BUHARI APPOINTMENTS: Presidency list may be incomplete

The Presidency may have knowingly, or unknowingly left out a number of names in its list of appointments made so far by President Muhammadu Buhari.

In the wake of the controversies trailing political appointments made by President Buhari, the presidency had released a list of names and appointment it said were not skewed towards any geo-political zone.

Reacting to a newspaper publication which accused Buhari of favoriting the north in the appointments made so far, Femi Adesina, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, released a list of 159 appointments, representing all appointments made by the President since assuming office in 2015.

However, a deeper sturdy of the list sent out by Adesina revealed a number of omissions.

The list did not contain the names of a number of Special Advisers (SA) and personal assistants to the president, among whom are Bashir Ahmad, the president’s Personal Assistant on New Media.

Also, the names of appointees at the Federal Mortgage Bank (FMB) left out Hajiya Rahimatu Aliyu – Executive Director (Loans Department, Securities Issuance and Market Development).

Read also: As Presidency releases list of all Buhari’s appointments, it declares ‘majority are not from the North’

At the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) the names of Tijani Suleiman – Executive Director and Mr. Jasper Azuatalam – Executive Director were not listed.

Funnily, a statement by Mr Adesina in March 2017 had named Mr. Folorunsho Coker as the newly appointed Director-General of the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation (NTDC), but Coker was actually appointed, and has been serving as DG of the Nigerian Tourism Development Commission (NTDC) as stated in the presidency list.

The list, which the presidency claimed was comprehensive, containing every appointment made by Buhari since assumption of office however left out names of some appointments into a number of parastatals.

On October 6, 2017, Mohammed Nakorji, Assistant Director Press in the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF) had announced a 13-member Governing Board for the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency, (FERMA) which he said was subject to Senate approval.

It would be recalled that some appointments that had been made recently at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) had stoked bad blood from some parts of the country, especially the South-east, which said nobody from that zone was appointed into the board of the nation’s cash cow.

This had prompted a former President of Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Dr Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, to institute a court case against the Federal Government over what he described as “lopsided appointments” at the NNPC.

A number of appointments approved by President Buhari on March 31, 2017 into the executive management of some government agencies and parastatals, as announced by Mr Adesina, were not mentioned in his list.

They include those into the boards of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) and the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN), as well as the National Theatre and National Troupe of Nigeria, National Council for Arts and Culture and the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) among others.

This is not the first time the Buhari administration is being accused of lopsided appointments, or nepotism.

Earlier, Dr Junaid Mohammed, a frontline northern politician and former member of the House of Representatives in the Second Republic had accused the current administration of nepotism.

He had given a detailed breakdown of family members, and relatives Buhari had appointed into different offices in his administration, a claim the presidency is yet to react to, or refute.

 

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