Those who should not be ministers (2)

The race to get onto the ministerial list for the coming dispensation is hot. Understandably, President Goodluck Jonathan is under pressure. Apart from the complex political calculations he has to make, power brokers are scheming to get their wards and proteges on the list. However, a close look at the antecedents of some of the names being touted show that they are definitely not fit to be ministers. THE PUNCH continues its special series on these nominees and highlights why President Jonathan should resist the pressure to appoint them as ministers.

Olusegun Agagu If this former Governor of Ondo State and failed senatorial candidate in the just concluded general elections, Olusegun Agagu, 63, sails through the current jostling for ministerial appointments in the new President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration, then his middle name, Kokumo, (he does not die again) will be said to be at work. Reason: he has continually held public positions since the commencement of the Fourth Republic in 1999. And the magic cannot be attributed to any superlative performance in any of the offices he had occupied in the last 12 years. Indeed, his involvement in public service predated the current democratic dispensation. He was the Deputy Governor of Ondo State during the aborted Third Republic between 1991 and 1992.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo appointed him his pioneer Minister of Aviation in 1999. He became the Governor of Ondo State in 2003 and stole a second term victory in 2007 but was later sent packing by the Court of Appeal in February 2009. The court returned Olusegun Mimiko, a former Secretary to the Ondo State Government and candidate of the Labour Party, as the winner.

Agagu was on March 5, 2009 questioned by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for alleged N25bn spent by his administration on the Ondo State Oil Producing Areas Development Commission. Also, the Mimiko administration has commenced probe of contracts awarded in the last six months of his administration. Ayo Arise One of the surprises in the ministerial list proposal from Ekiti State is the name of this Oye-Ekiti-born controversial politician.

In 2003, he joined active politics and was at various times governorship aspirant on the platform of Alliance for Democracy, Action Congress and Senatorial candidate under the banner of the Peoples Democratic Party. In a saner clime, his defection from one party to another within a few years will be interpreted as a mark of inconsistency, which is not a good quality for somebody aspiring to be a minister in the most populous black nation.

The successful entrepreneur who holds a Master’s Degree in Urban and Regional Planning is, like many politicians of his ilk, not without a past that is far from desirable. His role in the violence that characterised the governorship re-run in his state in 2009 readily comes to mind.

Many political thugs loyal to the senator were arrested in his Oye-Ekiti residence with various weapons and charms. For daring to take the photographs of the suspected hoodlums, a photojournalist with THE PUNCH, Segun Bakare, was beaten blue and black the following day in front of Arise’s sprawling residence by his followers led by a woman suspected to be his wife. Bakare’s working tool, a Nikon 300 camera, was destroyed and seized by the rampaging aides in the presence of Arise.

On November 10, 2007, a violent fight reportedly ensued between the then Ekiti State Commissioner for Education and Technology, Mrs. Abiola Ayimonche, and Arise, resulting in the disruption of the PDP’s primaries in Oye Local Government Area for several hours.

During the fight, Arise’s clothes were reportedly torn to shreds. He also received severe nail scratches on his face and neck. In the pandemonium that followed, delegates that had been on the queue and ready to vote fled, while the riot policemen attached to the two combatants watched helplessly. Eyewitnesses said a disagreement between Arise and Ayimonche over the procedure for the primaries led to the fight.

Fighting in the public, even in the face of provocation, is no doubt, not a good attribute of a minister.

One of the favours President Goodluck Jonathan should do his countrymen is to keep such an enemy of democracy away from the ministerial temple. Olagunsoye Oyinlola Brigadier-General Buba Marwa (retd.) holds his popularity as military administrator of Lagos State, between 1996 and 1999, to the abysmal performance of his immediate predecessor in office: Olagunsoye Oyinlola. The retired Brigadier-General and prince of a sleepy Okuku town in Osun State was an appointee of the late dictator, Gen. Sani Abacha, and he ruled the Centre of Excellence from December 1993 to August 1996.

For the 33 months that Oyinlola ruled Lagos, public utilities and sectors, especially roads, totally collapsed. The roads were either riddled with craters or taken over by heaps of refuse. In explaining the deplorable state of Lagos roads, Oyinlola pleaded non-availability of bitumen. But Marwa was able to procure the ‘disappeared’ bitumen and fix the roads and other infrastructure, in the succeeding three years, to the admiration of Lagosians.

Oyinlola left the military in 1999 and returned to his Osun home state to join the political fray. Four years after, he was elected the governor on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party. He stole a second tenure in 2007 but was sacked by the Court of Appeal in October 2010. During his tenure in Osun, he was again rated low in performance, compared to his predecessor, Chief Bisi Akande, who was the governor from 1999 to 2003.

However, if his times in Lagos and Osun states recorded minimal achievement, they were not short of controversies. If Oyinlola is appointed minister as proposed by the Osun PDP just a few months after his dismissal from office by the court, President Goodluck Jonathan would be seen as compensating an election rigger and an alleged non-performer. That is contradictory to the image the president is pushing. Ruquayyat Ahmed Rufa’i When President Goodluck Jonathan appointed Prof. Ruqquayyat Ahmed-Rufai as the nation’s 44th education minister and the eighth since June 1999, on April 10, 2010, expectations were high as there were a lot of challenges facing the sector. Nigerians thought that with her appointment, the sector would enjoy the kind of robust ideas a one-time education minister, Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili, brought into the management of the sector between June 2006 and April 2007.

But events in the last one year have revealed a mixed bag of fortunes. There have been some flashes of hope as she encouraged the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board to release the result of the matriculation examination of 2010 after two weeks of its conduct.

Apart from the fact that she did not come with her own blueprint as the case had been since the new democratic dispensation, her implementation of the roadmap for the development of the sector packaged by her predecessor, Dr. Sam Egwu, has not proved her to be a worthy minister.

The four critical areas of Egwu’s roadmap – increased access, quality assurance, technical, vocational education and training and funding – are still begging for improvement. And rather than working to actualise them, she has added two teacher-training and development to the component of the roadmap.

These, she stressed, remained critical factors in the repositioning and delivery of quality education, as well as strengthening and coordinating 21 parastatals under the ministry.

Before her appointment, the Federal Government had signed an agreement with workers’ unions in the nation’s tertiary institutions. But up till now, the agreement has neither become a law nor has it been reviewed as stipulated by the letters of the agreement.

Due to this, workers’ unions, including the Academic Staff Union of Universities and the Senior Staff Union of Nigerian Universities, have threatened to embark on another round of strike if the agreement is not signed into law or reviewed as enshrined in the document. So far, the minister has not done anything in this direction.

Ahmed-Rufa’i, in the last one year, has carried on with her “don’t rock the boat attitude,” preferring rather to pander to the wishes of Jonathan, her benefactor. Otherwise, dons who were opposed to what they described as the ‘political establishment’ of six new federal universities, argued that the minister should have advised against what they described as a ‘big joke’.

So, with her laid back attitude, a lot of observers believe, the professor of Arabic Studies does not deserve a return to the cabinet as a second term minister. They advise the president to appoint a seasoned and unbiased educationist or technocrat to head the ministry. Patricia Etteh It is definitely a measure of how bad things have turned in Nigeria and, sadly too, a pointer to where the country is headed that less than four years after Mrs. Patricia Olubunmi Etteh was disgracefully forced out as the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, she is being positioned for a federal appointment in the incoming President Goodluck Jonathan administration.

The brief reign of the Ikire, Osun State-born hairdresser-turned- politician at the exalted position came tumbling on October 30, 2007, just four months after her emergence. A panel of enquiry of the House found her guilty of inappropriately awarding contracts worth N628m to renovate her official residence and that of her deputy, Babangida Ngoruje, and buying 10 units of Toyota Land Cruiser and two 320 Mercedes Benz cars at the cost of N123m and N49.6m respectively.

A woman of limited education, Etteh turned the lower chamber into a laughing stock while she was in charge in her use of English. For instance, she referred to the House as “This hollow chamber”, when she meant ‘hallowed chamber’ and called the airport runway, “run away”.

In saner and more serious countries, the likes of Etteh should be spending some time somewhere else other than in the corridors of power. But this is Nigeria, where the very worst among us, someone once observed, can be the one calling the shots.

The way forward for this nation does not lie in the hands of evidently discredited and deficient politicians. Surely, Patricia Etteh does not represent the way forward for Nigeria, and should be discarded by President Jonathan.