President’s tacit indictment of Ganduje and others

....also published in Daily Trust

The conspicuous absence of Kano state governor, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje and his Katsina state counterpart, Aminu Masari among the thirteen governors commended by President Muhammadu Buhari in his National Day address last week, for their contributions towards the steadily growing success of his administration’s economic diversification policy in agriculture, captured the interest of many observers. The thirteen state governors who earned the Presidential commendation were the governors of Kebbi, Lagos, Ebonyi, Jigawa, Ondo, Edo, Delta, Imo, Cross River, Benue, Ogun, Kaduna and Plateau States.

By implication, this commendation is also a tacit indictment of the other governors. Of course, as Bakano, I am particularly interested in the implications of Governor Ganduje’s absence in the list, being also governor of the ruling All Progressives Congress’s largest stronghold in the country. Governor Masari’s absence is also quite interesting, being governor of President Buhari’s home state i.e. Katsina, which is also arguably the second largest stronghold of the ruling APC.

Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje of Kano state

Now, unsurprisingly, no sooner had the President finished his address than some Ganduje’s critics began to ridicule him and rejoice for what they consider their vindication for insisting that he has failed to live up to expectations. His political opponents from Kwankwasiyya faction of the APC in particular gloated over what they regarded as President Buhari’s show of disappointment in him despite his purported loyalty to him (Buhari). Interestingly, since falling out with his former boss, Rabi’u Kwankwaso, Governor Ganduje has been increasingly portraying and promoting himself as a staunch Buhari loyalist in his apparent attempt to neutralize the looming threat that Kwankwasiyya followers and other disillusioned Kanawa pose against his re-election bid in 2019.

Obviously, politically speaking, the possible implications of this Presidential commendation of some states could be rather detrimental to the President’s expected re-election bid in 2019. This is considering how governors call the shots in their parties’ policy-decision processes at the national level, and effectively unilaterally run the state chapters of the parties in their respective states. Besides, this, among other things, is apparently what Kano, Katsina and other poor-performing APC governors simply intend to leverage to secure re-election in 2019. Also, their purported loyalty remains a political ploy intended to enable them to continue benefitting from Buhari’s unrivalled popularity in their respective states, and to capitalize on the gullibility of the gullible among the electorate who are unfortunately many, if not actually the majority, to get re-elected thanks to largely their perceived loyalty to Buhari. 

With this apparent line of thought, such poor-performing governors apparently don’t see any need to justify their stay in power or their re-election bids with the provision of sustainable economic infrastructure or strategic development projects that are adequate enough to attract domestic and foreign investments which, in turn, create jobs hence wealth, and bring economic development into the society. Without dismissing the importance of the construction projects, they provide here and there, these governors lack dynamic brains innovative enough to think beyond the provision of white elephant projects that lack potential to generate proportionate economic development, or projects that are simply too substandard to support proportionate and sustainable economic activities.

Equally frustrating also, when they travel outside the country ostensibly on a mission to attract foreign investors, they betray embarrassing and inexcusable naivety in the politics surrounding the process of attracting foreign investors. The typical trend is this regard is that, a state governor would be accompanied by an unnecessarily big entourage of largely political office holders to, say, China, where they would end up being attended to by a factory manager or, at best, by the factory owner who would show them around his factory as some members of the entourage are busy taking pictures of the governor and his attendants to flaunt in the mainstream and social media platforms giving a false impression of the governor’s purported commitment to attracting foreign investors into his state. However, at end of the mission, all what they bring back home is a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that would end up in the archives.

Now, though President Buhari’s commendation of those governors is apparently aimed at encouraging them to do more and also encouraging their counterparts to follow suit, yet, it’s high time adequate mechanisms were put in place to provide easily accessible and regularly updated verifiable details on state governors’ performances in their respective states using transparent rating formula to rate them according to the amount of resources at their disposal and economic potential of their respective states.