Observe Decorum In Sacking Public Office Holders

The culture of sacking office holders, sometimes at the flimsiest of provocations has been with us shortly after independence. This implies that whether it is military rule or civilian administration that have dominated the political leadership space, the mentality of dismissing public officials with little or no thought about procedure and decorum has been a part of us. The quickest example is the palace coup that overthrew General Yakubu Gowon as Head of State while he was attending a meeting of the Organisation of African Unity, OAU, now known as AU in Kampala, Uganda in 1975.

Like the foregoing instance, the embarrassment that the sack of a public official who is attending a function on behalf of the government outside the shores of Nigeria brings about is unquantifiable. Recently, Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria was dismissed by President Gooluck Jonathan while the governor was away to Niger Republic on official assignment. A week later, it was the turn of the  then Sports Minister Bolaji Abdullahi who was in Poland to get the boot, in what analysts believe was a politically-motivated sack.

It does not matter what informed the dismissal of these officers and the others before them who were thrown out in similar circumstance. What is pertinent is the kind of image we create for the nation out there.  Is it that the President never gets information about the movement of his subordinates, so as to know when to discipline them? If he knows, why not wait for officers who are outside the country to return before reading the riot act to them?

The haste to sack these men and women when they are away on official duty smacks of lack of coordination and in-fighting any time these announcements are made and an ambassador or high commissioner mandated to break the news to the officer affected by the sack, as was the case with the CBN governor.

The dismissal of political office holders while they are representing the nation in foreign countries has some implications.  Apart from the embarrassment it generates for the country, the safety of the affected officer may be jeopardized. We live in perilous times and in climes where political and business rivals lurk in virtually every corner, an officer who loses his job outside of the country, with no provision for security, becomes vulnerable to attack. This might not manifest directly but the implication is that we inadvertently call danger to such people when their security aides are withdrawn, diplomatic permits and other forms of immunity taken from them.

We are not questioning the president or governor’s authority to hire or dismiss an official. Any erring officer deserves nothing but a reprimand or dismissal. But decency demands that things are done properly

The manner our public officers get axed from public office encourages corruption. The fact that these men and women come to office knowing that sooner or later they could be dismissed predisposes them to ‘preparing for the rainy day’. We recall how the civil service reforms of the 1970s led to massive corruption after many civil servants were dismissed without following the rules. Those left behind in subsequent decades till now have to steal as much as they could since they don’t know when they could be sacked. This can be worse nowadays when corruption is almost an art and the mechanisms for combating it have rather worked only in breach.

It is true that we still experience a lot of military haze over our political space despite being a democracy. The manner of fiat that the President and the governors exercise as reflected in some decisions of public interest they take leave much to be desired. We hope that we will start to do things in an organized fashion. Action must be taken with fairness and firmness. And, ultimately, we need to stop making the removal of government officials from office an issue of derisive jokes in international circles.