Politics

How not to be a presidential aide

Published

9 years ago

October 27, 2017

The executive/legislature relations under the All Progressives Congress (APC) has continued to be grossly mismanaged by non-career principal officers in the Presidency parading as presidential aides to President Muhammadu Buhari.

More often than not, some of the presidential aides behave as though they are their own boss, take laws int0o their hands and even breach official protocol.

It was bizarre that the Chief Security Officer (CSO) to President Muhammadu Buhari, Bashir Abubakar could not understand the formal protocol involved in the visits of the President of the Senate and Speaker of the House of Representatives and other leaders of the National Assembly to the Presidential Villa for a meeting with the President.

Accordingly, the CSO denied Senate President Bukola Saraki, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Right Honourable Yakubu Dogara, and other principal officers of the National Assembly access to the Presidential Villa for a scheduled meeting with President Buhari on the proposed 2018 appropriation bill. Unfortunately, the Presidency is a major institution of governance which bought to have register of daily activities; so, what went wrong? was the visit of the lawmakers not in the register of activities for that day, or was the CSO a lord unto himself?

The CSO had insisted on having his officers frisk the National Assembly leaders, on arrival at the gate of the Presidential Villa gate in a white Toyota bus before they would be allowed into the president’s residence. The lawmakers, however, declined; declaring their preference to turn back rather than be subjected to individual security screening. That was a gross embarrassment and unprofessional supervision of democratic institutions.

However, later interventions normalized protocol which cleared the way for Senate President Saraki and Speaker Dogara to hold the meeting with President Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo thereafter.

The incidence which made the principal officers of the National Assembly and other lawmakers leave the pilot gate of the presidential villa angrily when security officers insisted on frisking them and putting them through security before allowing them passage scuttled the business of the day in which the president had proposed a dinner with the federal lawmakers. The dinner was then rescheduled for next Tuesday.

Other lawmakers refused to return to the Presidential Villa with Saraki and Dogara for the meeting with the president.

ALSO SEE: Ambode, Aisha, Emefiele named in police corruption allegation

President Buhari had apologized to the lawmakers but more is expected; at least, the CSO deserves proper discipline or be reprimanded otherwise, the president may not be exonerated from the deliberate mismanagement of the Presidency under his administration.

Meanwhile, a statement from the Presidency declared that: “President Muhammadu Buhari will on Tuesday, October 31, 2017, host the leadership of the National Assembly to dinner at the Presidential Villa.

“At a private dinner with the Senate President, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rt. Hon. Yakubu Dogara, at the State House, President Buhari said the dinner, earlier arranged for Thursday, October 26, will now hold on Tuesday.

“The new date is occasioned by a security mix up that attended the earlier scheduled meeting.”