also wrote on the Senate President, Bukola Saraki’s
corruption trial and the frosty relationship between Mr. Buhari and the senate.
He told the president that the federal civil servants across the country
were so used to the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and the PDP way of doing
things, so much so that their loyalty was to the opposition party, because of
the several years of the PDP’s administration in the country.
“Mr. President, there is a perception that our government has been
captured by a shadowy public service/PDP cabal such that we have won elections
but the country is still run largely by these elements that are hostile to you
and to us all.
“There is a strong perception that your inner circle or kitchen cabinet
is incapable, unproductive and sectional. The quality and the undue
concentration of key appointments to the North-East and exclusion of South-East
are mentioned as evidence of this.
There is a perception that your ministers, some of whom are competent and
willing to make real contributions, have no clear mandate, instructions and
access to you. Ministers are constitutional creations Mr. President and it is
an aberration that they are expected to report to the Chief of Staff on policy
matters.
“Mr. President, there is an emerging view in the media that you are
neither leading the party nor the administration and those neither elected nor
accountable appear to be in charge, and therefore the country is adrift.”
Mr. El-Rufai, a well-known political ally of Mr. Buhari, said bluntly in
the memo that the APC administration under Mr. Buhari has failed to live up to
the expectations of Nigerians who voted the party into power.
“In very blunt terms, Mr. President, our APC administration has not only
failed to manage expectations of a populace that expected overnight ‘change’
but has failed to deliver even mundane matters of governance outside of our
successes in fighting BH insurgency and corruption,” Mr. El-Rufai said, adding
that the general feelings among the party supporters today was that the
government wasn’t doing well.
On the economic front, Mr. El-Rufai acknowledged that Mr. Buhari
inherited a bad situation, but said that the administration, having been in
power for more than a year now, could not, therefore, continue to blame the
previous administration for the hardship in the country.
“We were elected precisely because Nigerians knew that the previous
administration was mismanaging resources and engaged in unprecedented waste and
corruption.
“We must, therefore, identify the roots of our enduring economic
under-performance as a nation, and present a medium-term national plan and
strategy to turn things around.”
Mr. El-Rufai provided the president with detailed and insightful analysis
of the nation’s economy and offered suggestions on what could be done to put
the nation back on the pathway to prosperity.
For instance, he said that Nigeria was currently producing less
electricity than the city of Dubai, and that the power sector reform that was
started in 2000, earlier than the reforms in the telecoms sector, was now in
serious crisis and nearly at the point of total collapse.
On the state of the transport sector, he told the president, “Inter-state
(Federal) roads are generally in a state of disrepair. The national rail system
is still the colonial narrow gauge constructed by the British for the
extraction of needed raw materials rather than for the encouragement of
intra-national trade and connectivity.
“The dual track, standard gauge national railway system initiated by the
Obasanjo administration in 2006 has been partly abandoned in favour of
piecemeal implementation of sections rather than the integrated programme.
“There is significant potential in the development of inland waterways
but there has been no serious effort at seeing the dredging of Rivers Niger and
Benue to completion.
“The aviation sector is largely private and mostly insolvent. Virtually
all the major airlines are beholden to AMCON, and their services are poor,
unreliable and expensive.”
He advised the president to, among other things, appoint for himself a
“high profile” economic adviser, as well as set up a two-level economic team –
one at a political level to be chaired by the Vice President, and another at a
technical level consisting of the heads of key economic agencies “to do the
more detailed technical analysis and present options for decision and action”.
Mr. El-Rufai said, “The President must communicate actively and directly
with the Nigerian public about his vision – the government’s plans, strategy
and roadmap to take the country out of the current, dire economic situation.
“We need a five-year national development strategy and plan urgently.”
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