EL RUFAI TO BUHARI- I AM LOYAL TO YOU SIR- LETTER ARCHIVE FROM APRIL- what has changed?

Kaduna State Governor, Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai

Starting well the work of change - Thoughts for President Buhari - April 2015

We have done the impossible.

We have defeated an incumbent president and our party has won large majorities in both houses of the National Assembly. All things being equal, we will likely win the majority of the 29 governorships being contested on April 11, in sha Allah.

Congratulations sir. Now the real work begins.
Expectations are at an all-time high. It is a giddy moment for Nigeria because under your calm and consistent leadership, we have shown that achieving the impossible only takes longer. To sustain this, we must set the right tone and direction of your administration in a manner that is both timely and appropriate.

You must send the right signals very early on that not only “change has come to Nigeria” but in reality things will change in the shortest possible time. The people believe in you. They trust you. I have great confidence that you are determined to discharge that trust. It is in the light of the above that I decided to write this memo to present my thoughts on what I consider critical to your success in the coming days, weeks and months. We must neither lose the enormous goodwill that you currently enjoy, nor the governance momentum people expect, once you are sworn in.

I have seen these avoidable events happen to the Obasanjo, Yar’adua and Jonathan administrations. President Obasanjo almost completely wasted his first term in office by trying to do things the old way and with the same familiar set of characters. We must guard against that being our fate.

First and foremost, I am concerned about your staying alive and well. You are trained in the art of conventional warfare and survival. You are by nature a careful and thoughtful person. However, your religion, culture and personality sometimes combine to create room for fatalism. I believe we must always prepare for the worst, while of course hoping for the best. In this transition period and thereafter, you must be especially mindful of potential attempts to cause you physical harm or worse.

This may sound far-fetched, but the desperation of those that seek power for financial gain has no limits. My suggestion is that you take a short break, perform the Umrah and engage in both rest and reflection as soon as the transition team begins its work. The political system and economy you are about to inherit are broken. Our various peoples are more divided today than possibly even during the Nigerian Civil War. Political actors have become transaction-oriented across parties, including ours. National security and military institutions have been desecrated and politicized. Public administration has been excessively corrupted. Law enforcement is weak and selective and the justice system so privatized that money often determines judicial decisions at all levels. The economic situation is dire and oil prices likely to remain in the $50 per barrel range for some time to come. Our debts have multiplied in the last eight years while reserves and financial system stability are currently under very serious pressure.

It is 1984 for you all over again— only far worse. These are some of the reasons why I said
a year ago that I sympathized with you. You must therefore put forward some organizing principles around which your administration would be designed that will enable Nigerians identify and adopt as a unifying vision for the next decade or so.
In my humble opinion, these principles should be national unity, social discipline, personal sacrifice and the constant signalling of hope for a better tomorrow. You must through your words, your personal example and the selection of the team around you, unite our nation by creating a sense of inclusion that gives people of proven honesty, competence and commitment, roles in your government. The mistake of the outgoing regime of creating a strong appearance of an Ijaw enclave, or the Katsina-Kano cabal of Yar’adua, must be deliberately avoided. There will be a strong “it’s our own turn” sentiment among many of our own allies and comrades. This must be strongly resisted.

We must also move away from the PDP culture of excessively zoning positions without regard to merit. Primacy should be given to capacity to get the job done ahead of ethnic and religious considerations. Federal character should first prioritize competence, capability and honesty, while consciously making an effort to reflect our diversity. The PDP system of leadership by identity-centered allocation brought the nation to near collapse.

It is your duty to bequeath a better one. It is the exhibition of equal concern for all citizens in all regions that will unite our people and reduce the negative use of ethnic, religious and regional identity in governance.

All across our society, you must preach a new message of sacrifice. The cost of governance must be reduced while tax collections increased as a matter of national survival. This requires consensus on sacrifice by all groups. Times will be hard. Fixing what has been broken will need sacrifice on the part of everyone.

Government officials should be humble. The fanfare, protocol and the sirens that excessively separate the people from their leaders must be moderated as a matter of conscious and deliberate policy. You will have to set the tone for a new era of modesty. You have to make ostentation socially abhorrent and, to use the language of today’s youth, uncool. You will have to enjoin all APC governors, legislators and ministers— and everyone in the service of the federal government— to do the same. Our people will make these sacrifices willingly when they see their leaders making the same.

Individual discipline, respect for rules and regulations and compliance with the rule of law are major tenets of your first outing as head of state. If anything, things have worsened dramatically in thirty years. Indeed, indiscipline, and impunity are some of most serious challenges you will have to confront. You must remind our citizens consistently to be personally disciplined, respect rules and obey the law. You must require political leaders to do same, and as usual, confirm that you will lead from the front.

While the nation is more deeply divided than ever, the North appears more cohesive than ever. This is a phenomenon that needs to be nurtured, moderated and mobilized for the overall good of Nigeria. There are many lessons here to learn from Ahmadu Bello’s style of inclusive leadership that gave primacy to respect of minority rights and concerns.

Addressing the recent devastation of parts of North-Eastern Nigeria and the emergence of unprecedented security challenges in the North-West and the Middle Belt require collaborative actions and cooperation between the state governments and your administration. This must be approached with single-minded vigour.

A key requirement of setting the right tone and direction of your government is to choose the right people early to constitute your core team that will work in the State House. Over the years, you have worked with many persons and have assessed their capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. It is vital you bring this to bear in your (1) constitution of the transition team, (2) choice of personal staff, (3) prominent cabinet positions and (4) leadership of key regulatory institutions and federal executive bodies. These initial decisions all combine to send signals to political, economic and diplomatic stakeholders about the direction of your government. Getting these wrong spells doom for any administration. The transition team you announce sends the first signal within and outside the party and our nation regarding the direction of your administration.

As you may have noticed during the composition of your campaign council directorates, there are at least three groups continuously competing for your attention, struggling for control, and seeking to determine who gets on that and other lists for various reasons. Each group is important and contributed to your success. The challenge is how to moderate individual and group expectations, discourage factionalism, and make key appointments in a manner consistent with the tone and direction of your administration.

The Lagos group more or less led by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is the most organized and proactive. This group made a key contribution in our electoral success, but like all groupings it naturally exaggerates its role in order to increase its influence in the coming administration. The group will use the media to promote its own “GMB Boys” or suggest “Northerners” of their choice that they think would do their bidding. Some already are boasting that they will choose the next petroleum minister and the executive leadership of the NNPC. They will seek direct control or great influence over key economic portfolios, including agencies involved in revenue generation (NNPC, FIRS, Customs, etc.) law enforcement (Attorney General, EFCC, etc.) and financial services regulation (CBN, SEC, PenCom, etc.). This group will seek an alliance with some GMB family members to help strengthen their pre-eminent position in these areas.

The national chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun is under pressure from the APC leadership to ensure that the party plays a prominent, rather than a back seat, role in your administration. The chairman is being guided behind the scenes in this effort by the likes of Senator Lawal Shuaibu, Dr. Hakeem Baba Ahmed, Senator Bukola Saraki, Hubert Shaiyen, Dr. Kayode Fayemi and Senator Bunmi Adetunmbi. This group essentially desires an entrée into your government through the party and are concerned more with political power than commercial transactions. While the chairman’s agenda is altruistic and progressive, some of those pushing this effort are, not surprisingly, driven by personal positioning and advancement. This group will attempt to take strong positions in the transition team as policy entrepreneurs and “technocrats” and representing the party hierarchy as a first step in controlling the machinery of the federal government. They will therefore focus on ensuring that they have a say in who occupies administrative and bureaucratic offices like that of the Chief of Staff, the SGF, Head of Service, key Permanent Secretaries and headship of parastatals.

The third group is essentially an amalgam of the remnants of your original TBO-CPC-BSO apparatchiks and the campaign team loyal to, or able to tolerate Governor Rotimi Amaechi. Even here there are outliers as this group is neither cohesive nor with a clear agenda other than affection for you as a person. Indeed, rivalries between group members sometimes divide its attention as we saw during the campaign period. This group is probably the most loyal to you even if some members are positioning themselves for what they feel is well deserved, cherry-picks of executive appointments and positions in your government. This group will essentially look forward to controlling the State House (The Villa) and be the main personnel in the President’s office. The group will ally easily with your family members to deepen and broaden its influence.

A fourth group is likely to emerge to include former, outgoing and current state governors. Under the PDP system this group wielded a lot of power over federal appointments while exclusively retaining control of their states and local governments. I think this is one area in federal-state relations that needs urgent and fundamental reforms. The fifth group that would emerge if you do not keep a close watch on the party organs and the replacement of likely vacancies in party leadership positions is the APC National Executive Committee, National Caucus and the Board of Trustees.

Finally, the National Assembly will present both a challenge and an opportunity. One of the challenges is how to accommodate the South-South and South-East in the leadership scheme of the NASS bearing in mind their voting behavior and results of last week’s elections. The opportunity is for you and the party to allow the NASS members to freely choose their leaders in much the same way we elected our candidates without external imposition of ‘zoning’ and other PDP habits that nearly brought our nation to its knees. My suggestion is that you avoid endorsing a candidate or recognize any so-called geopolitical zone having any exclusive right to any position in the NASS leadership. Let them have as many rounds of elections as possible to produce the leaders. Thereafter, let seniority in NASS automatically determine leadership as we have seen in the US Congress and other developed economies. Let the rigid rule of leadership by geographic allocation be gradually but surely phased out.

The quality and caliber of the personal staff you appoint, along with a handful of key executive positions will either reinforce the tone and direction of your government or contradict it. The key positions to watch out for are Chief of Staff, Deputy Chief of Staff, Principal Secretary to the President, Secretary to the Government of the Federation and the Head of Civil Service. Others are the visible advisory positions – the NSA, Economic and Political Advisers. All these are appointments that can be made without needing Senate confirmation and even before inauguration so that work can start without delay.

Cabinet appointments are constitutional and subject to Senate confirmation. So are the service chiefs and heads of Federal Executive Bodies like the Civil Service Commission, Police Service Commission and the EFCC, etc. The SGF-designate can establish which of these offices have imminent or likely vacancies available so that the search for replacements can begin in earnest. The President is required to nominate a minister from each of the 36 states. It is vital that while our unity in diversity is observed, the caliber of persons to the following ministries will also reinforce the tone of direction or contradict it – Finance, Defence, Petroleum, Power, Works, National Planning, Education, Health and Agriculture.

It is important that these persons are carefully selected with emphasis on integrity, competence, capacity and chemistry to work well with the President. I urge that you seriously consider filling most of these positions with “political neutrals”— technocrats and subject-matter experts who are not necessarily very active in our political party or in any of the identifiable groupings described above.

Next in order of priority is the selection of heads of various regulatory agencies like the CBN, NCC, NERC, SEC and the Anti-Corruption agencies. Once again, those nominated for Senate confirmation in these positions either raise new questions about the tone and direction of your government or send clear signals about the new policy direction. Many of the positions are due for renewal and work needs to start in earnest to search for the most suitable persons that reinforce your national vision of unity, discipline, modesty and sacrifice. Other sub-cabinet appointments are key to our success, and such must be taken equally seriously. These include the FIRS, NNPC, BPE, BPP, DPR, UBE, FERMA and so on. It is vitally important that even key positions that do not immediately come up for renewal, such as governor of the Central Bank, be made available for new leadership.

Mr. President-Elect, I cannot overemphasize the importance of setting up a mechanism for recruiting and vetting all potential candidates, via a small committee of three to five people that will be appointed by you. This committee, separate from a transition committee, and working mostly quietly behind the scenes and reporting directly to you, should be dominated mostly by people that are not too deeply political. I urge you to prioritize setting up such a committee now.

Permit me to conclude this note with a checklist of what I will call “hot-button” issues that will confront you beginning from the middle of April 2015. Many of them have been brewing for a while but kept under wraps by the outgoing administration ‘until after the elections’:

1. Risk of Fuel supply bottlenecks due to non-payment of “subsidies” and subsidy regime itself.

2. Shutdown of the crude oil export terminals due to disputes about levies (and bribes)

3. Position on the $2bn budget support loan from the World Bank and AfDB being rushed by Minister of Finance

4. Merging of duplicating agencies to save costs as recommended in the Oronsaye Report.

5. Rushed nomination of executive director and President of Africa Development Bank by the Minister of Finance and the Presidency.

6. Security sector review and development of rapid response counter-insurgency strategy, particularly urgent depoliticization of the SSS and polluted branches of the armed forces.

7. Treasury Status – Extent of Salary & Pension Arrears, Crises in state finances, etc. at least 24 states are unable to pay salaries without bridging loans. There is a need to look very closely and early into the operations of the Federation Account. Insolvent states can only add to our inherited significant security and political challenges

8. Immediate Budget Review – Supplementary Budget to refocus tone and direction including the proposed review of VAT and luxury taxes.

9. Agricultural Inputs Prioritization for the 2015 cropping season to avoid a famine in 2015-2016. Maize prices have collapsed due to imports, while warehouses are filled with imported "duty-free" rice much below our farmers' production costs.

10. Quick Wins and Strategies – Electricity, Insurgency, Road Repairs, Abuja Renewal, etc.

11. A careful look at the exchange rate particularly the sustainability of the current resurgence of the Naira and the stock market and avoiding being blamed for any future exchange rate adjustment.

12. An early consideration of currency policy and operations, including recent redenomination, redesign and rationalization of notes and coins in light of the alleged massive seigniorage of the CBN in the last few months to finance elections and bail out the recently privatized Electricity Distribution companies.

Fortunately, I believe that the Hand of God was tilting in our favour from the very first day the APC was conceived. There are also tons of goodwill, and millions of talented people, especially young people, willing to support you and make a success of your presidency. I hope that this memo adds to the menu of suggestions you have on your table. I wish you all the best of luck sir, and will continue to work and pray for our collective success, to bring our nation back to the track of peace, progress and prosperity.

I am sure you know that you can always count on me to contribute in any way that improves our chances of success.

Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai
Abuja. April 6, 2015

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