One major tragedy of Nigeria’s politics is the way we make people redundant through political appointments. How many former political appointees became productive to societal growth after the tenure of their appointments?
Have you checked the C.V.s of most political appointees? What were they before they were picked? This is the quality of people who grow through same system to become key policy makers for us. Most of them cant write a memo.
Majority of those who got political appointment irrespective of how irrelevant and inconsequential such appointments were, refused to either return to their bases after their tenures in office, or do not have anything or anywhere to return to, because most of them didn’t have anything doing before their appointments.
In other climes most political appointees either go back to teach in the universities or back to their professions after their appointments. By so doing, they enrich their spheres of influence with the the privilege of their new exposures.
But in Nigeria, they stay back in their various state capitals to become political pimps, carrying bags, seeking for contracts to inflate.
Until our elected officials start picking people who are productively engaged in their chosen fields, we will continue to mass produce sycophants masquerading as aides. That is why our people hardly resign from office or even leave after their tenures, cos they have nowhere else to go to.
Until we start picking people with second addresses they can return to after their political appointments we will continue to over populate the polity with unproductive but highly consumerist individuals whose activities contribute nothing to national economy.
Our politics will continue at the level of prebendalism unless we stop using political appointments to create jobs for unemployed and unemployable individuals.
Is this not hugely manifested in the New Direction government in Kogi State though the presence of a brilliant few can’t be denied?
– T. D. Bamishile
