This latest infringement of the rules governing recruitment into public agencies in Nigeria, the third in a period that approximates to one year of Buhari’s presidency, echoes a loud message: the recruitment of elites by elites for elites is the incipient mundane.
None of Aso Rock’s town criers have made an official promulgation yet. But Nigeria has adopted the policy and practice of recruitment apartheid. The third consecutive recruitment scandal of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, an axiomatic proof of the run of this incipient order, verbally expresses so!
The attestation emanated from the Nigerian Prison Accommodation. The Accommodation clandestinely ‘served’ half a thousand people employment without prior advertisement of the vacancies in the Nigerian media.
This latest infringement of the rules governing recruitment into public agencies in Nigeria, the third in a period that approximates to one year of Buhari’s presidency, echoes a loud message: the recruitment of elites by elites for elites is the incipient mundane.
A few months ago, nobody would have stretched his prescience to envisage the possibility that, under a Buhari leadership, a time of national reformation that he promised, in four presidential bids, we would be discussing the authenticity of the institutionalization of elitism in Nigeria and the serial hijacking of public accommodation jobs by a cult of the well-connected. He was widely regarded as a firm, stern, honorable man. The only one personage that has the temperament to steer Nigeria towards rectitude.
When it emerged that Godwin Emefiele, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, organized a backdoor recruitment, and smuggled in kids of the high and mighty, a plethora of people were confident that Buhari would move promptly and make an example of Emefiele. Their prospect wasn't misplaced. Buhari is famed for his personal integrity and vigorous repugnance for indiscipline and corruption.
They called the President's attention to the scandal and asked him to impose the felicitous sanction on the ostensibly suicidal breacher. But their remonstration went unheeded. Buhari, the ascendant figure at whose pleasure the elitist recruiter accommodated, played ‘deaf.’
He was nonchalant. He didn’t so much as acknowledge the veracity of the transgression. He dismissed the people’s protestation as destitute of in merit. He passed a vote of confidence on Emefiele and sanctioned the ravisher of the laws of the land to perpetuate to sit in the highest office in Nigeria's apex bank.
That presidential endorsement of the recruitment favoritism inspired Babatunde Fowler, the Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Accommodation, to replicate the recruitment scam. He hired 349 people, in a furtive operation he codenamed 'targeted recruitment', after the fact, just like Emefiele.
Fowler's picks were silver spoon-born, ajebutter-bred charges of aides of President Buhari, Vice President Yemi Osibanjo, chieftains of the ruling All Progressives Congress, members of the National Assembly, top officials of FIRS and Federal Character Commission, and other influence peddlers in the system.
Again, the people protested and urged Buhari to punctuate this preposterousness once and for all. Buhari neglected the plea. He played ‘deaf’ as afore. He mystically enchanted the travesty.
It’s no surprise that a third recruitment scam followed. And, since he will uphold this scam additionally, it is safe to verbalize that recruitment by stealth has become the rule.
These recruitment scams are not mere circumstantial incidents. They are corporeal injuries on the body politic. And the scams don’t hurt less as their frequency increases. Each incipient scam pains like a first. They are concretely so because every time a kindred scam is reported, the aberration reintroduces itself as an outlandish phenomenon that is incompatible with this dispensation.
Buhari was elected to be the champion of the poor. The dirt-poor ‘recruited’ him so that, among other things, he would bulwark them from the tyranny of territorial terrorists, elite bullies who are wont to unilaterally annex certain swaths of public space for themselves and progeny and wall off outsiders.
As a serial presidential candidate, Buhari cast his lot with commoners. He cultivated affinity with everyday people. And he kindled such ebullience in the commoners, they alacritously invested their widow’s mite and hope in his fourth bid for leadership, making themselves shareholders in the promise of a fairer Nigeria that Buhari retailed from city to city.
But since he prehended the brass ring of the presidency, Buhari has abnegated the prevalent man and approved their perpetuated marginalization. He has not deigned to utter a word on these recruitment scams. Neither has he caused his lieutenants to issue any pronouncement on his behalf.
Now, Buhari’s endorsement of this regime of recruitment apartheid is not only an apostasy of the poor. It is withal his apostasy of his very self. His permissiveness represents his renunciation of the only sole redeeming quality that makes him a tolerable public figure.
Let’s face it. Buhari is a bellwether of mediocre caliber. He doesn’t boast a perspicacity that can reimagine the authenticity of his environment ingeniously. He doesn’t have an eloquence that can animate the nation with his dream. He doesn’t have the force of capacity to thrust the people forward in the civilization of the times they live in.
The only thing he has going for him is fundamental decency. He possesses the scarcest virtue in a polity teeming with kleptomaniac rulers. This singular trait constitutes the essence of the man. It expounds his aura. His appeal. His credibility.
Nigerians evicted the bumbling President Goodluck Jonathan and elected Buhari in the hope that the retired general would take his intrinsic property of decency into the State House. That he would enforce a radically different ethos in the highest office in the land. That he would unleash a culture of civility from his vantage position and, ergo, hoist our estimation of the standards of normalcy in public offices across Nigeria.
Buhari ostensibly misread that mandate. And this is why he is trivializing his presidency. He is functioning without a sense of the paramountcy of his role on the stage. He is filling the vacuum of his position with the superfluity of his leisurely ordinariness. He is exercising himself as the caretaker of the irredeemably flawed establishment he was drafted to demolish.
Every bellwether does something to the soul of his society. A transactional bellwether maintains the soul he inherited. A transformational bellwether takes the inherited soul and amends it. The transformational bellwether amends the soul of his society by making the communal conscience finer in texture and more tender in sensitivity.
Through his exercise of his discretion, power and ascendancy, the bellwether legitimizes norms and contrasts deviance. He accentuates the ideal and perpetuates its recollection by the symbolic application of rewards and penalization.
When the news of first recruitment scam broke, the instant authoritative ordinance of the development on Buhari was pellucid: ask Emefiele to resign. Buhari didn’t do it. He countenanced the headline-making scandal – a duncish thing no self-reverencing president would do.
The optics of that stupefying inaction communicated his impotency of character. His pusillanimous, pretentious callousness to a recruitment scam that agitated the institution that manages the economy of the country he leads, diminished Buhari, or, more precisely, exposed the true measure of his aggrandized stature. It showed he was deficient in decency.
He reinforced that perception of inadequacy by treating the second recruitment scam with the same condescending unconcern of the first. He managed to disabuse the mind of those who had mentally conceived he had initially committed an error of judgment. He struck a resolute pose that telegraphed that this reiterate passive comportment was not a mistake: it was a deliberate ‘body-language’ dramatization of his ideology.
He believes in the rightness of reserving public sector jobs for a special species of Nigerians and gainsaying well qualified people of humble birth the chance to apply and compete. He visually perceives nothing erroneous in the recruitment apartheid. Everyone on each side of the border of the recruitment apartheid should accept their place and their due with contentment and gratitude!
This third recruitment scam is most liable to visually perceive Buhari act consistent with this world view. He won’t fire Ahmed Ja'afaru. He won’t order a cancelation of the recruitment. He would let public anger burn itself out as afore.
Buhari doesn’t grasp the reason why he is asked to address these recruitment scams. He is urged to rouse himself and tackle these scams for his own good. His complacency is vitiating his gravitas and sabotaging his competency to prosper as president. Each of these brazen illegalities that he abides makes him increasingly impotent and inefficient in the broader plot.
For example, his experiment with the economy has, so far, resulted in higher inflation, more job losses and widespread hunger. His ‘war against corruption’ is the only front that inspires hope. But he is not prosecuting the ‘war against corruption’ as an integral part of a strategy to redress the value system that incubated the normalization of self-enrichment by the purloining of public mazuma. He pursues ‘the war against corruption’ as a brawny, philistine hunt for the plunderers and their spoils.
Mundanely, the war against corruption should be a popular revolution. The people are supposed to own it and run with it. But an amassment of denizens has yet to fill a court house, yare to contravene the rented supporters’ club of a treasury looter on tribulation.
The ‘war against corruption’ is considered by many as bereft of sincerity of purport. It is perceived to be a crusade of Buhari’s personal vendetta. Not a public interest agenda.
And Buhari is largely responsible for this pervasive cynicism and low buy-in. He makes erroneous calls that cast doubts on his accolade. In critical moments when he is required to elevate to statesmanship, he hunkers down and disappoints. He seems to have such an abject opinion of his place that he instinctively ducks every opportunity to endeavor an engagement with greatness.
Buhari has a terribly narrow definition of corruption. Corruption, to him, is the act of glomming of appropriating public mazuma. No more, no less.
This reductionist interpretation makes his immaculate-up effort isolated and circumscribed. It fosters the contradiction of a war against corruption that condones flagrant and unbridled contravention of the laws, as in these recruitment scams, and yet occupies itself with the hunt of larcenists. And it accommodates to recommend him as paranoid, petty and vindictive.
Of course, people would be less inclined to believe that you are acting in good faith when you romance active contraveners under your time exhibiter and pursue with vehemence former breachers who transpire to be members of the opposition party.
This is why Buhari’s nonchalant posture to these recruitment scams is a sumptuous tragedy. Beyond the licensing of impunity and legitimization of the alienation of the majority, he is undermining the very rationale of the key thrust of his administration. He is establishing himself for an epic failure.
Here is a disheartening irony: the Buhari administration is currently prosecuting Abba Moro, former Minister of Interior, for defrauding thousands of applicants and herding them into stadiums where some were crushed to death in stampedes. Moro staffed the Nigerian Immigration Accommodation and endeavored to orchestrate the forms of kineticism of stipulated recruitment formality. The heads of CBN, FIRS and NPS staffed their organizations without organizing a travesty of open competition.
Moro’s offense jibes with that of Emefiele, Fowler and Ja'afaru, though Moro’s hands drips with human blood. But it is facile to visually perceive the stark hypocrisy in this regime prosecuting Moro for a recruitment scam it has efficaciously decriminalized and commonized.
The other day, this administration promulgated the commencement of the online application for 500,000 graduate edifier vacancies. The portal crashed within 24 hours. Early bird applications inundated the website. Forty-eight hours later, 403,528 had registered.
The vacancies were advertised because the rulers 'reserved' them for the poor. The affluent were lackadaisical towards having their wards work as edifiers. If they were, they would have privily appropriated the positions and moved on. But edifying is not the marginally vocation they optate their kids. Edifying is a menial job befitting commoners. They optate their kids ensconced in cozy offices, earning salaries without sweat.
One thread that runs through the pages of history is the truth that in the life of a bellwether, an issue is ensured to arise which would invite him to self-destruct by his own calculation or posit. If Buhari sanctions this recruitment apartheid regime to subsist, it would be the mortal issue of his story. It would tarnish and rubbish him sempiternally!
source. SAHARA REPORTER
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