By nightwatch News Analyst
Putting together a cabinet by a leader who is not influenced by nepotism is not an easy role. It is a lonely station, But some leaders are influenced by their kitchen cabinet that comprises close friends not excluding their wives or husbands as the case may be. In passing let me mention the remark of President Buhari when he said his wife belonged to the other room when she tried to go beyond the bounds of the Kitchen Cabinet.
Indeed quick decisions are unsafe and sometimes one finds oneself halting between two opinions .Some people are appointed by decisions arrived at on the spur of the moment .Here we say there is an element of luck but in a Cabinet that should be more productive there should be appointments done by quiet calm deliberations than whimsical ones.
No amount of theory can be a substitute for experience which is why the President cannot afford to leave out persons who had had experience in Ministerial posts .It will not be out of place to reinstate persons like Dr.Alpha Wurie and Mr.Alpha Timbo to the Ministries that they occupied before .The President himself is using the experience he gained as Deputy Chairman of the NPRC and Head of State for three months so if he discounts experience he will be discounting himself.
Another factor in the fixing of a Cabinet is the appointment of persons to Ministries of their expertise .There should be a clean break with this practice if we lay any claim to a practical NEW DIRECTION .That is not the ideal practice of Cabinet rule. It is a backwardly Africanized practice responsible for most of the bottle necks within Ministries. A pundit and Educationist like Dr.Morie Manyeh should be deployed at another Ministry instead of Education .If engineers are sent to the Ministry of Works they will end up at the Presidency where the buck stops. This is avoidable because a Cabinet Minster need not be an expert in a Ministry but to administer policy guidelines as laid down by Cabinet .This presidency should get out of the old mould and make a marked difference.
From the leaked Cabinet list of Ministers it seems that women are again seriously marginalized .One would have thought that their conspicuous absence from parliament would have seen their significant presence in the Cabinet.
By applying the measures outlined above President Bio can hit the ground running and not walking.