● Intrigues As He Issues Second Threat To Cabinet In His First Year Of Office
● Why Mr President Is Experiencing Jitters
When passion bites the dust, a true leader learns to recognise the demons of his failures. He does not idolise them nor does he launch a desperate defence to rationalise them as success by other means.
Rather he uses his failure or the possibility of failing to sharpen his intuition, by acknowledging mistakes for what they truly are: feedback.
In the same vein, it may be said that President Bola Tinubu has identified and accepted the possibility of his government failing due to the mediocrity of his kitchen cabinet.
This informed his urgent resort to strongly worded reproach and threat to his over 47 ministers. President Tinubu, last Wednesday, threatened to sack any of his cabinet members who fail to deliver on the specific mandate of his or her ministry as his administration settles down to the business of governance.
Due to their dismal outing at the recently concluded United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), among other events, President Tinubu has read the riot act to his ministers.
The poor performance of some ministers at the recently concluded United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), among other issues, has exposed them to possible sack or redeployment.
Soon, after their shameful outing, President Tinubu ordered a retreat for his ministers entitled: Delivering on the Renewed Hope Agenda.
Tinubu handed down the threat while declaring the 2023 Cabinet Retreat for Ministers, Presidential Aides, Permanent Secretaries and Top Government Functionaries open at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
Speaking on the theme: “Delivering on the Renewed Hope Agenda,” Mr President said his administration was not oblivious to the challenges ahead but there must be a clear-cut decision and action plan by all stakeholders to wriggle out of the problems.
He also stated that since becoming President, he had graciously accepted all challenges and liabilities thrown at him by his predecessor.
He said there would be no room for excuses, hence the reason he took his time to assemble all the best brains in his cabinet, who can aid the administration to meet the yearnings and aspirations of the citizens.
The President said he had directed the Special Adviser on Policy Coordination, Bala Hadiza to head the Result and Delivery Unit, through which key performance indicators of all ministerial appointees would be monitored.
He said at the end of the retreat all ministers would sign a bond of understanding to track those performing to expectation or not.
“If you are performing nothing to fear, if you miss the objectives, we review, if you have no performance you leave us, no one is an island because the buck stops on my desk,” Tinubu stated at the retreat.
Among the key priorities the Tinubu administration wants the cabinet members to focus on are food security, ending poverty, economic growth and job creation, access to capital, inclusivity: drawing on skill base, security, fairness and rule of law and anti-corruption.
The speed with which President Tinubu ordered a retreat for the ministers may have also suggested that he could have been briefed on the below-par performance of some of his cabinet members during the trip.
In the last week, the media had been awash with the threat by President Tinubu to axe some ministers, which prompted insinuations in some sections of the press that a cabinet reshuffle was imminent.
Findings revealed that the President might have discovered that, indeed, there were some square pegs in round holes among members of his team, which may be impeding the efficiency and performance results envisaged by their appointment.
A private sector operator, who was in New York for the UNGA, recounted a particular case where a minister “blew a chance” to sell Nigeria to the world.
The businessman said he was disappointed at the inability of the minister to drill down on the huge offerings the new administration was bringing to the world.
The lapses in judgment of his ministerial team and their failure to put up a good showing at UNGA thus became a major source of irritation to President Tinubu. This made him organise a hasty retreat for their reorientation; it was at the retreat that he issued his recent threat to them.
This is the second time Tinubu would threaten his appointees with dismissal if they did not perform.
He had given a similar warning in August through his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngelale, who said President Tinubu would not permit any failure of any of the ministers, adding that Tinubu was not scared to sack any minister who is not effective.
While speaking on a Channels Television programme, Sunrise Daily, Ngelale said Tinubu had established benchmarks for each of the sectors and expected the ministers to meet the set standards.
“The President has set the benchmarks. The question now is about enforcement and the President has shown, as he did during his time in Lagos State as governor, that he is not someone that is afraid to fire anybody,” Ngelale said.
“He is not somebody who is afraid to level quick sanctions to ensure that they get the results that he wants because, ultimately, if this administration fails, they will not say a minister failed or a set of ministers failed. They will say President Bola Tinubu failed, and he will not accept failure,” he opined.
“Every minister coming in absolutely knows what they have to achieve within the time frame that has been given to them by the President and that’s something in the history of Nigerian governance we’ve never seen before,” he added.
