Why Aso Rock Cabal Chose Gambari As Buhari's Chief of Staff - Kperogi

A United States-based professor from Kwara State, Farooq Kperogi, has advised those expecting the new Chief of Staff to President Muhammadu Buhari, CoS, Ibrahim Gambari to be as powerful as the late Abba Kyari in that office to discountenance such thought. 

He foreclosed such possibility because the new CoS purportedly cannot function well enough in the Hausa language and "Buhari has difficulty forming deep informal interpersonal relationships with people who don’t speak Hausa". 

Kperogi, who disclosed this in an article published on his website on Saturday, stated that when Gambari stormed the Presidential Villa, "Buhari’s protocol officers welcomed him in Hausa, but he responded to them in English. When the Presidential Villa correspondent of an international Hausa broadcasting station asked to get a soundbite from him in Hausa, he said he wasn’t proficient enough in the language to give one."

AllNews recalls that the appointment of Gambari on Wednesday was greeted by widespread felicitations even from foreign missions with the Northern Governors’ Forum describing the appointment as “most deserving and timely”.

Kperogi observed that "the office of the Chief of Staff to the president, an ordinarily unremarkable secretarial job in the presidency, is attracting this quantum of outsized attention because of what it became when Abba Kyari held it".

The US-based academic, who claims to have inside sources in Aso Villa, wrote: "The Buhari cabal initially proposed a northern Christian as a replacement for Kyari to ensure that the position is stripped of the atypical influence Kyari brought to it—and to bring a little dash of token diversity to the Presidential Villa.

"They later chickened out and settled for Gambari because, although he is a brilliant, globally-connected scholar-administrator, he is also notoriously malleable, manipulatable, and usable. (Anyone who can defend Abacha’s tyranny and deride Ken Saro-Wiwa and his comrades as “common criminals” in the aftermath of their horrendous judicial slaughter can do and defend anything.)"

Writing that "Gambari was appointed CoS precisely because the intellectual and political powerhouse behind the Buhari regime chose to return the office to its previous lusterless, clerical drudgery", the columnist added that, "he was appointed to his position because the people who “own” the Buhari regime have decided to return the position to its former unremarkable, pre-Abba Kyari state".