Election: ANC can learn from President Buhari

Buhari

Nigerian politics is notoriously corrupt and frequently chaotic, but there are lessons to be learnt from Africa’s most populous country, especially since it has hard-earned experience in both the democratic governance and dictatorship departments since achieving independence from Britain, 55 years ago this month.
While there are certainly aspects of Nigeria’s governance history that SA would not want to emulate, since his election earlier this year President Muhammadu Buhari has sought to correct flaws in the system and introduce practices designed to promote effective governance rather than merely entrench power, a frequent criticism of his predecessors.

This includes the cabinet appointment process, for which he has taken considerable flack both at home and abroad because it has taken so long — his administration took effective control from the beginning of June, yet his cabinet was finalised only in the past few weeks.

However, the criticism may be misplaced, since it is now apparent that Mr Buhari has gone to great lengths to screen potential ministerial candidates to ensure they are not tainted by conflicts of interest or corruption, a scourge that has long been preventing Nigeria from achieving its economic potential.
He also dedicated much of his first few months in office to dealing with the security threat posed by Boko Haram, putting in place a military co-operation agreement with neighbouring states that has so far shown great promise in containing terror attacks.
Much as in SA, the Nigerian cabinet is appointed by the president, subject to confirmation by the senate. Ministers are responsible for policy, while permanent secretaries — career public servants who are the equivalent of our directors-general and account to the relevant minister — are responsible for policy implementation.

Interestingly, the British tradition of career public servants who avoid political affiliation and can, therefore, remain in place when the government changes, survives in Nigeria.
Competence and corruption remain an issue. However, "cadre deployment" and the horror stories this approach has produced in SA are largely avoided, partly because the president is less involved in the appointment of permanent secretaries.
Unlike in SA, the Nigerian constitution specifies that the composition of the federal (national) government "and the conduct of its affairs" must "reflect the federal character of Nigeria ... thereby ensuring that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few states or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in the government".

In practice, this has translated to a convention that has been maintained throughout the democratic era, in terms of which there is at least one representative in the cabinet from each of Nigeria’s 36 states, either as a full minister or as a deputy, known in Nigeria as a minister of state.
Mr Buhari has stuck to this convention but broken with another maintained by the People’s Democratic Party of his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, in terms of which state governors nominated ministers. This resulted in political trade-offs that served party politics rather than effective governance.
Where SA — especially the governing African National Congress — could learn from Mr Buhari is in his approach to ministerial appointments themselves. He did not have to change his country’s constitution, or even legislation, to ensure competent people were appointed to key cabinet portfolios. Mr Buhari retains considerable discretion in this department, but even though about half of his new ministers are political veterans, the rest are essentially technocrats from outside the political establishment in the fields of law, medicine and finance.

Among them are a former ExxonMobil executive, a UK-trained accountant and investment banker, and a former Goldman Sachs executive who now heads Nigeria’s biggest private equity firm, giving business a voice in policy making that is sadly lacking in SA.