The Daura mafia

SIR: Have you ever heard the phrase the “Georgia Mafia”? It was invented in 1976 to describe the way the new American President, Jimmy Carter, populated his cabinet with his town folks. The President, a native of Georgia, in coming to the White House to assume the presidency, brought a whole team of outsider collectively nicknamed the “Georgia Mafia.” Heads didn’t roll in America, the bastion of democracy. There was no cry of tribalism. In fact no one shouted foul.

“You dance with the ones that bring you,” was how someone described Carter’s approach to staffing. In other words, since in the presidential system the bucks stop at the president’s table, and thus the president has no one but himself to blame if the ‘cookies crumble’, he has to surround himself with the people he knows he can work with. Thus we had the following people accompanying Jimmy Carter from Georgia to the White House and appointed into plum offices: Andrew Young (a black man!) as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; Budget Director Bert Lance; Communications Director Gerald Rafshoon; Domestic Policy Advisor Stuart Eizenstat; Attorney-General Griffin Bell; Secretary Phil Wise; Congressional Liaison Frank Moore; White House Counsel Robert Lipshutz. Carter’s Press Secretary, Jody Powell and the de facto-Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan among several others from the president’s home state Georgia, are other additions.

Now since we have chosen to adopt the American presidential system, we should all be ready to play the game according to the rules. It is said in America that “Every president brings his people.”

Jonathan Goodluck or is it Goodluck Jonathan (you see, I have forgotten the correct name of the former president already. Truly, failure is an orphan!) ruined himself because he couldn’t be his own man. Even when, for example, he kept on crying that there were Boko Haram members in his cabinet as well as in the top hierarchy of the Military, he didn’t have the liver to move against them. Instead, along with his supporters, he preferred to blame his failure on “saboteurs”.

Truly, Jonathan and his supporters are ignorant of the principle of vicarious liability which governs the presidency. A president that is worth his salt doesn’t blame anybody for his failure or the failure of his government. He carries the can on his head.

So, let’s leave Buhari to “dance with the ones that bring” him. If he staffs his cabinet with “Daura Mafia” – that is, all the folks from Daura, his home town – so be it! And if as a result of that we are now enjoying, for example, regular light as we are presently doing and also having the suckers of this country abandoning or disowning their loots, including their private jets and landed properties, and asking the mountains and the rocks to fall on them instead of waiting for Buhari to clamp them into the Kirikiri Maximum Prison, honestly I think we should thank God for “Change”. Or what do you think?
Sly Edaghese,
Lagos.