New Hands On Deck(?)

Unlike his immediate predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, who was a military Head of State way back in the early 1980s, precisely 30 years before he was elected President of Nigeria in 2015, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed is absolutely new on the job. Even as the former Governor of Lagos State who, while there, demonstrated enough capacity for the engagement of competent hands for the purpose of the design and implementation of policies and programmes of government, he is not the same as a second timer.

Yet, he is a former governor whose expertise in governance has been firmly established, which is the strongest reason for the hope that he will speedily expand his horizon and vision to incorporate issues that are essentially national. The new president is, in fact, expected to quickly begin to have that kind of pan-Nigerian outlook that is a fundamental feature of a true president of Nigeria in whose hands the citizens of the country can willingly entrust their future.

Tinubu is, in other words, assumed to have possessed the amount of competence that is sufficient for a starter like him to strategically commence action. A combination of his past records as a former democracy activist and later state governor as well as his usual pronouncements and actions on politics, governance and all other matters of public importance has made a lot of Nigerians to have the impression that his emergence as Nigeria’s president can easily translate into a commencement of a particular phase of a democratic process that can be most defining of all the previous ones.

Although he is rightly regarded as one of the most fundamental pillars of the All Progressives Congress (APC) that produced the last government under Buhari, the new government of which he is the head is not expected to be a complete continuation of the last one.  Having come at a time when various groups of Nigerians have both arrived at diverse, nay conflicting, conclusions and also developed correspondingly varying impressions about the new government, all of which should be maximally critical to his approach to the governance of the country, the new president should strive to be a miracle worker of some sort in his well-acknowledged bid to fix the country.

Apparently, Tinubu benefits from the belief that he is a team builder who must have, by now, concluded arrangement for the engagement of the right hands for the job. Most of those who have, by any possible means, been either already engaged or may be invited into the government are expected to be people with the required understanding of the enormous challenges that the governance of the country fully represent.

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“All hands must be on deck in order to move Nigeria forward” as one of the most popular calls on Nigerians for the purpose of making them to partake in the task of nation-building should serve as the basis on which recruitment of the people into the new government should be made. The particular fact that the country has all it takes to make progress and the citizens can do far better in terms of individual and collective contributions towards the attainment of national goals should continue to necessitate the search for only those who will be true facilitators of credible governance.

An outline of the priority areas in which the new government will carry out critical actions as contained in President Tinubu’s inaugural address is, perhaps, an indication of some readiness for real performance. It all shows that as a leader of a giant country that is, however, a victim of a lot of infractions by some of the past leaders, he is not unmindful of the high expectation that his plans and styles will be robust enough to serve as solutions to the numerous problems that have unfortunately become the main features of the political and governance processes in Nigeria.

By stating that the mission of the government is to “improve our way of life in a manner that nurtures our humanity, encourages compassion towards one another and duly rewards our collective effort to resolve the social ills that seek to divide us”, he has captured the issues that are of huge concern to the citizens. The clear expression of determination to look into the issues of security, economy, agriculture, infrastructure as well as monetary and foreign policies is suggestive of the admission of the fact, on his part, that a lot need to be immediately remedied in these and some other sectors.

Nigerians are, of course, not unaware of the fact that Tinubu and all those other new leaders at the lower levels are products of mere elections, not a revolution. They, therefore, should not be required to behave in a manner that will portray them as agents of the kind of radical change that is being furiously advocated by a lot of elements in the country when, after all, both the composition and size of the new government may not be significantly different from what obtained in the past.

However, it will not be proper to just rule out the possibility of the occurrence of some fundamental adjustments that can result in a major redesign of strategies for the management of vital national issues. A certain body language of the new president and some of the real and potential key figures of the new government has somehow shown that the adoption of measures that are different from the usual ones which will expectedly yield better results is much more likely than not.

The drivers of the new government with Tinubu as the biggest of them are not new hands in the strictest sense as they were at various times and levels key participants in the governance of the country or some parts of it. Even as they continue to sing some songs that carry strong messages about the need for the kind of reforms that can effectively bring to an end the ugly culture of abuse of the processes and procedures of management of affairs and delivery of services by the government, they are still, in a lot of quarters, seen as some kind of pretenders who should not be easily trusted,

At the same time, they can choose to behave in a manner that can make them look like the ones that have the kind of new hands that should be put on deck in order to move the country forward and ultimately render such a negative perception meaningless, which is really the expectation at the moment. If, for example, the new president improves and widens his strategies for a vigorous search for people with the required quantities of capability and readiness to key into his vision, the new team can inspire confidence in all Nigerians.