Draw up your plan for 2020

Alhaji Jamilu Aliyu Zannah, who rejected his appointment as Zamfara State Commissioner for Education last week, gave as his reason Governor Bello Matawalle’s failure to place a phone call to him during his three-week sojourn in an Indian hospital. Zannah believes he deserved a phone call to check on his condition because he was Matawalle’s campaign manager during the last general election. Insofar as Matawalle did not get his governor’s chair at the polls but as a direct fall-out from APC tussles, I personally wonder why the campaign manager deserves much recognition, but no matter.

This talk about phone calls reminds me of an episode that happened during the Nixon Administration, as revealed by leaked memos. A low-level staffer of the White House Congressional Liaison Office wrote a memo saying a Republican senator was terminally ill. His boss took the memo and recommended that President Nixon should place a call to the dying senator. When it got to Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman’s desk, he decided that since the senator was dying, there was no political value for the President to call him. Instead, Haldeman reasoned, it will be more advantageous for the President to phone and condole with the widow after the senator dies. So Haldeman minuted on the memo, “Wait until he dies.”

I do not know whether Matawalle’s Government House in Gusau operates such a systematic, cold-blooded operation to determine which phone call the governor should make or should answer. It may soon become necessary to do so. Every governor in Nigeria, and the president too, needs a system to regulate his phone calls, text messages and social media engagements. It will offend many people, especially professional politicians who are wont to say that “we were the ones who put him there.” If a ruler doesn’t do that however, he will squander so much time on the phone and in the social media that he will leave many important things undone.

Not only phone calls. In Nigeria, state governors attend innumerable marriages, birthdays, funerals, condolences, church and mosque occasions as well as turbanning, installation and appeal fund launchings. In addition, they attend numerous meetings in Abuja, of party, National Economic Council, Council of State, Police Council, to see the President, to meet with IG, to see individual ministers and key agency heads in order to lobby for projects. Many of these are essential duties of a governor but if he does not prioritise them, all the time will pass and he will realise that he left more important things undone.

While the president has less compulsion to attend domestic social events, he receives numerous invitations to foreign meetings, of the UN, AU, ECOWAS, Lake Chad Basin Commission, bilateral visits, world powers that regularly summon all African leaders to summits, as well as to climate change, security, investment and population control summits. One must resemble the Artful Dodger in managing all these IVs. For President and for governors, some meetings are very important. Some are not so important. Others are what the media call jamborees, the ones that only provide photo-ops and the chance to rub shoulders with the high and mighty. Delegation is the key here; at most of these occasions, some other high official could represent the president or governor and brief him privately and in council on what transpired.

Given that governance at all levels in this country has suffered from the absence of strict policy, travel and engagement priority setting, it is necessary, going into the last full week of 2019, for each leader to sit down, streamline his operations and set his firm priorities for 2020. President

Buhari has already streamlined his operations by directing his ministers to deal with the Chief of Staff first. Although this arrangement has its problems, it also gives the president time for deep reflection as well as the setting and enforcing of priorities. That is, if he curtails foreign trips.

A governor will do well to sit down this week and list ten key projects that he intends to accomplish in 2020. He should also identify ten or so socioeconomic policy goals that he intends to accomplish in 2020, as well as some priority projects for which he needs to court federal, CBN, NGO, private sector or foreign help and map out how to go about getting it. A governor without firm priorities will be pulled this way and that by contending forces and will be dashing from one location to another and in the end, may not accomplish much.

Many years ago, I witnessed how a certain Northern state governor was allocating resources for the month. He sat in one small office while repairs were going on in his main office. There were only two visitors’ chairs; the Finance Commissioner sat on one and I sat on the other. The Commissioner summarized for him on a sheet of paper the money that was available, and he listed all the major demands that various ministries and agencies were making for the money, which was far short of the demands.

Meanwhile, seven other commissioners stood with us in the small office. Despite the governor’s plea for them to go out, not one of them did, so he ordered the ADC to lock the door so that more people will not come in. He then dithered over the sheet of paper; he will tick some items, then cross them. He finally ticked some items and the commissioners concerned wildly jubilated. I thought: this man needs to set his priorities.