By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Few appointments have generated as much excitement— and entranced
the imagination of Nigerians— as the appointment of Ibrahim Agboola Gambari as Muhammadu Buhari’s Chief of Staff.
The Emir of Ilorin thanked Buhari for it even though there
is no record of him publicly thanking Olusegun Obasanjo when Abdullahi
Mohammed, another Ilorin son, was appointed Obasanjo’s Chief of Staff in 1999—and
reappointed by Umar Musa Yar’adua in 2007.
The Northern Governors’ Forum also congratulated Gambari on his appointment even though they had never congratulated
two previous northerners who had occupied the position.
And then you have mostly Yoruba irredentists who are intensely
apoplectic about Gambari’s appointment for both legitimate and utterly asinine
reasons.
The office of the Chief of Staff to the president, an
ordinarily unremarkable secretarial job in the presidency, is attracting this quantum
of outsized attention because of what it became when Abba Kyari held it.
As I noted in my May 13, 2020 social media update titled “Ibrahim Agboola Gambari: A Presidential Babysitter Who Won’t be as Powerful as Abba Kyari,” “The only reason the position of CoS to the President has become
uncharacteristically visible in the last five years is that Buhari is both too
cognitively incapacitated and too splendidly incompetent to function as
president, so he needs a proxy or, as I pointed out in my April 22 status
update, ‘a babysitter, a political and intellectual babysitter.’
“As a military dictator, Tunde Idiagbon was Buhari’s
political babysitter from 1983 to 1985. The late Salihijo Ahmad’s Afri-Projects
Consortium (APC), was ‘the sole manager of the PTF projects,’ according to Ray
Ekpu’s June 5, 2018 article titled, ‘Petroleum Trust Fraud.’ In other words,
Buhari couldn’t even manage a government agency as small as the PTF without
needing babysitting. Of course, most people know that since 2015 until his death,
Abba Kyari was Buhari’s proxy.
“Mamman Daura, on whom Buhari is intellectually and
emotionally dependent, ‘created’ Abba Kyari for Buhari but Kyari later grew
into a Frankenstein that almost devoured his ‘creator.’ Daura wants no repeat
of that and sees a potentially dutiful factotum in Gambari who was Buhari’s
external affairs minister from 1984 to 1985.”
In other words, Gambari was appointed CoS precisely because
the intellectual and political powerhouse behind the Buhari regime chose to
return the office to its previous lusterless, clerical drudgery. The Buhari
cabal initially proposed a northern Christian as a replacement for Kyari to ensure
that the position is stripped of the atypical influence Kyari brought to it—and
to bring a little dash of token diversity to the Presidential Villa.
They later chickened out and settled for Gambari because,
although he is a brilliant, globally connected scholar-administrator, he is
also notoriously malleable, manipulatable, and usable. (Anyone who can defend
Abacha’s tyranny and deride Ken Saro-Wiwa and his comrades as “common criminals”
in the aftermath of their horrendous judicial slaughter can do and defend anything.)
Most importantly,
although he self-identifies as the descendant of a Sokoto Fulani man who migrated
to Ilorin in the early 1800s, he is too culturally removed from members of the Aso
Rock cabal to be an insider.
In Nigeria—and elsewhere—identity is performed mostly
through language. Gambari doesn’t speak Hausa. When he appeared in the
Presidential Villa on Wednesday, for instance, Buhari’s protocol officers
welcomed him in Hausa, but he responded to them in English.
When the Presidential
Villa correspondent of an international Hausa broadcasting station asked to get
a soundbite from him in Hausa, he said he wasn’t proficient enough in the
language to give one. This isn’t surprising for people who have studied his biography.
Gambari spent his formative years in Ilorin and Lagos where he
was exposed to only Yoruba and English. When he came to Ahmadu Bello University
in Zaria as a senior lecturer in 1977, he was already in his 30s by which time
the window of opportunity to learn a new language had closed for him. So he
will always be an outsider on the inside.
This is particularly significant because Buhari has difficulty
forming deep informal interpersonal relationships with people who don’t speak
Hausa. In my October 21, 2017 column titled, “World Bank, Buhari, and Presidential Subnationalism,” I referenced this trait of socio-linguistic
insularity in Buhari.
I wrote: “Buhari’s interpersonal discomfort with, and
perhaps contempt for, Nigerians who are different from him—often expressed
through awkward snubs and linguistic exclusivism—go way back. On page 512 of
Ambassador Olusola Sanu’s 2016 autobiography titled Audacity on the Bound: A
Diplomatic Odyssey, for instance, we encounter this trait:
‘I was asked by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs… to
accompany Major-General Buhari on a trip to West Germany when he was Petroleum
Minister in 1978,’ he wrote. ‘During the flight, to and fro, [he] did not say a
word to me even when we sat side by side in the first-class compartment of the
plane. When we got to Germany and went to the Nigerian Ambassador’s residence,
[he] spoke entirely in Hausa throughout with the Ambassador-in-post. He did not
speak to me throughout the trip. I was deeply hurt and disappointed.’”
As far as Buhari and his handlers are concerned, Gambari is only
a little more culturally familiar than Sanu because of his Muslim faith. The
fact that they settled for him to lend a veneer of “diversity” to the face of
the presidency is all the proof you need to know that they don’t regard him as
one of them.
In other words, people who are congratulating Gambari because
they think he’d be another Abba Kyari who would overstep the bounds of his
office and represent Nigeria abroad to negotiate deals, invite the INEC
chairman to his office and tell him how to conduct elections, remove the Chief
Justice of Nigeria and replace him with a dunce that is amenable to his wiles,
determine who gets a government appointment and who is excluded, etc. would be
disappointed.
And Yoruba irredentists who are imputing motives to, and
delegitimizing, his middle name because they think he’d be another Abba Kyari
should have their hackles down. He doesn’t bear Agboola because he needs the validation
of Yoruba people in the southwest. He bears it because there is no Ilorin person
who doesn’t bear a Yoruba name.
In a two-part column I wrote in August 2018 titled, “Ilorin is an Ethnogenesis: Response to Kawu’s Anti-Saraki Ilorin Purism,” I said, “I
know of no Ilorin person, whatever his or her ancestral provenance, who does
not have a Yoruba given name.”
The current emir of Ilorin, who is the son of Ibrahim
Gambari’s older brother, was known as Kolapo throughout his professional
career. He only became “Ibrahim” after his ascendancy to the Ilorin emirship.
Although Tunde Idiagbon traced patrilineal descent from Fulani ancestors, he
never identified with his Muslim given name, Abdulbaki, throughout his life. In
fact, he gave all his children Yoruba names: Adekunle, Babatunde, Ronke, Mope,
and Bola.
Contrary to what Gambari’s Yoruba critics allege, Yoruba
names are the authentic appellative identities of Ilorin people. Their Muslim—and
sometimes Fulani—first names are often, but not always, opportunistic appellative appendages to court
the acceptance of political power wielders from the far north.
I have lost count of the number of times my Ilorin friends’
parents unintentionally disowned their children when I went to look for them in
their homes using their Muslim names as their only identifiers. They recognized
their children only when a younger relative who understood the people I was
describing identified them by their Yoruba given names.
What both the cheerleaders and critics of Gambari are
missing is that he was appointed to his position because the people who “own”
the Buhari regime have decided to return the position to its former
unremarkable, pre-Abba Kyari state. Let Gambari be.
