In a rare memo to President Muhammadu Buhari, the Governor of Kaduna
State, Nasir El-Rufai, has narrated how bad the nation was faring under
his watch, 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 Sahara Reporters 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 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 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.
“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.”
El-Rufai said 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 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 of 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.”
El-Rufai,
a well-known political ally of Buhari, said bluntly in the memo that
the APC administration under 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,” 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,
El-Rufai acknowledged that 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.”
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”.
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.”
The
Kaduna state governor said he was inspired to write the memo to the
president because of Mr. Buhari’s contribution to his rise in politics
and that his political future was tied to the performance of the
president.
El-Rufai described the president as the “only hope” for Nigeria, and urged him to run for re-election in 2019.
“You
have to run again in 2019 if your objectives of national restoration,
economic progress and social justice are to be attained in the medium
and long term.
“You must, therefore, succeed for the good of all
of us – individually and collectively, and particularly those of us that
have benefitted so clearly from your political ascendance,” El-Rufai
told the president.
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