Widow of the late former Biafran leader, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu has returned to government as a junior minister. If approved (0r rather, when approved, if she will not be given the El-Rufai voice-of-Jacob-hand-of-Essau confirmation treatment) by the Senate, she will serve as the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs.
In that position, she will serve as Nigeria’s deputy international image-maker-in-chief, a position she is certain to fit into rather snuggly. For, as it is often said here of a person or persons walking a familiar terrain, she had been there. In 2011, she was appointed Senior Special Assistant on Diaspora Affairs and in 2012, Nigerian High Commissioner to Ghana and later that same year, Ambassador to the Kingdom of Spain, by then President Goodluck Jonathan. So, when it comes to speaking for Nigeria on the global stage, Mrs. Bianca Ojukwu can be counted to do a swell job of it, because she comes with experience.
But Mrs. Ojukwu’s appointment comes at a cost to Anambra. First, she replaces an activist Anambra-born Minister, Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye whose removal cannot rationally be explained except that this government of vested interests is unlikely to allow a nosy, change-desirous, anti-vested interests, extremely self-confident lady to stay onboard as minister and ‘spoil things for person’.
Once peeved by the shenanigans of civil servants who organize all manner of workshops and conferences just to find ways to line their pockets, the former minister was to fume: “Money is given to ministries, and it is spent on travel and programmes that do nothing to impact the nation. If you knew the amount of money the government allocates to ministries, you would be shocked. Why should this continue? Why should we stand by and let it happen? Who do you think will save you? It’s you who must save yourself. Let them call me names—troublemaker, madwoman—I am ready to take it.
“You talk about peace and security, but with poverty, how can you achieve that? You keep organizing workshops, but where are we heading with poverty? How do we solve it? By diverting money to activities that have no impact on the people you claim to want to help?”
This kind of no holds-barred, self-opinionated lady as Tinubu’s Minister?
The former minister also took on the UN system as it affects Nigeria, alleging that more than 40 per cent of monies collected for Nigeria by UN agencies is often frittered away as agency fees or service charges and the like and paid to a myriad of consultants, both Nigerian and outsiders, vowing to make it difficult, going forward, “for anyone to work in our country with the kind of way they’ve been working before now.”
“Things must have to change,” she once declared, insisting that “the narrative must change…”
And she boasted that she had the support of Tinubu in her determination to change the way things were done, at least as far as her ministry was concerned.
“If I didn’t have the support of Mr. President, who born you? I would have been sacked by now. That’s what Presidents normally do,” she said in a chat with Arise TV in New York on the sidelines of UNGA79, explaining that she would have been sacked for stepping on toes if she didn’t have the support of the president.
Now see what Mrs. Kennedy-Ohanenye got for doing her work rather exceptionally: a sack! And, you ask, so exactly what is the politics?
Secondly, Mrs. Ojukwu is a card-carrying member of APGA and an ally of the Anambra State Governor, Chukwuma Soludo. What is the politics of her appointment? For a Tinubu who has the greatest appetite for utilitarian politics, there must be some politics of self-aggrandizement in this development. To hit APGA from within and home in for APC capture of Anambra in 2025 as the ruling party’s National Chairman Ganduje has boasted? Or simply to affirm his disdain for Igbo States and the seeming pleasure in doing things that tend to put them down. Why didn’t Tinubu replace Kennedy-Ohanenye, a senior minister, with another senior minister from Anambra? Could he not have made Bianca Ojukwu a full minister?
It is instructive that only two States of the South East have full ministers, namely Ebonyi, Minister of Works and Enugu, Minister of Science and Technology. Could Uzodinma have fallen out of favour? How could Imo, South East’s APC powerhouse, with its Governor as Tinubu’s man-Friday, have had its Minister demoted to Minister of State? From Minister of Trade and Industry, Imo’s Doris Nkiruka Uzoka-Anite is now Minister of State for Finance. And how could Abia, where Deputy House Speaker, Benjamin Kalu and former Governor, Orji Kalu are Tinubu’s strong men not have got the Minister of State for Labour from their State, Mrs. Nkeiruka Onyejeocha, promoted to a minister?
One’s interpretation of the developments is simply that Tinubu is not convinced that he has true allies in the South East, who can be trusted with full ministerial authorities, either by themselves or their proxies, to work for him. So, like Buhari (and it is possible that the obvious anti-South East stance of former President Buhari was a Tinubu intellectual input, given the president’s seeming “pepper-them-more” policy towards the South East), Tinubu would appear content to simply fulfil the constitutional obligation of giving the South East’s due to them but not in any significant way. The idea may be to weaken the zone politically and economically as well, to ensure it isn’t of much moment in the 2027 political calculations.
Whatever the reason for Tinubu’s unapologetic curt treatment of the South East since the beginning of his presidency, there is nothing, I wager, politically savvy about it. The idea in the South West that the zone doesn’t matter as long as one is working with the North (a mistake the late Moshood Abiola and even the revered late Chief Awolowo made) remains a political miscalculation in political Nigeria. With the Peter Obi political revolution afoot in Nigeria, a thorough-bred South Easterner’s impact on the politics of the country, is it still politically sounder to antagonize the South East than woo the zone with kinder political actions?
The total capture of the Nigerian state by the Tinubu tendency in 2023 to win the presidency may well be the elixir goading the president to act with so much disrespect to groups and nationalities in Nigeria. But even if the president has “taken care of things”, in preparation for the 2023 presidential election encore, as can be seen from his security, judicial and INEC appointments (he retains Mahmood Yakubu as INEC Chairman, for Christ sakes!), how much of the push-back plans of the rest of political Nigeria can he account for?
One had expected that instead of simply preparing for an improbable 2023 presidential election encore, President Tinubu would be wooing Nigerians of all political, religious, cultural and ethnic persuasions to support and work with him to deliver on his mandate as president of the Federal Republic. That he is not doing that but seems to still rely on old tricks to tackle the political challenges of now and the future shows he is largely stuck in past, you know, hobbled by is a self-assured obduracy that may hurt the presidency going forward. The notion that leadership is defined only by eternal survival politicking driven by acrimony, discrimination, hate-mongering, bone-deep nepotism and ethnic baiting, as the Tinubu Administration has demonstrated this past one year and five months, may well be the undoing of Tinubu’s politics.
