Hakeem Baba-Ahmed: Tinubu genuinely isolated — he has no time for most aides

Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, former special adviser on political matters to Vice-President Kashim Shettima, says he did not feel wanted by the Bola Tinubu administration.

Baba-Ahmed resigned his appointment in the presidency in March.

Speaking on ‘Prime Time’, a programme on Arise TV on Monday, Baba-Ahmed said he would have stayed longer if the job was solely about him.

“If it was all about me, quite possibly I would have stayed longer. But I felt I could have been a lot more useful to the country and to the administration,” he said.

“I believe also, I don’t like for this thing to sound boastful, I believe I had something to offer. Because the reason why they asked me to go there, not to sit idle and to watch a lot of things going wrong, you don’t have an opportunity to fix them.

“You don’t have an opportunity to engage the president who has all the powers to be engaged. You don’t have any channel.”

Baba-Ahmed said while he met Shettima nearly every working day, that was not enough.

“I saw the vice-president virtually every working day. We talked, we discussed the country. But Nigeria requires a lot more than talking with the vice-president,” he said.

“I think I met him, I saw him three times in the mosque in the villa and we shook hands. But I never had a chance to sit down with President Tinubu.

“I honestly don’t know. I think part of the problem is that he never really had time for people like us. I’m not sure he had time for a lot of the people working for him.”

He described the president as “genuinely isolated” and said it was either by choice or due to unknown circumstances.

“The president really is genuinely isolated, whether it’s by choice or by circumstances we don’t understand,” he said.

“The bottom line is he ought to be available to a lot more of the people that he has trusted, either to run ministries or departments or to advise him. And he isn’t. And that’s a problem for the country, not so much for him.

“But it’s a lot because the president of Nigeria is a hugely powerful person and he has massive responsibility on his shoulders.

“So if he’s not going to look for solutions to problems from people that he had appointed, there are only two options left. Is he getting advice from the wrong people? Or is he getting no advice at all?”

‘DIFFERENT WORLDS’

The former spokesperson of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) said people around the president seem detached from reality.

“When you hear people close to him speak about Nigeria, it’s as if we live in two different worlds,” he said.

“That is the most frustrating thing for me. We would leave the villa, we would go home. We would watch real people, and sometimes we would drive around, we’d go home, we’d see, we’d mix with the poor people.

“We knew how desperate the country is, how desperately life is, difficult life is, the insecurity level, how high it is.

“People were losing hope, asking what is the value of this democracy, and sometimes they say, ‘what are you doing there? We thought with people like you, we wouldn’t be seeing some of these things.

“At least, are you guys really advising the president about some of these things?’”

Baba-Ahmed said Nigeria would fare better if the president was more open to counsel.

“I believe if President Tinubu was more open to suggestions and advice and if he has higher quality of people handling sensitive positions for him, and he makes himself available to them, and they talk to him, and he tells them, they tell him what they think, I think the country will be better,” he added.

In an open letter to the president on April 23, Baba-Ahmed urged Tinubu to shelve his re-election bid.

“Step aside — not for your opponents, but for a new generation of Nigerians who can carry the nation forward with fresh energy and ideas,” he wrote.

Baba-Ahmed recently said the north would unveil its position on the 2027 presidency in the next six months.

“We know nobody will become president without the north,” he had stated.