By Ishaya Ibrahim
Nigeria grapples with a poor economy and failing public education.
But the cabinet President Muhammadu Buhari proposed is not tailored towards addressing those problems.
The list which he announced has 10 lawyers, six business and accounting professionals, two medical doctors, two engineers, one economist and one Information and Communication Technology expert. The others have degrees in the arts and social sciences.
The lawyers in the list are; Festus Keyamo, Emeka Nwajiuba, Babatunde Fashola, Godswill Akpabio, Sharon Ikeazor, Niyi Adebayo, Lai Mohammed, Abubakar Malami, Geoffrey Onyeama and Mohammed Abdullahi. They make up 23 per cent of the cabinet, the dominant profession in the government.
The accountants and business administrators in the proposed cabinet are; Uche Ogah, Sadiya Farouk, Musa Bello, Adamu Adamu, Zainab Ahmed and Sabo Nanono.
Rauf Aregbesola and Ogbonnaya Onu are the only engineers in the list, just as Olamilekan Adegbite and Ramatu Tijani are the two professionals in construction designs.
Olorunimbe Mamora and Chris Ngige are the medical doctors, while Gbemisola Saraki is the only Economist in the cabinet, Isa Pantami, the expert in Information and Communication Technology and Hadi Sirika, the Pilot. A retired Major General, Bashir Salihi Magashi, is the only man with security training.
The others are holders of degrees in English, Sociology and International Relations.
An economist, Pita Ochai, thinks that Buhari is not taking the economy very seriously by not appointing experts in that field.
The former finance minister, Zainab Ahmed, may return to the post. But Ochai thinks she lacks the credentials to navigate Nigeria out of the economic crisis confronting it.
The economy is crawling at 1.9 per cent, far below its population growth of 3 per cent per annum.
Ochai believes that Ahmed lacks the expertise required and work experience to restore Nigeria’s economy into global reckoning as her strength is accounting, a field favourable to calculations than finding solutions to the nitty-gritty of demand and supply.
Ahmed has her first degree in Accounting from the Ahmadu Bello University in 1981, and an MBA from the Olabisi Onabanjo University.
Ochai also feels that Gbemisola Saraki, the only economist in the pack, may not be suitable enough for the finance minister job even though she is a trained in one of the world’s finest universities, the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. The reason is that she has in the last 20 years, been involved more in politics than economics.
In the list, there is no educationist, even though Nigeria has a crisis in the education sector – 13.5 million of its children are out of school.
The former minister, Adamu Adamu, is a trained accountant and a practising journalist. His tenure was without any policy thrust, uninspiring save for trying to keep university lecturers from going on strike.
Also, Buhari did not appoint an expert in agriculture even though the government claims that it hopes to create jobs in that sector.
