#EKITIGATE: PUBLIC PRESSURE FORCES JONATHAN TO ASSIGN OBANIKORO TO LACKLUSTER CABINET POSITION

Senator Musiliu Obanikoro

President Goodluck Jonathan today assigned ministerial nominees to their portfolios, dumping Musiliu Obanikoro, the shady former minister of state for Defense, in an insignificant cabinet post.

Mr. Jonathan unveiled the ministerial deployments at a meeting of the Federal Executive Council today in Abuja. Mr. Obanikoro was named as the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs II, a position starkly lower in prestige than his former position as minister of state for defense. Several civil society groups, columnists and opposition senators had opposed Mr. Obanikoro’s nomination on account of the former minister’s involvement in an illegal scheme to use the military to rig last year’s governorship election in Ekiti State. SaharaReporters had obtained an audiotape where Mr. Obanikoro and several PDP politicians ordered Brigadier General A.A. Momoh to have his troops detain supporters of then incumbent Governor Kayode Fayemi in order to boost the electoral prospects of the PDP’s governorship candidate, Ayo Fayose.

Despite the widespread opposition to Mr. Obanikoro’s confirmation, Senate President David Mark wangled a senatorial clearance for the former junior rank Defense minister. Mr. Obanikoro’s senate clearance was stalled twice, before Mr. Mark used underhanded tactics to get him approved. Most opposition senators walked out of the chambers to protest what one of them termed “the Senate president’s act of bad faith.”

A source at the Presidency disclosed that President Jonathan was so shaken by the widespread opposition to his nomination of Mr. Obanikoro as a minister that he decided to assign the controversial former minister to one of the most obscure cabinet posts. “Even PDP stakeholders in Lagos and the southwest were against Ambassador Musiliu Obanikoro,” the source disclosed.

Mr. Obanikoro, who once served as Nigeria’s ambassador to Ghana, had resigned from President Jonathan’s cabinet to seek the ticket as the PDP’s governorship candidate in Lagos. After losing out to Jimi Agbaje, the former minister of state for Defense pressured Mr. Jonathan to re-nominate him to the cabinet, threatening that he would neither work for the president’s re-election nor support Mr. Agbaje’s governorship aspiration if he was not “accommodated with a ministerial appointment,” according to a source at the Presidency.

During his stint as junior Defense minister, Mr. Obanikoro had access to a full range of military arsenal, including naval choppers that ferried him around Lagos whenever he visited the state. His former position afforded him the power to commandeer a military general and troops to help rig the governorship election in Ekiti State in June 2014.

Mr. Obanikoro’s humiliating cabinet post is equivalent to an ambassadorship, a source within the cabinet disclosed. Largely a sinecure, the new post is seen as Mr. Jonathan’s delicate balancing act, keeping Mr. Obanikoro quiet without incurring any huge political cost that would have been triggered by the reappointment of the former minister to the Defense portfolio or any prominent cabinet post.

In today’s cabinet assignments, retired Colonel Augustine Akobundu was made the new minister of State for Defense.