I know I was not the only one concerned...
As an employer of labour with a thousand staff whose salaries I must pay, I know that not a few of my employees and fellow employers of labour expressed similar concerns especially as Barclays indicated that it was soon to follow the route taken by JP Morgan.
However, with a cabinet about to be in place, it is the expectation of Nigerians and the international community that the concerns raised by international banking consortiums and global rating agencies on Nigeria’s economic direction would soon be addressed. Yet, now is the time for well meaning Nigerians to speak up and articulate ideas to the president and his ministerial nominees on what steps they could take to improve their chances of success at turning around Nigeria. I have always believed that it is the height of mental laziness to reject ideas because they come from an All Progressives Congress (APC) or Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) person. That type of behaviour ushers in silly season in politics and business.
I mean, Nigeria’s economy is tanking. Our economy could even be said to be sick. Anybody that fails to see this may be living in denial. Does a sick man reject the cure for his sickness because his doctor is PDP or APC? I think not. So I urge the government and the party in power to have an ear to the ground and soup up advice. Who knows where the solution to our economic situation will come from? On my own part, I would offer some advice to the president and his would-be cabinet on little things that they can do to build a better working relationship amongst themselves and between them and the Nigerian people. My advice may be small, but I would urge my readers not to underestimate the big difference small changes make.
My first advice is to the would-be cabinet of which I played a part in their successful screening in the Senate of the National Assembly last week. Each of them, no matter what portfolio they are eventually given, must see their job as COMPLEMENTING each other as part of a complementary team and not as COMPETING with each other as individual runners in a race. I have been up close and personal to almost all administrations in Nigeria beginning from my tutelage under Vice-Admiral Akinwale Wey who taught me much of what I know of Nigerian history and our style of government to my mentoring under the sagacious intellectual, President Olusegun Obasanjo.
If the public knew how much of the failure of successive administration was caused by infighting and competition amongst ministers and kitchen cabinet members they would actually stop blaming past presidents and heads of state and direct their verbal missiles at their aides. Competition within an administration distracts the president and impedes the ability of the government to deliver the goods.
In the last 16 years of civil rule, Nigerians have witnessed the rise of online news sites that have become a thorn in the flesh of governments at all levels because of the sensitive news, half truths and down right lies they sensationally publish. Nothing has distracted Nigerian governments over the years as these news outlets. They have also been assisted by print tabloids that call themselves news magazines but which publish sleaze instead of mainstream news. I can authoritatively state that much of the sensitive news that finds its way to these media emanate from competing ministers and infighting kitchen cabinet members struggling to outdo each other by secretly revealing embarrassing information about their colleagues to undermine their influence with the president.
Where they have no dirty laundry to air against their colleagues, they cook up lies and half truths and these websites, hungry for Internet traffic, and their print media colleagues desperate to increase circulation and advertising, publish these stories without verification which are then swallowed by an unwitting public hook, line and sinker. The end result is that the government starts to react and once a government enters reaction mode, the administration loses the moral authority it requires in order to achieve anything meaningful and must from that time rely on authority borrowed from the offices its members occupy.
Let me ask President Buhari if he can remember the names of President Abraham Lincoln’s aides and cabinet members. I am even going too far. No one remembers who served with Ronald Reagan. They only remember Reagan and Bush!
For President Buhari to be successful, he must not tolerate the type of self-defeating behaviour I outlined above because while his ministers will share in his success, none of them will share in his failure. If the administration fails, history will record that Buhari failed.
He is best served if he reminds his ministers that there is no ‘I’ in team work and as such individual team members must resist the urge to use the media to promote themselves. Let their work promote them instead. No matter what individual cabinet members in any government may think, none of them is as smart as all of them, therefore it is their teamwork that will make the president’s dream work!
It has been rightly said that if you see yourself as the big picture, your reflection will prevent you from seeing the true big picture. And if I may ask, what is the true big picture? That is a question that can only be answered by President Buhari as he makes his vision so clear to his team because if a leader has no vision his team has failed before they even began. Change is a slogan not a vision!
My next advice to President Buhari is that he must live out the adage he articulated during his Independence Day broadcast when he said that “order is more vital than speed”. His ministers would be in a hurry to impress him. Many of them who themselves have presidential or gubernatorial ambitions would be in a hurry to impress Nigerians. As such, they may bind the government by making wild but popular promises in order to ingratiate themselves into the good books of the president and the public. But such behaviour is counter productive because though the windmills of government surely, they also grind slowly. Very slowly.
Nigerians have not so soon forgotten ministers who promised them uninterrupted power supply by year’s end. Years have passed since those promises were made and either the ministers meant light years or the light they referred to was candle light! You see, when you are in government, you should not be in a hurry because people will forget how fast you did the job but they will not forget how good or bad you did it! Then moving on to the president, I sincerely advise him to value his ministers because cabinet members work for the vision of a president that values them and sabotage the agenda of presidents that they feel do not value them.
Although what I am about to say may raise unpleasant memories in the president, but his own personal history bears out the truth of what I have said immediately above. He should be tolerant to his ministers and ensure that he talks to them or with them but never at them!
If any of them habitually comes to him with juicy gossip on other team members (as would undoubtedly happen), he should save his administration by showing such a one the door. As soon as he does that, all other ministers will fall in line!
Finally, President Buhari should remember that leadership is pure and simply the ability to translate vision to reality. He should use that as a yardstick for deciding who remains in the cabinet and who gets dropped. Ministers must deliver results and not activity. The president ran on an agenda of change. His ministers must make change a reality or jump off the change trains with alacrity.
These are my little nuggets of advice to the president. I give this advice not because I am a supporter of the president or his party but because I am a supporter of Nigeria and it is in my interest that the driver of the car called Nigeria, in which I am a passenger, gets the car to its destination safely and with the passengers in good condition to continue the journey that goes on and on.
My name is Ben Murray Bruce and I just want to make commonsense!
by BEN MURRAY BRUCE
Ben Murray Bruce is the senator representing Bayelsa East and Chairman of the Silverbird Group
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