THE sack, midway into her tenure, of Chinelo Ahonu-Amazu, as Director-General of National Pension Commission (PenCom), and the repeated extension of the tenure of the permanent secretary of the Education ministry, Jamila Shu’ara, are indications of some of the incongruities assailing the Buhari presidency. Some critics, however, say the problem is not so much incongruity as impunity. Why the sack of the PenCom executive management team is contentious is not because the officials were sacked midway or that the government did not have the authority to take such measures, but because of the refusal to adhere to the provisions of the Pension Reform Act 2014. The government has not found it fit so far to explain or defend its actions.
Both the chairman and D-G of PenCom, if sacked midstream, are for example to be replaced by appointees from their zones in line with the Pension Reform Act 2014, Section 21 (2). The presidency ignored the law, sacked both, and refused to in effect do a substitution as demanded by the relevant law. In the Education ministry, Mrs Shu’ara retired in 2016, and there were replacements waiting in the wings. Instead, her tenure was twice extended, and despite heated controversy swirling around the matter, the extension was furthermore documented by the office of the Head of Service of the Federation and given force till February 2018. It was an exceptional treatment that the government simply refused to explain or defend. In fact, in the letter reappointing her, the government warned that it was an exceptional step that should not be cited as policy. This incredible affront is hard to understand.
The Education ministry is of course a hotbed of controversial appointments. In February 2016, the ministry had announced the sacking of 13 vice chancellors of mainly new federal universities, with some of them yet to complete their tenure. The excuse was that no enabling Acts backed their establishment. Though the Acts were later discovered, the error was not reversed. And no apologies were issued.
The Buhari presidency has consistently claimed to embrace the rule of law. There is no proof that it consciously tries to do so. When it has obeyed the rule of law, it has seemed to do so by accident rather than by design. Indeed the situation is so bad that it has flouted the law when there appears to be no special advantage in doing so. Some of the sacked 13 VCs were, for instance, on the verge of completing their tenure. More shockingly, it was puzzling to discover that a skewed number of the replacement VCs were appointed from the same geopolitical zone, not to say from the same university.
Mrs Shu’ara’s departure would not have injured the Education ministry in any way, regardless of how competent and ‘irreplaceable’ she is. And what would it have cost the government to appoint replacements for the chairman and D-G of PenCom from the zones the sacked ones came from as the Pension Act provides? These unforced errors are many and multiplying, to the point that it simply makes no sense to commit them. The only plausible reasons for some of these anomalous measures and appointments are that the Buhari presidency is either at bottom sectional, as critics have said, or that the president has deliberately or inadvertently ceded his powers to faceless persons and groups.
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