• Tuesday, March 19, 2024
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BusinessDay

Gambari in quiet push to re-direct the presidency and make it work better

Gambari

The new Chief of Staff to the President, Ibrahim Gambari, has begun a quiet operation to redefine the mode of engagement in the Presidency with special focus on enhancing delivery of the government’s key objectives.

This will also promote harmonious working relationship between the respective offices of the president and vice-president.

Gambari, a long-serving diplomat who has personally witnessed and successfully worked to defuse crises in different locations across the world, was appointed two weeks ago after the death of his predecessor, Abba Kyari.

It is now emerging that Kyari had placed such a strong grip on the workings of Nigeria’s seat of power and in the process setting aside established collaborative working protocols. He also centralised considerable policy-making and executive power in himself far beyond what had become known and through three presidential tenures as the established role of a chief of staff to the president. This antagonised many in government and ensured that only what he (Kyari) wanted got the attention of President Muhammadu Buhari.

The late CoS was said to have set up a secretarial clearing house with three key staff deployed during the tenure of Lawal Daura as DG of SSS and who worked as secretaries to Abba Kyari. This system bypassed the entire administrative/document-processing system institutionalised in the State House over the previous three presidential tenures. This structure was supported by a court of senior aides, including Fola Oyeyinka, Faruk Gumel and Abdulmuttalab Mukhtar who had the official titles of senior special assistant to the president but who, by virtue of their being part of Kyari’s working inner circle, exercised power far beyond their titles, job descriptions and authority.

A fourth member of the group is one of the president’s special assistants co-opted by Abba Kyari to ensure the flow of documents to the president as preferred by him.

This group of special assistants is led by Oyeyinka, who first came to Kyari’s attention by virtue of his marriage to a lady who happened to be very close friends with Aisha, Kyari’s daughter, herself a vice-president at the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority [EE1].

BusinessDay learnt that Gambari has been studying the internal workings of State House, Abuja (better known as The Villa) and examining how memoranda on various policy and executive matters are prepared and sent to the president. Gambari may have been pushed to act after controversy erupted following the dismissal of the erstwhile managing director of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) by the minister of power, Saleh Mamman.

The sack of Mohammed and his replacement by Sule Ahmed Abdulaziz in acting capacity was communicated via a one-page memo by Gambari titled “Re-aligning the Transmission Company of Nigeria with the Presidential Power Initiative”. The interesting thing, however, is that this Presidential Power Initiative is actually a euphemism coined by the late Abba Kyari and his team for the equally controversial $2bn Siemens equipment supply contract being put up by them as the silver bullet to solve Nigeria’s power sector problems.

This contract did not pass through known procurement procedures under Nigerian law, was not requested by any of the companies in the electricity sector, was not and still is not part of the Federal Government’s Power Sector Reform Programme and had never been known to be a subject of consideration or approval by the Federal Executive Council.

In fact, until the ill-fated trip to Germany by a Federal Government delegation led by the late chief of staff to negotiate terms of this contract, even the minister of power himself was excluded from any intimate knowledge of the deal. This is said by those familiar with standard working procedures of the Federal Government and the Federal Executive Council (FEC) to be not only unusual but also highly irregular.

Even before the demise of Kyari, the MD of TCN, Usman Gur Mohammed, was seen as an opponent of the Siemens deal and so before Gambari’s arrival, a memorandum was written by the minister of power, accusing the MD of being an obstacle to a deal that essentially had no foundation of support either in the electricity sector or in the Federal Government’s electricity sector reform plans.

BusinessDay understands that with the knowledge of aides including Oyeyinka, the minister of power wrote the required memo to the president. It is now not clear when the president actually saw and approved the memo, but it was treated with lightning speed.

Gambari who, immediately upon resumption, was presented the letter conveying the purported presidential approval of Mohammed’s dismissal by a member of the Oyeyinka-led group of aides, is now keen to locate all the originating documents supporting the minister’s allegation against Mohammed and the request for his termination.

The new chief of staff wants to be sure that the process of the sack aligns with extant, well-articulated “approved disciplinary procedure against chief executives officers of Federal Government parastatals, agencies and departments”, which were summarised in a May 19, 2020 circular to all ministers by Boss Mustapha, secretary to government of the federation.

In that memo, the SGF said, “Upon receipt of the submission from the Minister (to request a disciplinary action), the Secretary to the Government of the Federation shall without delay cause an independent investigation and advise Mr. President on the appropriate course of action, including interdiction or suspension in accordance with principles guiding sections 030405 and 030406 of the Public Service Rules, pending the outcome of the independent investigations and it shall be the responsibility of the Secretary to the Government  to further advise Mr. President on the next course of action, based on the outcome of the final investigation.”

Gambari, it is believed, has also made a general call for the location and delivery of all supporting documents that will usually accompany requests and advice to the president. Days ago, a Lagos newspaper reported that as many as 150 memos without the president’s authorisation may have been uncovered. It is now understood that there are also hundreds of memoranda from various ministries, departments and agencies to the president that, for unknown reasons, were left untreated since 2015 by the former chief of staff and so were never delivered to the president for his attention.

“There is no power grab in any of the actions of the new CoS,” a senior official told BusinessDay. “The new helmsman simply seeks the effective functioning of the presidency so that the key objectives of the president can be delivered and promptly too.”

Abba Kyari had a completely different way of carrying out his duties and was accused by some of emasculating the office of the vice president. He virtually usurped authority from various key MDAs of government and aggregated the powers in his office. This led to gross inefficiency which resulted in the phrase “go-slow” used by Nigerians to describe the pace of action at the presidency.

Those with good knowledge of the goings-on over the last four years say rather than be a facilitator of an efficient presidency, Kyari became an initiator and direct executor of government policy.

It is into this near chaos that Gambari, the 75-year-old diplomat, has now arrived. With no time to fight anyone but with a firm insistence on getting the presidency to function properly, the new chief of staff is now quietly enthroning his mark on the presidency.